Intergalactic Album: Hello Nasty (1998)
Sabotage Album: Ill Communication (1994)
by 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. text limit
