Ill Communication by the Beastie Boys is now a quarter of a century old and Amazon Music has created a short documentary about the album and its impact since 1994.
After the passing of Adam Yauch in 2012, surviving members Mike Diamond and Adam Horowitz have been carefully keeping the group’s profile up. They have released the autobiographical Beastie Boys Book and ran a speaking tour around it, but have said they would never do a full tour as the Beastie Boys.
The video version of Still Ill: 25 Years Of Ill Communication runs for 15 minutes and takes on-stage interview footage of Horowitz and Diamond at SXSW earlier this year and mixes it with archive footage alongside input from musical collaborators. This video documentary is available on Amazon’s website for anyone to watch.
There are, however, more parts to this. Amazon Music customers in the US can hear an extended audio version of the SXSW interview (running to 40 minutes) by saying, “Alexa, play Still Ill on Amazon Music.”
On top of this is a 14-track playlist on Amazon Music which has commentary on half a dozen of the key tracks from the album (as well as an intro and outro) which runs to just over 38 minutes.
And, with Amazon being Amazon, there are also links to buy not just Ill Communication but also their entire back catalogue, the Beastie Boys Book and Beastie Boys T-shirts.
“The Beastie Boys had a few crucial pivots in their career, but for me, the Ill Communication era could be their most important transformation,” Amazon Music’s head of editorial Nathan Brackett told Variety. “It was the moment in the early 1990s where they brought so many of their influences full circle into one sound, and, in a sense, became the best version of themselves.”