Sabotage

MCA came up with the bass line that anchors "Sabotage" while playing in the studio one day, and it caught the rest of the Beastie Boys straight away. Ad-Rock and Mike D picked up their instruments and began building on the riff, with Ad-Rock on guitar, MCA on bass, and Mike D on drums. The track grew out of a jam session, and the group worried it was too rock-heavy for them at first. It was released by Grand Royal Records in January 1994 as the first single from Ill Communication, produced by the band with Mario Caldato Jr.

The lyrics arrived late in the album's recording. Ad-Rock proposed trying again with new words he had just written, a fictitious rant portraying Caldato as "the worst person ever" who was always sabotaging the band and holding them back. The working title had been "Chris Rock", named for a sound engineer called Chris who thought it rocked. Ad-Rock recorded the lead vocals at Caldato's home studio with hand-held microphones, giving the recording a thick, rough sound, while the bridge, backing vocals, and scratches were added at G-Son Studios the next day.

Spike Jonze directed the music video, a parody of 1970s crime dramas such as Hawaii Five-O and Starsky and Hutch, presented as the opening credits of a fictional police show. It was nominated for five awards at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards and lost them all, prompting MCA to bum-rush the stage in his "Nathaniel Hornblower" disguise during Michael Stipe's acceptance speech.