Ill communication is one my two favourite albums of all time (along with DJ Shadows Endtroducing.) and tracks from it still pepper my playlists 30 years after its release.
I was in America the summer it came out and it was blasting out of my cousins stereo as we drove through Boston. It pretty much changed my musical tastes overnight.
I finally saw the Beastie Boys and the MEN Arena 10 years later. Sabotage performed live in front (or in the middle) of 20,000 fans is a monstrous hurricane of fucking awesome that I'll sadly never witness again. But I'll remember it forever.
Rather than opting for the route of replicating their 70s cop show guises from the totally excellent sabotage video, I wanted to pay tribute to the photography that adorned the Ill Communication album sleeve.
There was a passage about New York in The Beastie Boys Book that really struck a chord with me. Here's a segment:
- music is ambient throughout the city. It is everywhere, whether you like it or not. A song will come on WBLS as you're climbing the stairs from the subway station and you'll catch it on a radio playing in a passing car, picked up by the outdoor speakers at a bodega, continued by a boombox hefted on the shoulder of somebody going the other way, resumed by another boombox in the basket of a bicycle weaving in and out of traffic, concluding in the pizza parlor you've just entered for a slice.
I wanted to replicate this feeling by incorporating a noisy urban vibe into the Charlies Angels-esque pose of the three bad brothers and did so by incorporating lines from this album in the form of graffiti.
How you gonna kick it?!
