Songfacts®:

• Beastie Boys, best known at the time for their puerile hit "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)," got uncharacteristically serious and somber on "Something's Got To Give." The opening lines are:
  
  I wish for peace between the races
  Someday we shall all be one
  
  Beastie Boys built their sound on hip-hop pioneered by Black artists. They always paid homage to these forebearers but had a hard time gaining acceptance in the community, in part because the novelty of their whiteness helped get them airplay on radio and MTV. In this song, they make a sincere plea for unity.
• The Beastie Boys did some singing on this track, not just rapping. They weren't good singers, so they would process their vocals using a karaoke microphone.
• "Something's Got To Give" was part of the third Beastie Boys album, Check Your Head. They moved away from sampling at this point and made most of the tracks with live instruments. The basic track for the song was made during a jam session they recorded to tape. Months later, they brought that tape to the studio, looped a section using a sampler, then added various other bits. They got some help from two additional musicians: James Bradley Jr. on drums and Mark Nishita on keyboards.
• The laughing that comes in at the 2:25 mark is a recording Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz) made of a little playback device called a "Smile Machine" that would clip on to cameras and play the sound of laughing at the press of a button. The idea was that using it would cause people in the photo to smile, but it's more likely they'd just get creeped out.
• A music video was made for this song, but the band isn't in it. It's made up of stock footage showing scenes of war, including footage of bombs being dropped on a jungle.