“Drop,” (Produced by Jay Dee)

Imani: We were doing an interview with [Beastie Boys member] Mike D for a magazine, and Spike Jonze was there doing photography. We had the album running in the background, and when the song came on, he said, “You guys want to do a video for this? I have an idea for this song.”

We wanted to release “Drop” first, but “Runnin’” had a radio-friendly vibe that the label thought they could work with.
Bootie Brown: The label president at that time just didn’t like what was going on, and thought we should have went in a different direction. Once he saw the video, saw what was going on and saw the Beasties involved, he changed his tone. With the music video, Spike knew what he wanted to do from day one.

Before we even did the video he brought in a linguist, and we had to sit down for a week or so and learn our verses backwards. Then the shoot itself was two days in Downtown Los Angeles. He knew exactly where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. With some directors they’re like, “Well let’s try this,” kind of like they run out of ideas. But when Spike said, “Let’s try it,” he did it to try to add some flavor to something we had already done.
Tre: It was a cold morning, getting all that water splashed on you and going through outfits after outfits. But it was the most fun I ever had making a music video.
Fatlip: It was a good video.

“She Said,” (Produced by Slimkid3 (Remix produced by Jay Dee) [click to read]

Tre: I really thought that “She Said” was a good song, but it wasn’t gonna be on the album. I fought tooth and nail mixed and done, and the record label was fucking with me wondering when it was gonna be finished, because they hadn’t heard it yet. They were stressing me the fuck out, but when I turned that shit in the next thing I know I get this call like, “We apologize. We didn’t know.”
Bootie Brown: The label was going through some stuff, too. The single was released through Interscope, but at the time, we were on EastWest. We had went through three distribution switches at that time when the album was out. So there were a lot of things label-wise that were messed up at the time.
Tre: When we did the video, we flew to the Caribbean to shoot it. We had a great time, but that was like the story of our life: something wacky always happening with the distribution, and us not having a stable situation.

With Jay Dee, he had sent a bunch of different versions of the song, and we picked that one that was out. It was a no-brainer. And we were in Amsterdam and did another video for it.