When the Beastie Boys released "Sabotage" as the first single off Ill Communication in early 1994, the song became a defining track of the '90s. Much of this is thanks to Spike Jonze's music video, which acted as a parody of '70s cop shows, and gave the song its iconic middle-finger attitude. It's maintained that anti-authority feeling ever since.
Though the uses of the song have remained clear throughout the last two decades, members of the Beastie Boys have never explained the actual meaning of the "Sabotage." Fans have speculated that it's an anti-religious song or, possibly, anti-paparazzi, because at that time the band had gotten into tiffs with photographers.
But, 24 years later, in a story from the audiobook of their new memoir, the Beastie Boys finally reveal that "Sabotage" is actually about an annoying sound engineer.
When Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz yells, "I can't stand it / I know you planned it," he's directing his frustration at their friend and producer Mario Caldato Jr., who was pushing the Beastie Boys to actually finish a track. As the story goes, the group was being indecisive about completing songs on their fourth studio album.
“We were totally indecisive about what, when, why and how to complete songs. Mario was getting frustrated,” actor Tim Meadows narrates in the audiobook. “That’s a really calm way of saying that he would blow a fuse and get pissed off at us and scream that we just needed to finish something, anything, a song. He would push awful instrumental tracks we made just to have something moving toward completion.”
At one point they considered including a scratched Queen Latifah sample as the hook but Horovitz landed on his "I can't stand it" scream directed at 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,” he says.
It might not be about cops or religion or annoying photographers, but even if it is directed at their buddy in the studio, the anti-authority message still holds up.
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