The Beastie Boys' "Paul Revere" appeared on their landmark 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, and it's a hip-hop track that has itself become a frequently sampled source — a sign of the genre's rapid evolution from consumers of breaks to creators of them. The track, produced by Rick Rubin, is built on a reversed drum machine pattern played backwards, giving it a distinctive, lurching groove that sounds like nothing else.

"Paul Revere" represents the moment when hip-hop started creating its own classic breaks rather than just sampling them from funk and soul records. The Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin's production approach — raw, aggressive, and built on sounds that were deliberately unconventional — helped expand hip-hop's sonic vocabulary beyond the traditional breakbeat sources. The track has been sampled by subsequent generations of producers, completing the circle: a hip-hop record that was itself built on samples becoming a sample source for future hip-hop.