There’s a playful, over-the-top quality to “Sabotage,” both in the song and the video, that embodies the Beastie Boys’ defining loose-cannon intensity.
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“Sabotage” was the first single off their fourth album, Ill Communication (1994), which was produced by Mario Caldato Jr. Caldato was the only producer to make a return appearance behind the board for the Beasties—he would also produce their next album, Hello Nasty, released in 1998. Thereafter the group began producing their own music.
“Sabotage” went to No. 1 and was certified triple Platinum. The video made an even larger impression, getting nominated for five awards at the 1994 Video Music Awards, though it failed to take home a single trophy. However, Rolling Stone has twice ranked “Sabotage” among the 500 best music videos of all-time.
The Song
By this time in their career, the Beasties had moved on from sampling to using live instruments. The music to the track came out of a jam session when Adam Yauch was playing his bass running through his Superfuzz pedal and happened upon the riff. Percussionist Eric “Bobo” Correa was in the control room and ran out into the studio to join him on timbales.
“After that, [Money] Mark came in, heard what was going on, and jumped in on the organ,” Caldato recalled. “He hit just one chord and started turning the organ all the way up, causing the Leslie [speaker] 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 chords and it was like wow! The track just came together.”
Despite the dynamic genesis of the track, it got shelved due to the Beastie Boys’ concern over its rock direction. “Every once in a while we’d put it up and listen to it,” Caldato said. “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.’ Beastie Boys 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.”
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Somewhere in the process, there was a rap-focused demo featuring a scratched Queen Latifah sample for the hook. But they were only maybe two weeks from finishing the album. Ad-Rock, aka Adam Horovitz, gave Caldato a call saying he had an idea for the vocals, but he didn’t want to do it in the studio. So he went over to Caldato’s home studio to demo the vocals. Horovitz had obviously been practicing because he nailed it in one or two takes. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s it! You did it!’ It was perfect,” Caldato said. “He had done his homework and he was screaming it with the exact amount of energy and attitude needed.”
The song sounds like a plea against an authority figure whose mirage-like scheme is keeping the singer down. The lyrics work on this anti-establishment level, but they are actually an intentionally over-the-top complaint about Caldato. “I decided it would be funny to write a song about how Mario was holding us all down, how he was trying to mess it all up, sabotaging our great works of art,” the band wrote in their autobiography.
The Video
For “Sabotage,” the Beastie Boys wanted something that expressed who they were without turning it into a huge production. They approached director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Her) about doing the kind of shoot where they could cram the entire team into a van and shoot random footage.
The cop show idea is one that had been kicking around for a while. “Adam wanted us to do a photo shoot as undercover cops on a stakeout, sitting in a car, surrounded by coffee cups and doughnut wrappers,” Yauch told Q Magazine in April 2008. “We mentioned it to Spike and he said, ‘Let’s do it.'” Jonze was so into the idea, he got into the costumed madness. “He was wearing this blond wig and mustache the whole time for no apparent reason” Yauch told New York Magazine in 1999.
They bought the clothing from area thrift stores and were so taken with the outfits that they started wearing them out to parties and functions. Yauch actually rushed the podium at the 1994 MTV Music Awards as his “Sabotage” character, Nathanial Hornblower, in a huge fake mustache and lederhosen when R.E.M. won the award for Best Direction. This was 15 years before Kanye West made a similar play on Taylor Swift, but with far more humor behind their intent.
Photo by Stephen Lovekin/FilmMagic
