RIP Adam Yauch/MCA of the Beastie Boys

damn this sucks.

nothing to add but RIP and hell yeah gonna crank it up when I get home from work.

I have a vivid memory of walking around the streets in the Castro (on a visit to a friend) after Ill Communication came out, listening to a tape of it over and over on my Walkman.

Oh damn, break my heart a little more why don't you.

^^^

― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, May 4, 2012 11:38 AM (17 minutes ago)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Playing Paul's Boutique in office as quietly as possible, trying not to look at that picture again.

i'm actually surprised at how sad this is making me but now i'm trying to keep it together at my desk. dammit.

terrible, and very sad. rip.

jeez, this is bumming me out in a major way. I dropped after hello nasty but all their records up to and including that one were on seriously heavy rotation all throughout my high school years. and he seemed like a good dude too. rip.

Statement released:

http://www.beastieboys.com/

Very sad. I remember seeing them first on the bill at one of those Def Jam shows, back in '86 or so. They weren't very well known back then, and they were getting booed pretty much from the moment they hit the stage. (And this was at a very large venue.) Still, they were falling over themselves laughing, MCA most of all. I recall getting a weird sense of, I don't know, freedom, watching this. I think about it every time I have to speak in front of a large group of people. I still aspire to have that kind of "fuck all y'all" confidence. I guess it was a pretty meaningful moment for me. RIP, MCA. Way too soon.

He seems like a pretty good model for how to live a life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kdThLmS4Ig

Listening to this mix right now: http://soundcloud.com/dj-format-c-1/beastie-boys-mix-by-dj-format-c

RIP MCA. I'm gonna bump Licensed To Ill like 3 times tonight. This dude was the best and the world is a little worse without him.

good TV moment at 2:45....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB-ya6gBI4w

aside from the music, I think the Beasties in general were really ground zero for a certain cool R&B/jazz/classic/punk axis collector mentality...like dudes that dug bad brains and old R&B and early hip hop and sonic youth etc...sorta the wax poetics mag aesthetic...i couldn't imagine, say, numero group existing w/o them

Kinda pisses me off that the three of 'em will never have a chance to actually do this, just walk down the street years and years on and swap stories:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_J7ROcRhsO4/Tgux7ShM-4I/AAAAAAAAAtQ/AyyqJpqerGI/s1600/MUDD07.jpg

awww

^^^yeah those getups are what I was thinking of when I ref'd the b-ball video upthread

http://gizmodo.com/5907730/deceased-beastie-boy-adam-mca-yauch-is-every-single-twitter-trending-topic-right-now

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/05/remembering-grand-royal-beastie-boys-brief-brilliant-magazine/51944/

M*tt, these were great

they were, yeah

I was 16 and at this summer college program when Paul's Boutique came out and I remember walking to the record store the day it was released, buying it and bringing it back to play in our dorm's common room and being floored by it. I was expecting another goofy, fun Licensed to Ill and instead it was this incredible other thing.

License To Ill was the first "real" tape I ever bought back in 7th grade, and Paul's Boutique was the first record that I ever remember looking forward to. Check Your Head came out right before I graduated high school, and Ill Communication came out during a particular decadent era of my college life and I have really fond memories of all of these eras. I saw them once at an outside venue in Pontiac, Michigan with L7 and House of Pain (lol 90s), and technically I saw one song from them at Lollapalooza in 1994 before I got kicked out.

Anyway this is pretty sad because unlike other recent big music deaths he seemed like a legit decent person who would probably still do some interesting shit later in life instead holing up and becoming a drugged out / crazy recluse.

Oh shit, I still have issues of Grand Royal at my parents' house somewhere.

I have a couple issues of Grand Royal stashed somewhere. So classic.

I think I still have my faded circa-'98 Beastie Boys shirt somewhere at home. Going to try to dig it out to wear when I'm out with friends tonight.

really ground zero for a certain cool R&B/jazz/classic/punk axis collector mentality

yeah, I'd go further and say they were an archetype for how pretty much every music hipster/geek operates today. Like, is pitchfork quite the same site in a world where the beastie boys didn't exist? It's not like they were the first people to ever be way into all kinds of music, or even all kinds of *cool* music, but nobody really pulled off an aristic statement pulling all of that knowledge and love in like paul's boutique, or their 90s records. I think this is part of why MCA dying means something to me, despite not having listened to the BBs records in years. I *feel* a part of whatever generation guys like him belonged to /blogging

artistic, duh

yeah dominique that's definitely what i was trying to get at, said better

jeez that picture made me cry a little bit in my office

― l0u1s j0rdan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, May 4, 2012 2:37 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't want to be at work right now.

An incomplete and off the top of my head ramble from the past hour:

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/heardmentality/2012/05/adam_yauch_dead_mca_beastie_boys.php

Wow. Shit.

Some friends of mine and I went to see the hip-hop exhibit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music some years back. It was springtime and there was no one there but us and Yauch, who was alone and perusing the exhibit quietly. On the way out, we found it striking that the Lubavitcher Jews went straight toward him and not toward us, who were about as Jewish looking as it gets. There was a brief moment that felt very "one of us ..." as we looked over our shoulders to see them proffering him a lulav and etrog, likely oblivious to who he was.

This is a sad.

with certain musicians their own overwhelming fannishness informs their music, thurston moore and the beasties come to mind

xp to dominique and matt

The time between Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique took forever. And when PB sounded nothing like LtI, I was a little disappointed at first. But the more I listened to it, the more I got into it, the more I could hear that beer-drinking frat rappers were moving them and us forward into a new direction…

I think I heard the first side of Check Your Head every morning for six months my freshman year in the dorm. Though I got sick of it, I still taped the CD longbox up on my cinderblock wall.

ha, that's a good jewish twist on the celebrities-just-like-us meme xp

Didn't have quite the same agewise impact on me cuz when I was in college all I was hearing was "Cookie Puss," but I bought the first 4 albums (Paul's Boutique on cassette) and my best friend claims they copped some of their behavior from watching him at parties at Bard. (saw them at L'looza 94 too)

also heavy Jerry Lewis influence obv

TRAGIC
RIP

in high school, for my friend's birthday i made a mix cassette tape where i laboriously compiled not songs but clips of our fav bboys lines. i would never do this now, so it's too bad that this mix is lost forever, on a lone cassette tape out there somewhere...

Just finding out about this now--big surprise, even though I knew there had been health issues. It was so exciting when they went #1 with their first album; as key a moment as Nevermind grabbing #1. (Who'd did they knock out--Peter Cetera? Jennifer Rush?) I had interviewed them a few months prior, and they were so funny and so obscene, I wrote it up under a pseudonym--I was still passing on my writing to my parents, and I didn't want my mother to read it.

didn't he found that distributor oscilloscope. because they do some great stuff. ditto grand royal magazine (RIP).

i admit i've never been an unqualified fan of the BB but they all seem(ed) like interesting, likable dudes.

sorry to hear this, RIP.

when i was 10 or 11 licensed to ill came out and i didn't like it that much and completely missed the boat on paul's boutique, but i picked up check your head on a whim and it didn't leave my car's cassette deck for months. definitely a game-changer for me w/r/t how i listened to music, it led me into soul-jazz and funk and all sorts of good shit. ill communication and hello nasty had similar lengthy runs in my car. this is really unexpected, i thought he had kicked it. i guess i haven't been paying attention. damn shame.

really ground zero for a certain cool R&B/jazz/classic/punk axis
this is otm -- i know i discovered a bunch of random things via the beasties ... jimmy smith's root down, for one, which led to a big dive into that kinda organ stuff.

yeah, ditto on that.

i guess when i was in h.s. i was somehow on this precious deep soul tip and i thought of the BBs fans who were just being exposed to this deep vein of black music as johnny-come-latelys. but that has a lot to do with h.s. social politics and now i totally get how they could be an awesome gateway drug.

precious = precocious

maybe precious too.

(Who'd did they knock out--Peter Cetera? Jennifer Rush?)

In the US, it was Bon Jovi.

ha, i'm probably a johnny come lately. to some extent, listening to paul's boutique made me realize the vast depths of american music -- almost as much as, say, the anthology of american folk music. i might've ended up liking the source material more than the beastie boys, but gotta give them their due in getting me there!

Here's an interesting thought: was Yauch the first of his peers (hip-hop, alt-rock, whatever) to let himself go dramatically grey?

I had a cassette dupe of "License to Ill" on one side and "Invisible Touch" on the other. I used to listen to it on a boom box on canoe trips down the Brandywine River.

Maybe they weren't alone in this, but they were also central to a huge rekindling of interest in Led Zeppelin (outside of just classic-rock stations) when they sampled "The Ocean"; Schoolly-D and others followed in short order, and it went from there.