Bill McMullen

Next up I am proud to introduce you to artist, designer extraordinaire… Bill McMullen.  I first remember hearing about Bill years back on a Beastie Boy website.  After doing some digging i saw that he was designing the clothing brand SwishNYC (which is on hiatus i’m hoping.)  He was also working on album covers for different groups like the Beastie Boys.  If you don’t know, Bill did the art for the Hello Nasty album as well as the Mixup album.  Both great albums and great artwork.  And of course he gets two points for rocking the Listen To shirt in his photo.  Thanks Bill!

I also saw alot of talk about him and some Star Wars toy that everyone had to have.  I am a fan of Star Wars just like everyone else who grew up in the late 70’s early 80’s but i wasn’t going to pay alot for a toy.  That was until i saw it was a mash up of Star Wars meets my favorite adidas shoe of all time, the classic shelltoe.  Well from that second on, I knew I had to have it.  I believe he only made around 1000 or less of them and I had to get my hands on one.  Soon after on a business trip to L.A. I walked into a store and saw they had a few of the holy grail shelltoe AD-AT’s on the shelf.  I was hooked instantly and bought one within seconds of being there.  I still have this AD-AT sitting on my desk and hope to keep it forever if possible.  People know they aren’t to touch it or play with it.  It’s art and that’s it.

Here’s a brief history of Bill McMullen incase you don’t know.  He moved from San Diego to NYC to give it a try for 6 months, and now he’s been there for thirteen years. Bill spent three years as an art director and designer at Def Jam Records working along side legendary Cey Adams, leading to his influential working relationships with recording artists such as the Beastie Boys, Method Man, Guru, Luscious Jackson, Foxy Brown, DMX, and Bad Brains. He has created various packaging projects for the must have Beastie Boys Criterion Collection along with countless others.  As a hobby and sometimes professionally he also works on beats and releases music, but he said he tends to focus more on visual mediums like design, art, and video.  To sum it up, Bill is just an artist and designer living in NYC, just working on projects and living. 

If you’re in need of some one of a kind artwork, please check out his show Hype, Hustle, Ripoff.  Check the link here to see how Bill mixes his love for the old school elements with pop culture and seamlessly fuses them together into classic elements of design with this show.  McMullen’s work ultimately resonates because it does more than brand, copy, market, and elevate, since he understands that all of these actions are mutually exclusive.  ”Ultimately, Hype, Hustle, Ripoff shows just how easy it is to be “had” by misinterpreting capitalism’s optical tools for cogent representations of unfeigned visual culture.”  You got that?  Good.  Now let’s get to it.

1. What do you do and where do you do it?
I do a lot of work from my apartment, where I have a home office and some pretty large areas that allow me to do photography and painting, and work on pieces for whatever projects I’m trying to do at the time. I’d love to get a studio though.

2. Name a defining moment in your career.
Obviously, the biggest has been the move to NYC, but there are some more subtle moments that have really factored in: first, I would say, would be getting my first Mac when I was back in college. I specify ‘Mac’ because at the time, that was the only personal computer platform that you were really able to do professional design work on. I use Macs to this day, but you can use other operating systems now, obviously! But that first machine, a Macintosh IIcx, really allowed me to learn the main programs and disciplines of doing design and layout, and typography. Next would be learning to DJ at the SDSU college-radio station KCR, and club-style DJing from my college friends Bart ‘Blackstone’ Cheever and Thomas Spiegel, who taught me how to mix and weave the diverse music that interested me into DJ sets at the clubs I started DJing at.

3. What is your biggest inspiration and who/what inspires you today?
Wow, tough question. Instead of naming names, I’ll discuss the idea of the ‘long run.’ It’s a weird time in my life because I’ve actually started to get old enough to see people I’ve admired excel as well as seeing others fall off. Not ‘fall off’ totally, not even because they’re wack or anything, but seeing people that were doing things I thought I wanted to do, suddenly unable to find a place any longer. The music industry, the promoting, the videos, the recording, everything has changed. It’s not what it was 10 years ago. The concept of the ‘long run’ is not always answered by the career you choose, but rather, how you can adapt and change careers if need be. And simultaneously, I see others strive and remain pertinent by expanding and growing, with the constant being their personality and professionalism, not just their job description that year. That’s inspiring to see. So I guess I’m saying the big inspiration for me is seeing people evolve and the paths they take to their ‘next level.’ Trying to observe and learn and apply that to my own path towards the proverbial ‘Next Level.’

4. What have been your biggest struggles?
Well, truthfully, I’ve been pretty lucky – no real hard times or tragedies beyond what most normal people face. The ’struggles’ are more with things like laziness. I’m prone to procrastinating and I have a lot of interests. So while that wide knowledge of different things like art, design, video and music production is pretty cool and allows me to dabble in all sorts of areas, I also feel like it may be hindering. A case of “covering the bases,” instead of just committing to a certain field and just going all out, do-or-die style like others I know who have focused and excelled in one field.

5. Sum up your style in 3 words.
That’s another tough one, guy! Let me think about it… “Full Metal Jackin’”

6. What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Doing phone surveys about brackish-water fishing for the government one summer, to earn money to buy a mountain bike! I wasn’t even selling anything, but people still hate getting phone calls from people they don’t know. You had to write down the time that each call was made. Each call lasted about 1-2 minutes, so you ended up looking at the clock every 1-2 minutes! The days would crawl. There was a hot supervisor named Judy that I had a crush on though. Even bad jobs can be good because they can tell you what you don’t want to end up doing, and you might even have a hot supervisor.

7. Name 3 things you can’t live without.
iPhone, Adobe illustrator, lottery fantasies.

8. What’s the best concert you’ve ever been to?  And where?
Another tough question! I’ve seen so many good shows, I’ll just recap some favorite memories – Public Enemy/LL Cool J/Eric B and Rakim/Whodini on the Def Jam Tour, where I met up with Tony Rome to get my tickets. A weird show in downtown S.D. where N.W.A was on tour with Too Short, UTFO, and Salt-N-Pepa… Some guy there yelled at me for wearing a Public Enemy shirt! In retrospect, his heart was in the right place – a blonde long-haired white dude in a PE shirt probably looked like the beginning of the apocalypse! Police/Echo and the Bunnymen/New Order tour back in 1988, Madness, Devo. Jesus and Mary Chain on tour between ‘Psychocandy’ and ‘Darklands.’ Ministry supporting the ‘Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste’ album. Huge festival in the UK with the Dust Brothers before they had to change their name to Chemical Brothers, along with Orbital, and a fucking KILLER set by Richie Hawtin, where he slowly built beats off of a 909, 808 and 303 up to something so nuts it was mind-altering, showing me what was possible out of an electronic show. Seeing Ol’ Dirty Bastard  (right before the release of 36 Chambers) take over the mic at a Rampage the Last Boy Scout birthday show, and tell everyone to “stop sleeping on the Wu!” leading Busta Rhymes (himself one of the best performers I’ve seen live) to have to take another mic and talk peace to ODB, and let him know that no one was sleeping on the Wu, but that it was Rampage’s night. They actually brought an SP-1200 on the stage, and hooked it into the DJ mixer to play the beats for Rampage. Seeing the Beastie Boys and having them say ‘Hi Bill’ from stage in Tokyo and Los Angeles, that’s crazy for a life-long fan like myself.

9. Name your top 5 favorite hip hop albums of all time.
Oh jeez. OK. Nothing too surprising here. But not necessarily in this order!
1. Criminal Minded – Boogie Down Productions
2. Daily Operation – Gang Starr
3. License to Ill – Beastie Boys
4. It Takes A Nation Of Millions – Public Enemy
5. Low End Theory – A Tribe Called Quest