I heard this song for the first time in probably 10 years the other night while at LiveStock chillin’. I remember writing raps to this shit when I was a kid and doing an illustration of Shyheim with charcoal.

For those of you who don’t know who Shyheim is, get a clue.

No disrespect to any Capoeira heads, but listen, Eddie from Tekken 3, this ain’t So You Think You Can Dance, asshole.

Thanks to db.

My cousin Mike Burns out in LA just sent me this video of B-Boy Jalen battling Lil’ Demon at this year’s FreeStyle Session. Jalen smokes him, and Anjelo fully admits to losing the battle.

These kids are the future man.

I love it. I fucking love it. Miss this shit like crazy.

Shout out all my b-boys and b-girls keeping this thing alive man.

I first heard about this dude after doing some spec work for Trixx through my homey Gavin Sheppard. At the time I was just getting a good handle on this design shit. I had just started fucking with Illustrator, and was doing everyone’s logo, press kit, flyer, mixtape, and unfortunately, R.I.P. shirts. This, strangely enough to say, was only a few years ago, and a whole lot has changed since then.

My dude Esco approached me a lot around that time, and truth be told, he was one of the only cats really fucking with me on some ill money tip. (Everyone still wanting favours needs to fall back. The seasons have changed). So one night he rolls up to I.C. Visions in his champagne Escalade and tells me he wants me to fuck with some press kits for Adam Bomb from Empire. (If you don’t know, get familiar man.. one of my favourite Toronto emcees hands down). I say, fuck it, and throw in a new logo, a logo for Loudmouths, a logo for MadeMenMusic and a press kit for Nem-S-Iss. When he next came through to check me, he had a wad of paper and 4 DVDs of photos.

The photos were on some next shit.. clearly. And I was on the phone asking who the fuck “Sean Getti” was. All I got was a url link with a balaclava on it. That’s it.

Getti was the dude back then and it’s good to see that he is still very, very relative, and very much a huge threat to anyone trying to get their creative games off the ground. This motherfucker is pretty much a sure bet that you’re not gonna make it far without an ounce of maniacal aspiration in your blood, and from the looks of it, he’s riding without rear view mirrors.

My dude, I said it once today, and I’ll say it again – You’re a maniac.

Check the SITE, courtesy of my homey Derek Blais.

Tonight at 11:15pm, I tried to log onto my facebook account and noticed that my screen was filled with codes. Now, I can fuck around in Flash a little bit, I know some basic html, but I don’t know much else beyond that. I mean, show me some xtml or some php and I can figure some of it out, but you’re just about speaking another language to me. From what I do know though, I could tell it was web code, and as any real design/web geek would do, I started trying to decipher it.

It seemed, (again, from my assumptions) that it was a rack of code used to help govern the facebook site and the majority, if not all, of the functions that we commonly use on the page. Everything from your default credit card account for facebook, to deleting your account, to the error messages that should pop up when you mess up on the site was there. And the scrolling down went on and on for about 30 pages.

Going through it all quickly, I started to think about how much of that information is a contribution to millions and millions of peoples daily moves being recorded by the powers that be, and how we trust that since the face of this beast is so welcoming, the mind of it must be as well.

It’s done nobody any harm right?

Just a few months ago my good friend was called and questioned by police about a party she was said to have attended where a domestic crime had occurred. After finding out that they had the wrong girl by the same name, she was told that she was tracked down by going through the history of everyone who had said that they would be “Attending” that particular event. One female officer even recommended that she not put her real birth date and information on the site, saying it is used regularly by Police to track individuals. Harmless right? We’re too in love to see it bleed us dry.

When I finally got past all the code, I ended up at what should have been the bottom bar of my personal facebook page, followed immediately by my actual facebook profile. It literally looked like my profiles lid had been blown open and it’s brain was exposed for all to see. Call me an artsy fuck all you want, but I’m being completely 100 on this one.

Inspired by the whole thing, I decided to design The Declaration Of Our Dependence as a comment on what our social lives have transformed into, and how our privacy and right to it has been camouflaged so sweetly from the inside out by our Big Brothers. I’m not sure that this will ever appear again on my screen, but I’m happy that I got it all down to put this piece together. It’s a great preemptive strike to the new “Is The Feds” series by Ideall Clothing coming this Fall/Winter, and it is definitely one of my favorite designs based on it’s relevance and message.

note: think it was easy to do? try putting 30 pages of code together piece by piece.

Hope you guys like it.

The Declaration Of Our Dependence by Bryan Espiritu

view the fullsize piece HERE