Sunday Night Sample - Beastie Boys - Intergalactic
Have received a lot of requests for a Beastie Boys sample feature which I'm appreciative of. A few months ago I blogged about the awesome documentary on Apple TV+ that Spike Jonze and Mike D. and Adam Horovitz teamed up to produce. I always knew how incredible the Beastie Boys' long and storied career has been, but having not been old enough to truly appreciate their rise and come up I had no idea just how talented they were. Especially MCA. The man was a mastermind when it came to music. He could play almost everything, had an ear for all genres under the sun (punk, ska, Irish folk to name a few) and was constantly learning and absorbing.
There are dozens and dozens of gems that MCA produced that feature insane samples.
For tonight I decided to go with "Intergalactic", the first single off of Hello Nasty.
Recorded over four years on two coasts and released on the cusp of Y2K, Hello Nasty was a transitional album for the Beastie Boys. It saw the band moving its base of operations back to New York from Los Angeles where they’d been working since the recording of Paul’s Boutique. Michael Diamond and Horovitz followed after Adam Yauch led the way, returning to Brooklyn. The past and New York were clearly on their minds, and this can be seen most clearly in “Intergalactic,” which even samples “MMM, Drop” from “TheNew Style” off License to Ill.
The robotic vocal sound from Ad Rock, ("Intergalactic, planatery...") was created with a vocoder (voice + encoder), the pre-autotune device made famous by Roger Troutman. 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.
Mike D had brought an old vocoder into the studio fucked around with it. But it never felt right using on a song for them. Until "Intergalactic". According to Adam Horovitz, “We’d been thinking about the vocoder thing for a while, and when we put ‘Intergalactic’ together, it just fell into place.”
The song was originally recorded in 1993 for Ill Communication but didn't make the cut.
According to Ad Rock -
“We had this beat off of a Bo Diddley record called “Another Dimension,” and we made this song all space doodoo rhymes. Like about Carl Sagan, Lieutenant Uhura, dilithium crystals, shit like that. And the break was ‘intergalactic planetary intergalactic.’
The lyrics mention Uranus and Spock's Vulcan death grip in addition to rapper Kool Moe Dee and the song "Ooh Child" by The Five Stairsteps.
Some of the other crazy samples MCA incorporated were Rachmaninoff's "Prelude C-sharp Minor".
and "Love is Blue" by The Jazz Crusaders.
The "drop" in the line, "Beastie Boys known to let the beat drop" comes from the Beastie's track "The New Style" from their Licensed To Ill album.
It also samples a vocal from The Stovall Sisters - Hang On In There
"Interglactic" a Grammy in 1999 for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.
The song also featured a pretty awesome music video which won the 1999 MTV Video Music Award for Best Hip Hop Video.
The video was a play on all the old Japanese flicks like Godzilla where Tokyo was destroyed by a large monster. The video was actually filmed in Japan, and the subways you see are from Tokyo.
It was directed by Adam Yauch under the pseudonym Nathanial Hörnblowér,[1] and it revolves around a giant robot causing destruction by fighting a giant octopus-headed creature in a city while popping, a parody of, or tribute to, Japanese Kaiju films (specifically the series finale of Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot). Various scenes are filmed in the Shibuya and Shinjuku train stations in Tokyo, Japan. Throughout the band is wearing the bright uniforms of (Koji) Japanese street construction workers.
The Beastie Boys performed the song at the 1998 Video Music Awawrds