Rolling Stone (p.72)
- 5 stars out of 5 -- "[A] high-water mark of hip-hop's golden age of sampling....PAUL'S BOUTIQUE became a dense, dizzying collision of lyrical references..."Rolling Stone (4/11/02, p.105)
- Ranked #5 in Rolling Stone's "50 Coolest Records" - "...Their accidental turn into great artists..." Rolling Stone (12/11/03, p.134)
- Ranked #156 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" - "[I]t ambitiously stitches together song fragments in a way rarely seen before or since." Rolling Stone (2/6/03, p.65)
- 5 stars out of 5 - "...A celebration of American junk culture that is still blowing minds today - even fourteen years of obsessive listening can't exhaust all the musical and lyrical jokes crammed into PAUL'S BOUTIQUE..." Spin (p.95)
- "Dense, arty, and with enough production hijinks to fill a junkshop, it honored hip-hop history while predicting the future." Q (1/95, p.268)
- 3 Stars - Good - "...betters its Bud-spraying predecessor on all counts: slower, funkier, funnier more diverse in reference....there is upbeat fun...silliness...and brooding invention..." Mojo (Publisher)
(p.118)
- 5 stars out of 5 -- "Put together on samplers with tiny memories, small fragments of staggeringly disparate musics drop in, then are snatched away abruptly; rhythms and melodies remain in focus as textures and sounds constantly shift." Mojo (Publisher)
(6/00, p.125)
- "...An album which shredded the rulebook. From 'Psycho' to 'Superfly', from Sly Stone to Ringo's dope beats on SGT. PEPPER, there's so much going on here that it sounds like a compilation....one of the most inventive rap albums ever made." NME (Magazine)
(11/19/94, p.46)
- 9 - Excellent Plus - "...Five years on from its release way back in August '89, [PAUL'S BOUTIQUE] is still an electrifying blast of cool....If you thought ILL COMMUNICATION was cool, check its younger incarnation..." Pitchfork (Website)
- "PAUL'S BOUTIQUE is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades' postmodern identity..." Record Collector (magazine)
(p.79)
- 4 stars out of 5 -- "[M]usic that seemed to digest all that had gone before it....An astonishing coming of age document..." | 
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