Intergalactic Sabotage Beastie Boys

Intergalactic Album: Hello Nasty (1998)
Sabotage Album: Ill Communication (1994)
by the Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys go to space in "Intergalactic," with alien-sounding vocals created with a vocoder, an electronic device originally created to encode speech. The funk musician Roger Troutman used the device on a lot of his songs, which were later sampled by hip-hop artists, but artists like Earth, Wind & Fire ("Let's Groove") and Daft Punk ("Around The World") really associated it with space. The original space-rock party jam, highly influential on Beastie Boys, was "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force, with a vocal that sounds like a vocoder but is actually a Lexicon effects unit. (Another song that sounds like vocoder but isn't: Cher's 1998 hit "Believe," done with Auto-Tune software that came on the market in 1997.)

The robotic sound inspired the lyrics, which mention the planet Uranus (cue Butt-Head) and Mr. Spock's Vulcan death grip. Also mentioned in the lyrics are rapper Kool Moe Dee and the song "Ooh Child" by The Five Stairsteps.

The song dates back to 1993 when they started cooking it up for their Ill Communication album, released the following year. They had been using a beat from Bo Diddley's 1971 album Another Dimension and making up lyrics with a space theme, using "another dimension" and "intergalactic, planetary" as the hook. It wasn't very good so it didn't make the album, but they revisited it for the Hello Nasty album when Mike D procured a vocoder. They wrote a new set of verse lyrics and this time the song worked.

There are bits of classical music flowing through Intergalactic. Rachmaninoff's "Prelude C-sharp Minor," sampled from a recording by Les Baxter played on a synthesizer, is blended into the verses. The piece of classical music at the beginning of the song is "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky. This part is edited out of the radio version.

Also sampled is "Love is Blue" by The Jazz Crusaders.

Some of the pioneering hip-hop acts that emerged in the early '80s distorted their vocals in inovative ways (check out "Jam On It" by Newcleus), but in the '90s, rappers usually went for a big, bold sound without any distortion. Beastie Boys bucked that trend, using a karaoke microphone to squiggle their raps on tracks from their 1992 album Check Your Head, notably "So What'cha Want." By the time they recorded "Intergalactic" for the Hello Nasty album, they had access to a vocoder.

Beastie Boys sampled themselves on this one, which they were wont to do. The word "drop" in the line, "Beastie Boys known to let the beat drop" comes from their track "The New Style" from the 1986 Licensed To Ill album.

"Intergalactic" was a huge hit for the Beastie Boys and helped nudge them further from their 1986 debut single "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)," which became a curse when they started to embody the frat boy personas from the song. By this time, they were Beastie men.

"Sabotage" is a song by the American rap rock group Beastie Boys, released by Grand Royal Records in January 1994 as the first single from their fourth studio album, Ill Communication (1994). The song features traditional rock instrumentation (Ad-Rock on guitar, MCA on bass, and Mike D on drums), turntable scratches, heavily distorted bass guitar riffs and lead vocals by Ad-Rock. A moderate commercial success and later significant critical success, the song was applauded for its impactful lyrics and melody as well as its humorous video, directed by Spike Jonze; it was also nominated in five categories at the 1994 MTV Music Video Awards.

In 2004, the Rolling Stone magazine ranked "Sabotage" No. 475 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2010, it was dropped to No. 480. In a 2021 updated list, Rolling Stone re-ranked the song at No. 245. In March 2005, Q magazine placed it at No. 46 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks, and was ranked No. 19 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 90s list. Pitchfork Media included the song at No. 39 on their Top 200 Tracks of the 90s list.

The song was first conceived when MCA played the signature bass line one day in the studio and it immediately caught the band's attention. Both Ad-Rock and Mike D picked up their respective instruments and started building on it. According to the 2018 Beastie Boys Book, the song, which was originally called Chris Rock (after a sound engineer called Chris who thought it rocked), was a humourous jab at their producer Mario Caldato Jr.'s repeated urgings that the Beastie Boys actually get some work done. As Ad-Rock stated in the 2020 Beastie Boys Story documentary, the lyrics are a fictitious rant about how Caldato "was the worst person ever and how he was always sabotaging us and holding us back."

According to Caldato, the instrumental track was an example of one that "evolved out of nothing" whilst the Beasties were jamming together, though they were concerned that the tune was overly-rock-centric for them and struggled to develop lyrics for it. Towards the end of the recording of the album, Ad-Rock proposed trying again with some new lyrics he had just written. The lead vocals were recorded at Caldato's home studio using hand-held microphones that gave the recording a more thick and rough sound, with the bridge, backing, and record-scratches being added at G-Son Studios the next day. Caldato described the impact of the track as immediately electric: "It just had so much more energy and sounded so different. When we'd play it to people, they'd freak out. That's what the record needed"