Songfacts®:

• Beastie Boys team up with their fellow New York City rapper Nas on this track, where they make the distinction between rappers - dilettante rhymers with no real skill - and MCs, who are the true artists. "It's one thing to be a master of ceremony, but it's another thing to just be playing a rapper and spitting eight bars on someone's track," Mike D of Beastie Boys explained.
• The song started with a drum loop group member MCA put together. He wasn't a drummer, but would often sit the kit and play a "John Bonham-ish" beat that his bandmates got really sick of hearing. But on this song, it worked.
  
  "He must've felt so satisfied after years of playing that same sloppy off-time beat, to now have it so locke in sounding just the way he'd wanted it to," Ad-Rock wrote in the Beastie Boys Book. "That same thing that drove me and Mike crazy now sounded booming."
• Beastie Boys sent the instrumental track to Nas when they finished it, knowing it was a log shot. To their surprise, Nas sent it back after a week or two with his vocals added. They didn't get to work with him in person, but were thrilled to have his contribution.
• The song's central sentiment is, "Too many rappers, not enough emcees." However the New York trio have stated in interviews that another of the lyrics has been commonly misheard. They claim that chat about "crack rappers," is instead, "crab rappers."
• A couple of old-school R&B/rap references in this song: "Strawberry Letter 23 like Shuggie" mentions the song written and originally recorded by Shuggie Otis and popularized by The Brothers Johnson; "Supersonic like J.J. Fad" refers to the 1988 rap song by the female trio.
• "Too Many Rappers" was released as a single in 2009 as the second single (following "Lee Majors Come Again") from their upcoming album, which then had the title Hot Sauce Committee Part One. The trio were forced to take a hiatus after MCA (Adam Yauch) was diagnosed with cancer, thus delaying the release of the album. In May 2011 the album was released under the title Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, with a new rendering of this song dubbed the "New Reactionaries Version."
• Beastie Boys listed various songs on the Hot Sauce Committee Part Two as containing samples by artists you've never heard of... because they didn't exist. "Too Many Rappers" claims to have samples from "Journeys, Oscillations And Other Dreams" by Irv Greenwood and "Stone Love Lady" by Rail. They thought it would be fun to send fans on the hunt for these mysterious tracks.
• The music video features the Beastie Boys and Nas exchanging bars in various places, including on stage. The clip was directed by Wes Anderson associate Roman Coppola.
  
  The visual wasn't released at the time the single was dropped, but was discovered by a fan of the group a few years later, and ended up on former Beasties' editor Neal Usatin's website.
• According to Ad-Rock, after they spent months toiling over this song in the studio, he and Mike D came in one day to find that MCA had erased a bunch of their parts and inserted a Super Fuzz terminator bass groove from beginning to end. Apparently, MCA would often go rogue, making bold decisions on his own. It was part of his genius, but could make him difficult to work with.