Samples

• "No Ice Cream Sound" by Johnny Osbourne from the album Mr. Budy Bye (1995)
• "Whutcha Want?" by Nine from the album Nine Lives (1995)
• "You're A Customer" by EPMD from the album Strictly Business (1988)
• "The Vapors" by Biz Markie from the album Goin Off (1988)

References

• Beatsie Boys - another name for the Beastie Boys, possibly coined by Biz Markie; in addition to this song, the band refer to themselves as Beatsie Boys in "Root Down," "Crawlspace," "All Lifestyles," and "Nonstop Disco Powerpack"
• Boggle - jumbled word game
• Lotto - New York state lottery
• Legos - brightly colored plastic building blocks
• Croquette - a ball of finely minced meat, rice, and spices
• Benihana - Japanese chain of restaurants
• SP-12 - a drum machine that allows the programmer to construct original percussive patterns using sampled drum sounds
• The Dungeon - Beastie Boys' former recording studio, located on Mott Street in Manhattan; the studio was called the Dungeon because it was located in the building's basement; the video for "Three MC's and One DJ" was shot in the Dungeon
• Walkman - portable stereo worn with headphones

Sample & Reference Breakdown

• "I'm the King of Boggle, there is none higher, I get eleven points off the word quagmire" - Run-DMC's hit "King of Rock" had similar lyrics (I'm the King of Rock there is none higher, sucker MC's shall call me sire)
• "It's like Lotto/You have to be..." - a sample from EPMD's "You're A Customer"
• "...in it to win it" - a sample from Biz Markie's "The Vapors"
• "non-stop hip-hop" - a sample from Nine's "Whutcha Want"

Beastie Boys

"The main difference between [Ill Communication] and this [album] is we played dominoes the whole time we worked on [it]. Boggle figures very heavily in the making of [Hello Nasty]." - Adam Yauch, 1998

"It's time you brought the grimy beats out the Dungeon" - "[The Dungeon is] an underground sub-basement where we lease a small, dank area" - Adam Horovitz, 1998

"Well, I'm a Benihana chef on the SP12" - "I have this plastic mechanical box called a sampler that's a SP1200 thing, and the record player's there. And then you put the record on and it records into the thing and then you chop off a little bit in front and a little bit in the end. So you get exactly the part that you want. Then you take your little kick drum part or snare drum part, or base line or whatever" - Adam Horovitz, May 1998

"I'm the King of Boggle there is none higher/I get eleven points off the word quagmire" - "Yeah, I got 11 points for 'quagmire.' You get a lot of points for Q. Q comes as Qu" - Adam Horovitz, July 1998

"We had a great electronic beat, then we put layer upon layer of sound on it and ended up with an old-school song. Unfortunately we didn't like the result. Well, we were rather disappointed about the way it turned out, so we started about the way it turned out, so we started to take the layers of sound away again and ended up with exactly the same beats we had in the first place. Well, that's how we work. We are playing with sounds until they fit, or they don't fit" - Mike Diamond, September 1998

Lyrics from "Ah, Scorpio" by Grandmaster Flash could have inspired the titles of "Can't, Won't, and Don't Stop" and "Putting Shame in Your Game": "Because you can't stop, won't stop playin' the game / And I know that you can do it if you show no shame"