Something's Got to Give (song)
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Something's Got To Give is the 10th track on the album Check Your Head by American hip hop group the Beastie Boys, released on April 21, 1992.
Both the song and the video have a strong anti-war message, the video containing footage of bombs being dropped on a jungle, and the song containing lyrics alluding to the pacifist messages of both Buddhism and Christianity.
"[Something's Got to Give] is one of my all time favorites 'cause of all the elements inside; mixing live music with samples of our live music, live vocals with samples of our vocals, the lyrics and their sentiment, and the fucked-up bass. The music came from a tape of us jamming at Cole Practice Space. Maybe six months later we were listening back to a bunch of tapes and found this stuff. We looped like ten bars of music on Mike's sampler and put them in a song type arrangement. Yauch wrote some lyrics, and me, Adam, Mike and Mark sang them. Mario went in the other room with a cassette of the music and sang the fucked-up high-pitched sound on a four-track, and then looped that. There's no hidden message behind the lyrics; they're pretty direct. To me this song just sounds funky. And I really like that the main instrument making the music is a DX7. As a little footnote, the "smile" with laughing I found in '89 or so. I was at this predominantly white mall (in L.A. or Texas) and in this crowded camera store there was this thing called "the Smile Machine" or something like that. I pushed the little button and the batteries were all dead so it came out like the devil making fun of us all in the mall. It just stuck with me like the "just say no" campaign. With how deep in America racism is, the image of the Smile Machine in the white mall fit nice in this song." - Adam Horovitz, 1999