FEATURE:
I'm Gonna Set It Straight, This Watergate
Beastie Boys’ Sabotage at Thirty
_________
THE first single…
from Beastie Boys’ fourth studio album, Ill Communication, Sabotage turns thirty on 28th January. Considered to be the best song from the iconic Hip-Hop trio (Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz, Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch and Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond), its incredible energy and quotability was matched by a legendary video. Directed by Spike Jonze, it pays homage and tribute to 1970s crime dramas like Hawaii Five-O and Starsky and Hutch. Without doubt one of the most memorable videos ever, there was this perfect combination that makes Sabotage such a genius song. One cannot think about it without visualising that video! I wanted to bring in some features around Sabotage and its making. I will come to a feature that takes a deep dive into that Spike Jonze-directed video for Sabotage. In 2021, Rolling Stone declared Sabotage to be the 245th-best (out of 500) song ever:
“The Beasties started raising hell as a New York hardcore-punk band before evolving into hip-hop kings. “Sabotage” shows off their mastery in both domains, a rap-rock bombshell from their 1994 hit Ill Communication. The three MCs jam on Yauch’s fuzzed-out bass riff, while Horovitz gets ill on the mic. As he said, “This one called for some old-fashioned screaming, that’s for sure.” “Sabotage” also inspired one of the coolest videos ever, a Seventies trip full of bad wigs and cheap suits — as big an influence on comedy as it was on music”.
In 2013, Sound on Sound went inside a classic track. Co-producer and engineer of Sabotage, Mario Caldato Jr. (Mario C), discussed the making and evolution of the song. it is interesting learning about how the classic came about. The recording and creative process of Ill Communication sounds fascinating and eventful. I am always interested learning about Sabotage and any revelations. An insanely good song that is almost like an explosion. It hits you the first time you hear it and sounds as powerful every time you come back to it:
“The standout track from the Beastie Boys' smash hit Ill Communication album nearly didn't make it onto the record at all — and when it did, it was the eight-track ADAT mix that made the final cut.
Released on 28th January 1994, a full four months ahead of the hip-hop trio's fourth studio album, Ill Communication, 'Sabotage' is a prime piece of rapcore, featuring Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horovitz's manic yelling backed by a compelling blend of hard rock, rap and scratching. As such, it's the high point of a US chart-topping album that's heavy on rhyming, word battles and funky grooves. It's therefore interesting that, according to Ad-Rock, "'Sabotage' was recorded as an instrumental, and the vocals weren't added until two weeks before the record was completed. It was the last song on Ill Communication to be finished.”
"Musically, that record had a lot of dynamics and impact,” says Mario Caldato Jr, who engineered and co-produced the album. "We lived it and all of the pieces came together.”
Too Rock?
According to Caldato, none of the songs were completely written prior to the band entering the studio. Instead, the material either evolved out of jam sessions or was created later with loops and editing.
"'Bobo On The Corner' was created live while jamming,” he says. 'The same for 'Sabrosa', 'Futterman's Rule', 'Eugene's Lament', 'Ricky's Theme', 'Heart Attack Man', 'Shambala', 'Transitions' and 'Sabotage'. We didn't have any of those numbers when we went to New York. When we returned to LA, we had them as basic tracks and then crafted them into fully fledged songs. The other tracks I didn't mention were all rap songs created with loops, and within those loops we'd add an acoustic bass, a live drum or something like that. However, those numbers were mainly based on loops.
"The starting point for most of the songs was an idea that came from touring, and in some cases we even pulled up cassette recordings of the soundchecks. However, there were also tracks that evolved out of nothing, and a prime example of that is 'Sabotage', which just happened. Adam Yauch was in the studio, working on his bass sound with the Superfuzz pedal that he loved, and he came up with that riff and kept jamming it for a while. He'd really get deep into stuff and focus hard on it. Eric Bobo heard that riff while sitting in the control room and he ran out and started playing a rhythm on the timbales, at which point Mike D entered the control room and said, 'What's going on?' 'Go in there,' I told him. 'Follow Bobo.' So, that's what he did, accenting the bass riff with his drums, because it's really the bass riff that drives and makes the song.
"After that, Mark came in, heard what was going on and jumped in on the organ. He hit just one chord and started turning the organ all the way up, causing the Leslie to distort while he moved the drawbars in and out, modulating the drone. When Ad-Rock heard what they were playing, I told him, 'Go for it!' Immediately, he began droning on the guitar and added some rock chord and it was like wow! The track just came together, forming from Adam Yauch's bass line, and within a couple of minutes it became this heavy thing with one chord and some hits. We kept working on it a little bit to form a quick arrangement and just recorded it. Then boom, it was done, and we were like, 'Oh, that was fun!
"When we first played it back, the guys were saying, 'It sounds too rock. We don't really want to go down that route.' There was a long discussion about it, with everyone also acknowledging it was pretty energetic and pretty cool. While we were listening, the owner of the studio — a guy named Chris — walked in. He was an older rock dude with super-long hair, and although he'd never normally comment much about what he heard when checking to see how things were going, he heard the 'Sabotage' rhythm track and said, 'Now that's what I'm talking about! This is rockin' right here! This is it!' He was super-excited about it because that's the kind of music he was into, so we ended up naming it 'Chris Rock' and it kept that title for the longest time. You know, 'It's Chris's theme.'
"In terms of the vocals, there may have been an attempt by Ad-Rock to do something, but the song still had no theme and no concept, and he finally said 'Nah, it ain't happening. Forget it.' So, we kind of left it alone, went back to G-Son in LA and continued working on the rest of the record. We had a bunch of tracks, a bunch of looping stuff that needed to be done, and I was also mixing some of the instrumentals; adding different elements while finding little parts that we liked to create a finished track. We were at G-Son from Monday to Friday for five months and throughout that time, even when we weren't working on the music, we'd hang out, shoot basketball and girlfriends would show up. At other times, Biz Markie and Q-Tip would also show up to record their vocals, along with the Jungle Brothers and whoever else was in town.
Ad-Rock Saves The Day
"'Sabotage', meanwhile, was still just an instrumental. I did one rough mix of it and it stayed there as our reference. Every once in awhile we'd put it up and listen to it, and they'd go, 'We don't know if it fits the record. It may be a bit too out there. We don't want to get back into screaming or any of that rock stuff.' You see, the guys were still sensitive to the first album having a lot of rock elements and rock guitars, so they were very cautious about how to proceed with the song. At some point, Ad-Rock again attempted to do some sort of vocal thing which just didn't pan out, and then, when we were already sequencing the songs and about two weeks from wrapping up the record, he called me and said, 'Dude, I want to try one more time to sing on that Chris Rock jam. I've got an idea for the lyrics.'
"He didn't want to do it at their studio, so I said, 'Fine, we can demo it at my house.' As I had a little home studio, I took the two-track mix that I had made of the song, threw it down on to an ADAT on two tracks — left-right — and had six tracks on which to mess around with vocal ideas. Then I set up the Sennheiser 421, Ad-Rock came by and he performed the lyrics that you hear on the record. He nailed it in one or two takes and I was like, 'Oh, my God, that's it! You did it!' It was perfect. He had done his homework and he was screaming it with the exact amount of energy and attitude needed.
"Being rappers, the Beasties felt comfortable using hand-held vocal mics. They didn't like the idea of singing into a big mic with the pantyhose [pop filter]. What's more, Ad-Rock and Mike D have those high voices, so cuffing the mic actually made them sound a little thicker and roughened them up. It worked out good, I'd compensate with EQ and, as there were no playback speakers to feed back, it just had a different sound. I don't think I ever used condenser mics with those guys. They used hand-held SM58s and MD421s, as well as cheap karaoke mics. Our secret weapon for 'So What'cha Want' [the second single from Check Your Head] was a $29 Sony Variety karaoke mic.
"The day after Ad-Rock recorded the 'Sabotage' lead vocal at my place, we took the track back to G-Son and said, 'Hey guys, check this out.' When they listened to it they said, 'Oh, sick! Yo, let's do the bridge part!' So we added the backing refrain: 'Listen all y'all, it's a sabotage'. Then Yauch did some terminating scratches, Ad-Rock also cut in some scratching — 'Our backs are now against the wall' — and we finished it on the eight-track ADAT. I didn't even dump it to a 24-track master tape. I was like, 'Let's just mix it right off the ADAT.'
"The rough left-right stereo mix was fine: vocals on one track, two background vocals and some stereo scratching — boom. So, after we did a couple of mixes to DAT everyone was excited about the song. You know, 'This is really good. It'll sound great on the record.' 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”.
There is a good argument to suggest that Sabotage is the greatest music video ever. It is in my top three. Such is its charm, humour and watchability, it can be appreciated by anyone. You do not need to know what the video is referring to get a lot out of it. It is brilliant watching the video and realising what fun they must have had! Beastie Boys and extras putting together this mini-masterpiece. In 2019, Kerrang! did a shot-by-shot examination and salute of the majestic Sabotage video:
“Art is subjective, so there’s no such thing as the definitive best music video ever, but if there was, it might just be the Beastie Boys’ clip for Sabotage, a joyously silly video that is pretty much one joke dragged out for three delightful minutes.
Directed by Spike Jonze, who would go on to make films like Being John Malkovich and Her as well as co-creating Jackass, the low-budget video sees MCA, Ad-Rock and Mike D running around the streets of Los Angeles in a pastiche of 1970s detective shows.
That’s kind of all there is to it, but it’s magnificent, as much due to the video as the track itself, an incredibly catchy punk/metal/rap hybrid that partly stemmed from Ad-Rock’s anger at dealing with paparazzi at his friend River Phoenix’s funeral.
It’s one of those songs that everyone loves (and features in two Star Trek films), and the video helped kickstart the career of a guy who became one of the 21st century’s most interesting filmmakers (and made Weezer’s Buddy Holly video), so let’s dive right in and see what we learn.
0.01
Now-obscure 1970s cop shows are referenced all through this, including Hawaii Five-O, The Streets Of San Francisco, S.W.A.T., Baretta, and Starsky And Hutch.
0.11
Hey look, it’s the Beastie Boys – Adam 'MCA' Yauch, Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horowitz and Michael 'Mike D' Diamond. Director Spike Jonze met the Beastie Boys photographing them for Dirt magazine. They mentioned an idea they had for a photoshoot which Spike loved it.
“For years, Adam Horowitz had been talking about doing a photoshoot as undercover cops, wearing ties and fake mustaches and sitting in a car like we were on a stakeout,” Yauch told New York Magazine in 1999. Spike did the shoot in character despite being behind the camera the whole time. “When he was taking the pictures, he was wearing this blond wig and mustache the whole time for no apparent reason” said Yauch.
The band enjoyed the shoot so much that they decided to revisit it in video form. "We'd done videos where the production people came up with these elaborate budgets, and it started to feel really awkward on the set," Yauch said. "So we asked Spike to work with just a couple of people, so we could fit the whole production in one van. Then we just ran around L.A. without any permits and made everything up as we went along."
0.25
Spike Jonze co-created Jackass, which started in 2000, and you can really see some shared elements – the fast and loose approach to filming permissions, for instance, and this bit looks a lot like it’s been filmed from a skateboard travelling next to the car.
0.40
According to the eagle-eyed experts at Dafont, this font is called ITC Machine. So now you know.
0.58
MCA is the one Beastie that gets a dual role, as both Sir Stewart Wallace and Nathan Wind.
1.04
Trainspotting director Danny Boyle cites the energy of this video as a big influence on the famous opening credit sequence of Trainspotting, where Ewan McGregor runs through the streets of Edinburgh.
1.15
Two rented cameras were accidentally broken during production. One was placed in a ziplock bag for an underwater shot – a bag which leaked. Another fell out of a van window. The budget ended up being three times what it was meant to be, almost entirely due to these accidents.
1.21
So it’s MCA as Nathan Wind as Cochese, Ad-Rock as Vic Colfari as Bobby 'The Rookie' and Mike D as Alasondro Alegré as 'The Chief'. Layered, you know?
1.47
There were additional knife fight sequences that were left on the cutting room floor due to what could and couldn’t be shown on MTV. Some of the extra footage can be found in this blooper reel.
1.57
The ol’ dummy switcheroo is always fun, isn’t it?
2.13
That’s DJ Hurricane as Fred Kelly as Bunny. He stopped working with the Beastie Boys a few years later, before the release of 1998’s Hello Nasty.
2.24
Sabotage was nominated for five MTV Video Music Awards, and somehow didn’t win any of them. As a particularly John Malkovichian Michael Stipe of REM headed to the stage to receive the Best Group Video award, MCA came out of the wings in an amazingly convincing Swiss person costume, in character as “Nathaniel Hörnblowér”, to protest Sabotage being skipped over.
Yauch used the Hörnblowér name for his work directing several other Beastie Boys videos (including Body Movin’ and Intergalactic) and their full-length concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That (which also features comedian David Cross as Hörnblowér in some behind-the-scenes extras). Stipe described the stage invasion as “a little bit of revolution” while Jonze described it as “an appalling situation”.
2.30
As a really successful, beloved track, it’s been covered a lot, by bands including Phish and Korn, but Cancer Bats’ 2010 cover is the best, accompanied by a video featuring the band abducting various Beastie Boys lookalikes.
2.42
Buddy Rich was a famous jazz drummer and bandleader known not only for his talent but also for his temper. Bootleg tapes were circulated of him shouting at his band members, swearing his head off, threatening to fire them for things like having beards.
2.49
Promoting the single, Beastie Boys performed Sabotage live on The Late Show With David Letterman, and holy shit, it’s amazing. It’s exhausting and brilliant and undoubtedly one of the best performances from a chat show ever.
2.54
Following Adam Yauch’s 2012 death from cancer, artist Derek Langille converted this video into comic form by way of tribute. The 7-page comic is free to download and print.
3.01
There we go. Great band, great song, great video, great fun”.
On 28th January, Sabotage turns thirty. I vaguely remember it coming out in 1994. The video instantly stuck in my mind! The album it is from, Ill Communication, was released on 31st May, 1994. The finest track from one of the group’s best albums, it is no wonder that Paste, NME, and American Songwriter ranked Sabotage as Beastie Boys’ best track. It is hard to argue against that! Thirty years after its release and it remains hugely popular on radio stations and among fans. I will leave things with the final words of an all-time classic: “What could it be? It's a mirage/You're scheming on a thing…
THAT’S Sabotage”.