Today’s music video of the day is my personal pick for the greatest music video of all time, Sabotage by the Beastie Boys!

This song was actually inspired by the band’s frustration with a sound engineer who the band felt was trying to rush them through their recording sessions.  The feeling was that he was deliberately “sabotaging” them and the band expressed their frustrations in an instrumental track.  It wasn’t until two weeks before the track was actually to be recorded that the Beastie Boys came up with the lyrics for the song.

The video, famously, features the Beastie Boys as three cops on a 70s cop show, pursuing and apparently murdering Sir Stewart Wallace.  This video is usually held up as an example of director Spike Jonze’s love of kitsch but the 70s cop show theme was actually first suggested by Adam Horowitz.

Believe it or not, this video was controversial when it was first released because it was considered by some to be too violent.  MTV actually demanded three cuts before they would accept it.  They demanded that the knife fight be shortened and that shots of bodies being tossed out of a car and over a bridge be taken out of the video.  Of course, in both shots, the body was obviously a dummy so I’m not sure what MTV was freaking out about.

Sabotage received five nominations at the MTV Music Video Awards and, amazingly, it lost every one of them.  Even best direction was won by Jake Scott, who did the video for R.E.M’s Everybody Hurts.  While Michael Stipe was accepting the best direction award, Adam Yauch rushed the stage (while dressed as Nathaniel Hornblower) and protested the snubbing of Sabotage.  

This was actually the first time in the history of the VMAs that someone rushed the stage to protest a win.  Kanye West, of course, later made this a famous move but Adam Yauch did it first.  (My favorite thing about the picture above is the look on Michael Stipe’s face.)

The MTV Music Video Awards may not have appreciated Sabotage but the rest of the world certainly did.  It not only remains one of the signature tunes of the 90s but, if you believe Star Trek, it’s also the song that inspired Jim Kirk to grow up, join Starfleet, and put the safety of everyone under his command at risk at least once a week.

Enjoy!