The Beastie Boys‘ landmark second album Paul’s Boutique turned 26-years-old yesterday, the album has gone on to become one of most revered and loved albums from the rap group’s brilliant career. The album is consistently named in magazine polls as one of the greatest albums of all time. At the time no-one believed the Beastie Boys could top the hard rocking beast of “Licensed to Ill,” but along came “Paul’s Boutique,” their first album release for Capitol Records. Released in the summer of 1989 the album only made a modest impact upon its initial release, essentially a love letter to their home town of New York, “Paul’s Boutique” is a dense record with its multiple layers of samples and beats that helped to redefine just how good sampling could be. With the help of production duo the Dust Brothers, the Beastie Boys mix up many beats, samples and loops to create a great record that many critics now regard as one of the finest release of 1989, the decade or even the century. Miles Davis said he never tired of listening to the album and Chuck D said the “dirty secret” among the black community was that at the time of release, ‘Paul’s Boutique’ had the best beats. The critics were clearly ready to give the album another go, and henceforth they rediscovered the density of the music, the richness of the samples, the sharpness of their jokes and the amazing musical genius of the Beastie Boys that created on of the greatest hip hop records of the time; of our time.