Electrify

Album: Hello Nasty (1998)
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Songfacts®:

  • The main groove in this song - the one with the brass instruments - comes from the song "Company," written by Stephen Sondheim, from the 1970 Broadway musical of the same name. Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys found it on one of his many crate-digging expeditions through used records. "I'd get home and listen to records I had just purchased at a Salvation Army and cry tears of joy after finding just one glorious bar of music to loop over and over," he wrote in the Beastie Boys Book.
  • "Electrify" is one of 22 tracks on Hello Nasty, the fifth of eight Beastie Boys albums. The song finds their three MCs trading lines in their trademark style, keeping up an electric energy as they reach the chorus:

    So can I get a witness to testify?
    Open your eyes, realize, electrify

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