A robot loose in Shibuya
The voice arrives already processed, a robot that has learned to brag, and the beat under it is fat enough to be a cartoon and sharp enough to be a record. Intergalactic, from Hello Nasty in 1998, is three New Yorkers pretending to be a transmission and succeeding because the pretending is so well played. Ad-Rock, Mike D and MCA trade lines like kids who have been given a microphone and a library. The hook is a playground chant with a visa. Intergalactic planetary. It should be silly. It is silly. It is also a piece of engineering that a club can trust.
They made the album at G-Son, their studio in Los Angeles, with Mario Caldato Jr., the producer who had learned how to let them be chaotic without letting the tape fall over. Mix Master Mike’s cuts are the weather system, scratches that comment and then get out of the way. The single came out in the summer of 1998 and did what their more serious records of the early nineties had chosen not to do: it grinned. The video, directed by Adam Yauch under his Nathaniel Hornblower credit, puts them in matching suits and a giant robot in a Japanese city, a kaiju picture that understands the song is a costume. You can see the joke. You can also dance to the low end, which is how the joke survives contact with a Friday night.
What the lyric actually contains is a pile of references, science fiction, their own past, a boast that knows it is a boast. The Beastie Boys had spent the decade proving they could be musicians, not only a prank. This track is the prank allowed back in, on the condition that the musicianship stays. Live it became a set piece, the robot voice, the crowd shouting the planetary line, three men who had grown up in public agreeing to be ridiculous on purpose. The studio version is tighter than the memory of it. Caldato keeps the vocal intelligible and the drums rude. Nothing drags. A joke that drags is a lecture.
We wanted it loud, ridiculous and danceable. If it didn’t make us laugh in the studio, it wasn’t finished.
(Beastie Boys, around Hello Nasty, 1998)
Hello Nasty is a long, playful record, and this is the postcard. People who had filed them under old news met the robot and updated the file. The song has been used since wherever a director needs a sudden burst of cartoon confidence. That use has not emptied it. The confidence was always cartoon, which is why it does not date into embarrassment. They were not pretending to be harder than they were. They were pretending to be from space, which is more honest.
What remains is the chant, still available to anyone who can shout and count. Intergalactic is a hit about scale that stays the size of a joke, and the joke is built like a bridge. G-Son, a robot suit, a scratch, three voices that refuse to grow dull. The transmission continues. Please do not adjust your planet.
