Songfacts®:

• Beastie Boys take a crack at simulation theory in this song, wondering if there's some cosmic entity with a remote control watching us just like we do on our televisions. And if this entity is watching, is it also controlling? Hmmm.
  
  Perhaps we're reading too much into it, but this was 1998, a year before The Matrix was released in theaters.
• According to Ad-Rock of Beastie Boys (as told in the Beastie Boys Book), he made a demo of the track on a 4-track tape recorder. Mike D was tasked with writing the lyric, but he had just discovered texting and they had a hard time getting him to stop. So Ad-Rock and MCA took away his phone and made him stay in the vocal booth until he wrote the lyric.
  
  "When he emerged from the closet-sized room, he'd written one of my favorite songs of ours," Ad-Rock wrote. "Focus is not Mike's strong point, but when forced he can be magnificent."
• "Remote Control" is one of 22 tracks on Beastie Boys' fifth album, Hello Nasty. For the most part, they were playing their own instruments to create the tracks by this point instead of relying on samples for the foundations. Ad-Rock's guitar is front and center on this one.