Alphabetical Order: Beastie Boys - 'Ill Communication'

How the first CD I ever bought mapped out the next 20 years of my music collection.

Jan 30, 2025

Welcome to ZERO CRED, the only music newsletter ever to exist. Alphabetical Order is a project where I go through my record collection and try to make sense of my life, from A to Z.

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A guy was on his way to my apartment to pick up the stuff. I carried the large, heavy box down to my stoop because I didn’t want some stranger coming up to my apartment. It was the middle of the summer in Brooklyn and I started to sweat as I lugged it down three flights of stairs. It must have weighed 60 pounds.

After a few minutes a van pulled up to the curb and a guy got out. This was not the guy. It was the guy’s guy, doing the pickup for the guy.

He looked at me and looked at the box. “This all of it?” the guy said after flipping open the cardboard flap and taking a peek inside.

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s all that’s left.”

“Two fifty, right?” He put a wad of cash in my hand. Two hundred and fifty dollars. That was all my life’s work was worth.

“Wait, hang on,” I said. “This one’s not for sale. This one is mine.”

I reached into the box of tightly packed stacks of CDs and grabbed the one hovering on top. Beastie Boys. Ill Communication.

“This was the first CD I ever bought,” I said.

The guy just sort of shrugged and loaded the box into his car. Then he drove off.

I must’ve been a pain in the ass when I was 11 because my mom used to send me away in the summer. She had a friend with a pain-in-the-ass son my age named Chris and every summer I spent a week at their house two hours away. Then Chris would come stay at our house for a week. Sort of a Pain-in-the-Ass Son Exchange Program that our moms set up to give themselves a break for a few days a year.

Some days Chris and I walked to the laser tag place and wreaked havoc until we got kicked out. Other days we read graphic novels at the comic book store until we got kicked out. Every morning started the same though. We’d wake up in sleeping bags on his basement floor and turn on MTV before our eyes were fully open. The afternoons were when we lusted after Daisy Fuentes or the bikini babes on Spring Break, but in the morning it was all business. We wanted to see one thing and one thing only. The music video for “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys.

We ate bowls of Froot Loops while waiting. We waited for hours, through music video after music video. All the hits of 1994. Sometimes they’d show a cool video like “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam. Other times they’d show Aerosmith’s “Crazy” which was only cool if you turned the sound off. We waited like this every morning. For days. And then, finally, the siren. The guitar. It was sabotage time, motherfuckers.

“SHUT UP SHUT UP IT’S ON,” Chris said. “SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

For the first 90 seconds neither of us even breathed. We stood with our noses inches from the screen and just took it in. Foot chases! Police cruisers catching air! Wigs! This video had everything. Everything two 11-year-old boys could want, anyway.

Then the song went completely silent midway through. After a few seconds the bassline kicked back in and we lost our fucking minds. Jumping up and down on the couch, hitting each other with every wrestling move we knew. Flying elbows off the turnbuckles and DDTs midair. Being wild little fucking maniacs. In that moment I had the strength of a hundred 11-year-olds. In that moment I could have uppercutted God himself back to heaven.

LISTEN ALL Y’ALL IT’S A SABOTAGE
LISTEN ALL Y’ALL IT’S A SABOTAGE
LISTEN ALL Y’ALL IT’S A SABOTAGE
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But after three minutes of pure chaos, the music suddenly stopped and the comedown was brutal. We could’ve gone another 50 rounds but it was over and there was nothing we could do about it. The only way to hear more was to buy the album.

A QUICK INTERLUDE FROM CURRENT-DAY DAN

Hello!

Current-day Dan here. I will get back to the tales of 11-year-old Dan in a second but first I need to be clear about something. It has been 30 years and I still think “Sabotage” is the greatest music video of all time. When I hear the guitar riff I still want to punch God in the face or whatever I said earlier. The perfect song/video combination. Some cool music videos have been made since. The video for “Closer” came out later that year and it still absolutely smokes. The shot of RZA bursting through the wall in the shape of a W in Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph” video is one of the hardest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Even the backwards Coldplay video is admittedly kinda cool. But “Sabotage” wipes the floor with all of them. I firmly believe this.

Thank you for your time.

I wanted to hear dirty words but the sticker wouldn’t let me. PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT, it said. It was stamped on the corners of all the albums I coveted and it made sure an 11-year-old like me could not purchase them. Sometimes I would try my luck and sneak one into my mom’s shopping cart at Kmart among her other items. But the cashier would always ask, “Are you aware this album contains material that might not be suitable for listeners under the age of 18?” And then my mom would say “Goddammit, Dan.” Which is pretty ironic when you think about it.

But then I discovered a loophole that would let me hear all the dirty words I wanted. I could simply ask my grandfather to take me to the store. My poor sweet immigrant grandfather. So trusting, so agreeable. So unaware of parental advisories. He was A parent but not MY parent and this made all the difference, legally speaking. He accompanied me to the register with my copy of Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication. The cashier fed him the line about suitable material and he just nodded back at him.

Since I had this rare opportunity to buy a parental advisory album, and since the store didn’t have it on cassette, I bought it on CD. Compact disc. I had a box of cassettes at home. A tiny little carrying case full of Dookie, In Utero, and The Beavis and Butt-head Experience tapes that accompanied me everywhere I went. But these were about to become obsolete because now that my family owned a COMPUTER. The finest home computer 1994 had to offer, a Gateway 2000 with Windows 3.1. With its powerful four megabytes of RAM I could do fucking anything. In Solitaire, I could play with any deck I wanted (I chose robot). In Paintbrush, I could draw boobs and penises in up to 28 colors. I could log onto AOL and, after only six minutes, be surfing the world wide web.

Oh you wanna listen to my Beastie Boys CD on this bad boy? Yeah go ahead and eject the CD tray. NO NOT WITH THE BUTTON ON THE COMPUTER. What are you, a caveman? Check THIS shit out. I hover my cursor over the eject button on Windows CD Player and click the mouse. Two feet away, the CD tray opens like magic. Like we’re in fucking Star Trek.

I listen to Ill Communication on the family Gateway and it’s everything I dreamed. They say all the dirty words. They say motherfucker. They say shit. They don’t censor “fucking” in “Sabotage.”

Oh my god.

A guy is talking about how he’s going to stick his dick in the mashed potatoes.

This has alone made it all worthwhile. I am absolutely losing my shit.

And I can re-listen to it all as many times as I want. I can skip through all 20 tracks in mere seconds. No longer would I have to hold the rewind button down to hear “Sabotage” again. No longer would I need to fast forward through the boring songs. No more re-spooling a cassette with a pencil when my Walkman ate it up. Lasers were going to do all my work from now on. I was a CD boy now.

CDs were as good as money to me throughout my teenage years. In high school my friends took jobs at Best Buy and Sam Goody just for the employee discounts or the ability to pocket a few CDs when the manager wasn’t looking. Once we were able to drive, we spent Friday nights scouring every single rack of used CDs for gold at Vintage Vinyl and listening to our hard-won discoveries on my car’s Pioneer stereo on the drive home.

I was constantly surrounded by CDs. Some in a travel booklet in my backpack. Some on the sun visor of my car. Some stacked up next to my computer. Some scattered on the floor. Always some scattered on the floor. Booklets and jewel cases and discs everywhere.

With every CD purchase came an exciting risk. Was I about to be the owner of a life-changing album that would open me up to a new world? Or was I about to realize I’d been misled by a combination of word-of-mouth buzz and targeted marketing that would lead me to unleash my anger in a fanzine that six people would read?

In college, my CD collection grew even more rapidly as I started writing to record labels to beg for promo copies for my fanzines, for my college radio show, and for whatever other half-truths I was shamelessly boasting in the name of free music.

After more than a decade of collecting CDs, I’d amassed around 1,500 of them. All sorted meticulously on my shelves. Alphabetically, of course. Plus a shelf where new acquisitions waited in limbo to see if they’d be triumphantly added to the permanent collection or be shamefully resold to the local store where they’d await a listener of less discriminating taste.

These shelves were the first thing I packed whenever I moved to a new place. Clothes, toiletries, and priceless family photos got stuffed into a big box, but CDs needed to be carefully sorted into Rubbermaid bins.

But somewhere between three different apartment moves, my CDs stopped carrying the same excitement they used to. Something about lugging them up and down flights of stairs really makes you question your dedication to collecting.

Friends who came to my apartment for the first time would laugh at them. Actually laugh out loud when they discovered that an entire wall of precious living room space was devoted to these musical antiques. They were especially judgmental as iPods and file-sharing became the standard. For a while, I snubbed my nose at them. I was the real music fan for buying these albums and they were posers.

But then one day I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually sat down and put a CD into my stereo. It was clunky and slow. It was a process. So much easier to just press a button on my laptop. I also couldn’t recall the last time I’d purchased a CD. Most stores didn’t even sell them anymore. I’d been putting my focus into my LPs which were overtaking my shelves. Now that I looked at them, I noticed the CDs were covered in dust.

In 2016 I was packing up to move into my fourth apartment in New York and I came to the sad realization that I couldn’t justify bringing several hundred pounds of bulky plastic discs with me this time. This was the end of the line for two decades of collecting. The 1,500 of us would need to go our separate ways.

But how to dispose of 1,500 CDs? I couldn’t just throw them in the trash. Each one represented an adventure. Each CD was an afternoon I spent somewhere in the tri-state area, doing the repetitive but meditative motion of flipping through rows of possibilities. The value of each one was priceless. It turned out, though, the actual monetary value was closer to ten cents. That’s how much resale sites like Second Spin and Decluttr were willing to pay me for them. I spent several nights typing the titles and UPC codes of my CDs into their websites to see how much each would fetch. Most were worth a measly 10 to 25 cents. Some were a dollar. A few of the harder-to-find punk and hardcore CDs were worth two bucks. The Misfits’ Famous Monsters was worth $3.75 and I have no idea why. There were a handful of CDs, like Saosin’s Translating the Name and a special edition of Deftones’ White Pony, that were worth more than $40 and those went straight to eBay.

After thinning out the herd on the internet, I tried to get rid of what was left the old-fashioned way. I stuffed them into a huge IKEA bag and hauled them around to all the music stores in my neighborhood. For weeks I did this. Each time I walked through the door I felt like a snakeoil salesman, dragging this sack of heavy ancient technology from store to store, trying to unload my wares on the poor cashiers. I dumped the stacks onto the counter and waited shamefully as the employee sifted through my once prized possessions. It took everything in me not to shout out context for each one. “That one was a gag gift.” Or “There’s actually a couple of bangers on that album.”

Finally I was down to the last few hundred CDs, mostly unsellable because they were promo copies with the barcodes punched out. I fired off a Hail Mary on social media that I was looking to get rid of them in bulk. Amazingly, a guy responded and said he would take them off my hands, largely sight unseen. What he was planning to do with them, I had no idea, but he offered me $250 so I didn’t ask questions. He said he’d send a friend to my place to pick them up.

Receipts from SecondSpin.com. I contain multitudes.

It’s been almost ten years since I said goodbye to my CDs. It feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t have a way to play a CD now even if I wanted to. The innovators at Apple decided that my laptop needed fewer holes in it and the CD drive was the first hole to go.

I can’t say I miss the few hundred pounds of weight I shed when I got rid of my collection, but there are things I do miss. I miss having my music centralized in one place, in one format. Everything I listen to now is scattered in the ethers, spread out across several platforms that could disappear at any moment.

But mostly I miss having a tangible document of my life since the age of 11. So much of what I’ve discovered in the digital age of music has no real-world memories tied to it. I miss taking a CD off the shelf and remembering where I found it, why I bought it, when that was, and who I was with. Maybe I’ll remember a store that doesn’t exist anymore or a friend I haven’t seen in years. Or I’ll remember a shameful phase of my life that will make me shudder.

So I’m glad that I kept my copy of Ill Communication. I can look at it and remember being 11 years old and buying it at a store that is long gone with my grandfather who is no longer with us. I can listen to “Sabotage” and remember jumping up and down with Chris and wonder what happened to him. I can remember sitting at my family computer in 1994. A computer that’s probably in a landfill somewhere. And most of all, I can remember hearing the guy say he was going to stick his dick in the mashed potatoes, and absolutely losing my shit.