Intergalactic - Remastered 2009

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 this song. 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.