FEATURE:
Sure Shot
Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication at Thirty
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THERE is not a lot written…
IN THIS PHOTO: Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch (MCA), Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) and Mike Diamond (Mike D) in London in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images
about a hugely important Hip-Hop album. Beastie Boys’ glorious fourth studio album, Ill Communication, was released on 31st May, 1994. It is coming up to its thirtieth anniversary. A wonderful album that is among the best the trio ever release, I wonder why there has not been more celebration and retrospection. Produced by Beastie Boys and Mario Caldato, Jr., it is a hugely varied and eclectic album. The album draws in elements of Rock, Punk and Jazz. Compared to the more sample-based first two albums, Beastie Boys’ Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz, Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch, and Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond relied more on live instruments from 1992’s Check My Head and 1994’s Ill Communication. Featuring collaboration and contributions from Money Mark, Eric Bobo and Amery ‘AWOL’ Smith, Q-Tip and Biz Markie, this is a fascinating and hugely wide-ranging album. One of the most impressive and nuanced that Beastie Boys ever released. Ill Communication reached number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. It was also their second triple platinum album. One of my favourite tracks on Ill Communication is Sure Shot. It is a hypnotic and amazing track, though it is one where Beastie Boys shout at women and offer salute. They were accused or misogyny and sexism in earlier songs, so this was sort of a correct and musical apology. Perhaps the most famous song from Ill Communication is the majestic and towering Sabotage. With its Spike Jonze-directed video – one of the best of all time -, it is the pearl in a golden album. I will get to a couple of reviews for Ill Communication. I will start out with a feature from The Conversation. They write how the album is “an artistic statement, a swag of songs greater than the sum of its parts”:
“The album itself is a kaleidoscope of jazz-infused break-beats (where Herbie Hancock meets the Chemical Brothers), smooth instrumentals, bratty punk interludes and gritty, guitar-driven monsters. These unwittingly expose the group’s musical influences, and define its fundamental essence. This is the Beastie Boys in their natural state, where they have nothing left to prove and only critical appreciation to gain. Ill Communication differed from the band’s usual anarchistic and boyish flavours by gliding into a realm with a deeper appreciation for sampling, musicianship, musical arrangement and storytelling.
With a jazz flute sample taken from Jeremy Steig’s Howlin’ for Judy, and a layered drum break taken from Run-DMC’s Rock the House, the opening track of the album, Sure Shot, bounces into an energetic myriad of break beat drums and lyrically fragmented phrases referencing music and pop culture icons:
‘Cause you can’t, you won’t and you don’t stop
Mike D come and rock the sure shot
I’ve got the brand new doo-doo guaranteed like Yoo Hoo [a popular, chocolate-flavoured soft drink]
I’m on like Dr John, yeah, Mr Zu Zu [Zu Zu Man by New Orleans musician Dr. John]
I’m a newlywed, I’m not a divorcee
And everything I do is funky like Lee Dorsey [Everything I Do Is Gonh Be Funky by Allen Toussaint, recorded by Lee Dorsey]
Cultural obsessions are nothing new for the Beastie Boys, but the breadth of material and the diversity of lyrical citation found here far outstripped their previous work on Licensed to Ill (1986), Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Check Your Head (1992).
The album features tracks such as Tough Guy, a short and sharp interlude reminiscent of their early punk roots referencing Bill Laimbeer (a tough NBA basketballer of the Detroit Pistons) and Root Down, a slippery deviation laced with a Jimmy Smith sample of the same title.
Before too long, the album peaks, reaching the infamous Sabotage. With bone-crunching guitars and fuzz bass, this lyrically and rhythmically heavy song takes aim at the media and paparazzi with the band expressing its disapproval of the constant barrage of propaganda being spread to discredit musicians and celebrities. Their tongue-in-cheek, ’70s cop show, parody video clip, directed by Spike Jonze, received numerous MTV awards.
While Sabotage is now rightly famous, it’s the collaboration between the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, Get It Together, that for me represents the pinnacle of this album. Teaming up with arguably one of the smoothest and most influential rappers of the era significantly enhances the album’s aesthetic appeal and offers a point of differentiation amid so many nasally driven raps.
Get It Together samples Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In by the Moog Machine, Headless Heroes by Eugene McDaniels, Escape-Ism by James Brown, Four Play by Fred Wesley and The Horny Horns and A One Two by Biz Markie to create a distinct, misty blend of soul-jazz and funk-infused hip-hop that can be now considered quintessentially Beastie Boys.
The instrumental component of this album is nothing short of exquisite. Songs such as Sabrosa, Futterman’s Rule, Ricky’s Theme and Shambala all contribute to its flow.
Where other hip-hop artists couldn’t offer such diversity in live musicianship, the Beastie Boys led the way in adding this instrumental flare to their sound. They left their stamp as innovators, crossing the boundaries of multiple genres.
To conclude, I must draw attention to the album’s final track Transitions. The secret is in the title. Could this be the finale that subtly outlines their sonic signature and confirms that behind all good music is thought, emotion and purpose?
Transitions closes out Ill Communication by providing a moment of instrumental solace with its alluring, harmonic charm, but more so, the absence of the Beastie Boys’ trademark vocals deliberately draws attention to the quality of their musicianship. Ill Communication is undoubtedly a landmark recording for the Beastie Boys and one that defines the end of the Golden Age”.
As there is not a lot in terms of anniversary features and retrospectives about Ill Communication, I will come to a couple of reviews. Assessed by Rolling Stone in 1994, it is a wonderful and legendary album that sounds timeless. You can put it on now to someone not familiar with Beastie Boys and they would be able to connect with it. So varied is Ill Communication, you get so many different angles, stories, moods and highlights. I think that it is still so important and powerful thirty years after its release:
“WHY NOT A Beastie revolution?” proposed the B side of the Beastie Boys‘ first 12 inch back in 1983; 11 years later, it has happened — it’s time to get ill in ’94. Since their comeback in 1992 with Check Your Head, the Beasties — Mike D (Mike Diamond), MCA (Adam Yauch), Adrock (Adam Horovitz) and various cohorts — have bum-rushed nearly every media outlet, starting their own studio, record label, magazine and line of merchandise. Still, the core of the Beasties’ appeal remains their music — as funky as the Ohio Players’, as experimental as Sonic Youth’s.
Ill Communication continues the formula established on Check — home-grown jams powered by live instruments; speedy hardcore rants; and insane rhyme styles buried under the warm hiss of vintage analog studio equipment. (An old-school distrust of the digital age pervades Ill: As Mike D states on “Sure Shot,” “I listen to wax/I’m not using the CD.”) Since the Beasties’ earliest recordings, recently compiled on Some Old Bullshit, their mission remains intact: to explore the unifying threads between hip-hop and punk, taking their basic elements — the scratch of a needle across a vinyl groove, a pounding snare-bass thump, the crunch of a power chord — and slicing them up with a Ginsu knife. The resulting B-boy bouillabaisse blends both genres, living up to Mike D’s boast that he’ll “freak a fucking beat like the shit was in a blender.” Ill maintains the Beasties’ consistency of style, but underneath its goofy, dope-smokin’ antics lies — gasp! — an artistic maturity that reveals how the Boys have grown since they began as pimply New York punks making anarchic noise.
The Beasties’ fourth album lives up to its title — layers of distortion and echo often render the vocals unintelligible, reducing them to yet another rhythmic element. A reggae influence also pops up on Ill, but instead of the stuttering dancehall pulse pervading hip-hop, the Beasties look to the reverb effects of dub innovators like Lee “Scratch” Perry (name-checked in “Sure Shot”) for sonic inspiration. Elsewhere, the Beasties show their roots in “Root Down” — in this case, the strutting bass undertow, organ fills and wah-wah, chicken-scratch guitar of ’70s blaxploitation-era funk. Throughout, the Beasties demonstrate their musical diversity, ranging from the Gang Starr-style minimalist piano loop of “Get It Together” (featuring a virtuoso freestyle cameo by Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest) to “Sabotage,” a bass-driven metallic rapfest. Only on the hardcore punk of “Tough Guy” and “Heart Attack Man” do the Beasties falter. While these tracks have visceral power, they ultimately show the Beasties to be punk classicists, unable to transcend the now reactionary sounding influences of ’80s thrash pioneers like Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Germs. Indeed, if the Beasties gave their hardcore the same sonic complexity they give their funk, they would prove truly dangerous.
The Beasties’ funk emanates from the flow of their call-and-response rhymes, from the play of MCA’s rasp against Adrock’s freaky nasal cadence. Unafraid of the ridiculous, the Beasties remain masters of the absurdist rap lyric, such as when Adrock comes “steppin’ to the party in the Fila fresh/People lookin’ at me like I was David Koresh — yeah!” (“The Scoop”). The Beasties detail their expected obsessions with basketball (“Tough Guy”), golf (Mike D’s “wearing funky fly golf gear from head to toe”) and smoking pot (“Legalize the weed, and I’ll say, ‘Thank heavens,’ ” proclaims Adrock on “Freak Freak”).
Ill also conveys the Beasties’ more serious side as they pay homage to hip-hop’s New York roots. Constantly hyping that “motherfuckin’ old-school flavor,” they drop references like Busy Bee and the Zulu Beat show, romanticizing New York as a mythic rap Mecca. Despite their current status as residents of Los Angeles, MCA states in “The Scoop” that “New York City is the place that I feel at home in,” while Adrock claims in “Do It” that he “got the beats in Manhattan/You can hear the texture.” Even more surprising is MCA’s growing role as the Beasties’ social conscience: On “Sure Shot,” he states that “disrespecting women has got to reduce” and details his interest in Buddhism on “Bodhisattva Vow” and “The Update.”
Amazingly, the early-’80s material compiled on Bullshit prefigures nearly every musical development on Ill, moving from the blaring hardcore of “Transit Cop” to “Jimi,” an anti-drug song (!) whose narrator moans, “Let’s, like, get my bong and do up some heavy weed” over midtempo funky drums and psychedelic guitar. “Cooky Puss,” the Beasties’ first hip-hop release, sounds remarkably contemporary — its references to women as “bitches” predate gangsta rap, and it was a successful phoneprank record long before the Jerky Boys.
Bullshit ultimately demonstrates the nascent Beastie philosophy, which Adrock articulates for ’94 on “Alright Hear This”: “I brought a microphone/And I pick it up/And then I fuck it up/And then I turn it up … with the mighty rockin’ sound/And you know my culture — I came to get down”.
I am going to end with a more contemporary review from the BBC. following on from a third studio album that seemed less impactful and accomplished as 1989’s Paul’s Boutique, form and critical acclaim was restored:
“While it was far from disappointing, the Beasties’ third LP, 1992’s Check Your Head, lacked a lot of the wow-factor that’d graced their sampladelic masterpiece of 1989, Paul’s Boutique. A return to the New York trio’s scrappy punk sound, prominent on early demos, Check Your Head was solid, competent, mixing the band’s trademark rhyme schemes with bombastic percussion and over-amplified riffs. But for their next set, messrs Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA would have to step their game up.
And didn’t they just. 1994’s Ill Communication mixed together elements of the preceding pair of long-players – the bratty sneer of the group’s 86 debut, Licensed to Ill, was by now forgotten – to present 20 tracks fluttering from low-slung funk to caustic rock’n’roll via bona-fide mega-hits and jazz-tinged instrumentals. Trading lines with such liquidity that, at times, the three voices blend into a perfectly unprecedented stew of consciousness, our protagonists were promptly re-established as both a rap force and a commercially viable proposition. In the UK, Sabotage – this album’s lead single – charted higher than any Beasties cut had since 1987’s No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn, buoyed by its now-iconic cop show-spoofing video. But one track alone couldn’t come close to representing the full spectrum of sounds on its parent LP.
Opening with a canine squeal before breaking into a flute loop cribbed from Jeremy Steig, Sure Shot wastes no time in setting a tone for what’s to follow: pop culture references, in-jokes, shout-outs to the Beasties’ supporting cast, all atop the sort of bread-and-butter hip hop beat that’s backed the dropping of science since day dot. Tough Guy’s a Check Your Head hangover, but at less than a minute it’s over as soon as the racket’s begun. From there, the Beasties slip back into hip hop mindsets – B-Boys Makin’ With the Freak Freak brings distorted vocals to the fore, ahead of Root Down’s appearance as a scratchy partner piece to Sure Shot, its reappropriated sample also drawn from jazz circles, namely Jimmy Smith’s Root Down (And Get It). Sabotage sits at track six – one of this set’s heavier numbers, with an opening riff that’s immediately recognisable (name that tune? Two seconds, max…), it’ll forever be heard with its video firmly in mind.
The album’s numerous instrumentals help to break up the dizzying cavalcade of rhymes coming at the listener from all sides – performed by the Beasties, they’re rooted in lounge-jazz territory, and the likes of Sabrosa and Eugene’s Lament would later feature on an all-instrumental collection, 1996’s The In Sound from Way Out! (the trio has since released a ‘sequel’, 2007’s Grammy-winning The Mix-Up). Of the rap numbers in the record’s second half, Do It welcomes long-standing Beasties buddy Biz Markie for its disyllabic ‘chorus’, and The Scoop positions the three MCs behind the same fuzzy production front erected by B-Boys… several tracks earlier. Heart Attack Man is a two-minute thrash-about introduced by a laughing-himself-apart Mike D; and the penultimate number Bodhisattva Vow is a showcase for MCA’s Buddhist philosophy, tumbling forth over Om-like drones.]
Ill Communication returned the Beasties to the number one position on the US Billboard 200 – the first time they’d topped the chart since Licensed to Ill – and their next two albums, 1998’s Hello Nasty and 2004’s To the 5 Boroughs, would repeat the feat. Clearly, this is the collection that steadied the Beasties after a minor commercial wobble – that, and it represents the moment when three brats from the other side of the Pond properly grew up, developed attitudes that looked to the future rather than live for the present, and became global superstars for all the right reasons. It remains to this day the quintessential Beastie Boys collection – perhaps not the most influential, nor the most critically celebrated; but certainly the most concisely encapsulating”.
Such an important album in the history of Hip-Hop and the legacy of Beastie Boys, the wonderful Ill Communication turns thirty on 31st May. It is still so vital to me. It came out not long after my tenth birthday. I think it was the first Beastie Boys album I heard. If you have not heard the album before then make sure that you check it out. The fourth studio album from Beastie Boys still sounds extraordinary…
THREE decades later.