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THE BULLETIN • FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2012
MCA and our mortality • Why the passing of the coolest Beastie Boy hits harder than we expected it would
T
here are (at least) two reasons I probably shouldn’t write this column: 1. Music writers are supposed to be hip, with it and plugged into what’s cool and contemporary. The last thing you want to read from your favorite music writer is 900 hand-wrung words about feeling old and mortal. 2. The news is seven days old now. It was May 4 when word of the death of rap icon Adam “MCA” Yauch of the Beastie Boys began to surface and spread, before completely taking over my Facebook and Twitter feeds for days. It was, in my little part of the world, an outpouring of grief for a musician that exceeded anything I’ve seen in recent memory — not Levon Helm, not Amy Winehouse, not even Michael Jackson. Maybe Kurt Cobain was comparable, but that’s hardly recent; the world was different in 1994, as were the circumstances around his death. But there’s one reason I am going ahead and writing this column, and that’s because I spent much of the past week listening to old Beastie Boys songs and watching the
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band’s interviews and reading other folks’ thoughts on Yauch, his art, his spiritual journey and what he meant to a generation: people my age (35), and older (up to 50ish, probably), and some outliers on either side of that range. This is not a reaction I would’ve predicted if you’d asked me two weeks ago how I’d feel if Adam Yauch died. Yet seven days later, I’m thinking about him. I don’t believe the outpouring of grief and my own preoccupation with Yauch’s death are borne solely out of the Beastie Boys’ stature in pop music over the past 25 years. They were never the biggest band in the world, nor the best, at least in my mind. It’s not entirely borne out of fandom, either. I, for example, am hardly a Beasties obsessive. I listened to the first four albums a lot and thought they ranged from pretty good to excellent, lost interest in the late 1990s, and was pleasantly surprised that last year’s “Hot
The Associated Press file photo
The Beastie Boys, photographed in 2006. From left are Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch. Yauch died last week at age 47 after a three-year battle against cancer.
Sauce Committee Part Two” record was a solid listen. I’m nowhere close to a super-fan. What I do think is interesting about the reaction to Yauch’s death is that it represents my generation’s reaction to our own mortality, which walked up out of nowhere and slapped us last week. Of course, it doesn’t take the death of a stranger to face the fact that you’re getting older. That’s a feeling I’ve been grappling with a lot over the past few years. But it sure helps reinforce those feelings when that stranger is someone you grew up with, even if he didn’t know it. You see, when Yauch and his band mates — Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz — burst onto the scene with their controversial “License to Ill” album in the mid-1980s, they were young and crass, prone to pushing buttons and testing limits, guzzling beer and ogling girls. Kind of like a wide swath of their suddenly huge throng of fans. Four years later came the huge artistic leap of “Paul’s Boutique,” followed three years later by a renewed inter-
est in their instruments (the Beasties famously started as a punk band) on “Check Your Head,” and then the ambition and commercial resurgence of “Ill Communication,” the final chapter of what many consider the band’s peak artistic period. Listening to those four records (released over an eight-year span) now is like watching a bratty child grow into a wide-eyed and well-developed college kid. The awkward stages and annoying behavior fade away, replaced by tremendous, world-changing potential. The change is most striking in Yauch, who transformed from a scruffy, beercan-crushing lout into a political activist and spiritual leader who spit gravelly rhymes about respecting both mothers and Mother Earth. If you’re the right age, and you look closely (the benefit of hindsight doesn’t hurt), you can see yourself growing up in Yauch’s example. I clearly remember giggling like a preteen at the bawdiest moments of “License to Ill.” Because, well, I was 10. I recall digging into the vintage funk/soulsample paradise of “Paul’s Boutique” just as my own
affinity for soaking up musical history was beginning to bloom. And one of my most vivid adolescent memories is blasting “Ill Communication” in my friend Mark’s car, cruising our hometown for no good reason other than to celebrate our rapidly expanding freedom. Months later, the climax of the Beasties’ then-megahit “Sabotage” was the highlight of my first Lollapalooza experience. There are a lot of kids … er, old folks like me who watched Adam Yauch mature from afar while experiencing a similar arc in their own lives. And now, he’s gone, and we can’t blame the things that have taken other musicians from us too soon; he wasn’t a junkie or a suicide risk. He was just a guy — a father and husband, a rapper and bassist, a Buddhist, a filmmaker. A guy with his share of gray hairs who battled cancer, like too many others. He looked like me (only much cooler). And losing him is bigger than just losing a Beastie Boy. It feels like losing one of us. — Reporter: 541-383-0377, bsalmon@bendbulletin.com