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The Ultimate Beastie Boys Sample Source Collection

Some amazing person has collected the full tracks of the songs that were sampled by the Beastie Boys on six of their best-known albums and provided them as a downloadable zip file. That’s 286 tracks, 22 hours of music, and encoded between 256kbps and 320kbps.

Obviously not every sample or drum break can or ever will be identified, but this is about as close as it’s gonna get! With the completion of this eighteen year long ongoing project, I want to personally thank each and every single person out there that has lent insight, shared knowledge, or provided me with any of the tracks that were used to compile this amazing piece of history. It goes without saying that much love, gratitude, and respect is owed to the Beastie Boys for introducing me (and you) to some amazing music via sampling that may otherwise not be heard, let alone acknowledged in this light.

Some of the included tracks:

Led Zeppelin - When The Levee Breaks
Kurtis Blow - Christmas Rappin’
Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison Blues
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Jimi Hendrix - Foxey Lady
Stephen Sondheim - Act I: Company
Peggy Lee - Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay

See also Paul’s Boutique Without Paul’s Boutique, where Tim Carmody provides some context behind the Beasties’ sampling:

The remix is fun to listen to, but mostly, it just reminds you that Paul’s Boutique sounds amazing because its sampled sources were amazing. Like De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, released the same year, Paul’s Boutique lifts tracks that would cost a small mint to borrow from today. (Three Feet High has never had an official digital release because the rights holders still can’t sort out the royalties.) The Beatles, The Supremes, The Ramones, Curtis Mayfield, Dylan, Hendrix, Sly, Bernard Hermann, and James Brown (of course) are all there. But mostly, it’s a love letter to old-school New York City hip hop: Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy 5, The Sugarhill Gang, The Funky 4 +1, and contemporaries like Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, and Public Enemy are the glue that holds the whole project together.

Now, if you know Paul’s Boutique well, you can’t hear those older songs any more without hearing Paul’s Boutique. There’s specific moments in those songs that hide there waiting for you to trip over them, like quotations of ancient Greek in an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem. Beastie Boys didn’t just find a way to make older music sound new; they found a way to invent their own precursors.

(via @tcarmody)