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.
![](http://www.nscurfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/beasties-30-4-b-1-724x1024.jpg)
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?!