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The Beastie Boys was already a rap phenomenon when the group's raunchy debut Licensed to Ill dropped in 1986. But the New York trio became a hip-hop legend after the brilliant, sample-based production of its 1989 follow-up, Paul's Boutique, put it over the top for good.

Now that 20 years have passed, the Boys are going back to the well with a remastering of that foundational effort.

Until Feb. 10, the trio is releasing limited-edition CD, vinyl and digital (including FLAC and Apple lossless) versions of Paul's Boutique, complete with videos, swag, posters, commentary and other treats from its official site. But that's all just repurposed ear and eye candy.

The true treats still lie within the recording itself. Two decades after the Dust Brothers-produced epic exploded the limits of sample-based hip-hop and musical production, it sounds as fresh as ever. Mostly because Paul's Boutique mined pop culture for all it was worth like few releases before or after.

Here are some of the record's coolest samples and allusions.

"Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun": From pounding drums lifted from Pink Floyd, Mountain and the Incredible Bongo Band to the introduction of live instrumentation played by the Beasties themselves, this head-banging track sequenced the gene for the trio's future work on the hyper-successful Check Your Head and more. It also contains some seriously esoteric lyrical allusions: "Three on the tree in the middle of the night" refers to a rival gang staking out James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. And the trivia rabbit hole goes deeper: One of those gang members was a very young Dennis Hopper.

"Eggman": This riotous spoof on the serious subject of drive-by violence lifted everything from Cheech and Chong to Aliens, but it's axis remains Bernard Hermann's horrific "Shower Theme" from Alfred Hitchcock's classic Psycho. One of the most memorable musical numbers ever written, it is ripped out of context and used to support the Beasties' confessional about egging everything and everyone they want.

"The Sounds of Science": Few hip-hop acts had sampled the Beatles by 1989, and not just because they were afraid to death of losing their shirts like they are in these copyfight-happy days. But the Beasties blew that door down in this multi-movement track, lifting riffs from "Back in the USSR," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "When I'm Sixty-Four" and especially Abbey Road's "The End" without compunction. It was so ambitious that its kind of sampling may never happen again, especially if the lawyers have anything to say about it.

"B-Boy Bouillabaisse": This is one of the Beastie Boys' most ambitious songs ever, a nine-part epic that careens among many tempos, styles and subjects. It is probably also one of the most stacked songs ever, featuring more than 25 samples, ranging from the classic (Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks") to the obscure (Scotty's "Draw Your Brakes" and Idris Muhammad's "Loran's Dance," whose moody funk bookends the entire album). A stone-cold classic.

Photo: Capitol Records/Wikipedia

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