RIP Adam Yauch/MCA of the Beastie Boys

can't believe i never saw them. RIP. the beasties were such a presence growing up, it's not right, too young...

its funny to watch hey ladies video now and all i can think of is beck and fatboy slim.

Gotta love the blog journalism:

http://globalgrind.com/entertainment/ll-cool-j-wants-hip-hop-preserve-adam-yauchs-legacy-details

LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys came up together. So when he heard the news that Adam Yauch has passed away, it was no surpise to find out that the "Walk This Way" rapper from Queens wants the world to preserve Adam's legacy.

One of the best shows I've ever seen was Beastie Boys/fIREHOSE/Basehead at the Troc on Philly maybe around '91 or '92, not long after "Check Your Head" came out but before everyone suddenly realized they were still awesome. It was a school night.

fIREHOSe opened when I saw them too

This is so great in every respect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSPCEeaaIe8

karaoked a gleeful Fight For Your Right tonight for MCA, wherever he is

feel so sad, like we lost a spirit guide or something

but I fkn love this thread right now, all these stories fill me with joy at what he & the Beasties gave us just by being enthusiastic funny earnest awesome music nerds/musicians

fuck fuck fuck

Didn't see if this was posted before, but Sasha Frere-Jones' piece in the New Yorker is great

Love this bit...

In the summer of 1986, I lived in Manhattan near Union Square with my first girlfriend in a duplex owned by a very trusting and foolish adult. In August of that year, my friend Tom Cushman gave me an advance cassette of “Licensed to Ill.” The liner was red letters printed on a white J-card, with either the Def Jam logo or Columbia’s or both. I was as obsessed with the fact of that cassette as the music. We knew somebody on a major label? And it was the Beastie Boys? This was a band whose 1983 single “Cooky Puss,” which is often described as the Beasties’ first “rap” single, is an extended, semi-capable funk vamp over which Mike prank calls a Carvel ice-cream store and somebody scratches a Steve Martin album (and the first Beasties E.P.), not capably. The single is about as commercial as a bag of dead spiders. It also represented the New York we grew up in, where a club like Danceteria would show loopy homemade videos on C.R.T. monitors and dance records were whatever records the d.j. decided to play while you were dancing.

Also...

Rather than being perceived as the first draft of Ali G, the Beasties were taken at face value; many threads got tangled in one of hip-hop’s breakthrough moments. Rap is ridiculously profane and loopy and perfect and anybody can do it and you can use any music you want! Ok bye! And then, two years later, on “Paul’s Boutique,” they took the idea even further: maybe you could rap every word you knew over every record ever made. Sure, why not.

you must be talking about GRRRRUNGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDyy7TmyOf0

It feels like saying goodbye to my youth suddenly. I know it's stupid and silly. But god damn you cancer. This guy seemed such a sweet and lovable guy. I feel especially sad for his daughter, a mere 14, so she really doesn't deserve this. :-( I thought he had pulled through. I remember the announcement. :-((

RIP. What would the 90's have been without the Beasties? Saw them a couple of times in '94 and it was awesome.

Sad news. Fight For Your Right is my earliest memory of actually hearing music, think I was 5 or so and I can remember instantly repeating the chorus to my parents.

Yeah it's really sad. I've barely even thought about the Beastie Boys for years, I suppose they slipped out of fashion at the end of the 90s and didn't quite come back in properly, Paul's Boutique excepted maybe, and I'd lost the need for music like that in my life since so never went back to them. But now I want to listen to pretty much all of them again - Ill Communication was the album for me, being 15 at the time, and yeah if you look back as an older listener there were always better rappers and probably better hardcore bands but the whole package they bundled it up into was so much fun and totally irresistible.

And yeah hip-hop for white people whatever think about how many listeners ears they opened up and how many great artists they pointed those listeners in the direction of.

his short from last year is free to watch on mubi this week

http://mubi.com/films/fight-for-your-right-revisited

Say what you will about Coldplay generally, but I'm down with any tribute that's sincere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVr4UP9ntLs

it is a testament to something that chris martin did not break character as Sensitive Rock Bro Frontman one time during that.

i kept waiting for him to crack-up at some point. maybe on the porno mag line he will crack up? here it comes. and...no. no. just keeps on being chris martin, heartfelt man.

more NYT fun:

`CH-CHECK IT OUT'

One Goat, on Account

To the Editor:

I had the great pleasure of reading your unsolicited critique of the "Ch-Check It Out" music video ["Licensed to Stand Still" by Stephanie Zacharek, May 16]. It took some time to get to me, as it had to be curried (sp?) on goatback through the fjords of my homeland, the Oppenzell. And in the process the goat died, and then I had to give the mailman one of my goats, so remember, you owe me a goat.

Anyway, that video is big time good. Pauline Kael is spinning over in her grave. My film technique is clearly too advanced for your small way of looking at it. Someday you will be yelling out to the streets below your windows: "He is the chancellor of all the big ones! I love his genius! I am the most his close personal friend!"

You journalists are ever lying. I remember people like you laughing at me at the university, and now they are all eating off of my feet. You make this same unkind laughter at the Jerry Lewis for his Das Verruckte Professor and now look, he is respected as a French-clown. And you so-call New York Times smarties are giving love to the U2 because they are dressing as the Amish and singing songs about America? (Must I dress as the Leprechaun to sing songs about Ireland so that you will love me? You know the point I make here is true!)

In concluding, "Ch-Check It Out" is the always best music film and you will be realizing this too far passing. As ever I now wrap my dead goat carcass in the soiled New York Times — and you are not forgetting to buy me a replacement! Please send that one more goat to me now!

NATHANIAL HORNBLOWER

Manhattan

The writer, whose real name is Adam Yauch, is a member of the Beastie Boys. He directs their music videos under the pseudonym Nathanial Hornblower.

It's funny because I definitely haven't given more than one listen to anything since Hello Nasty, and I was not anticipating that changing, but on the other hand it has hit me really hard.

Though as a couple of people upthread have said, just because he's not making music for me any more doesn't mean he wasn't being a great force for good in the world, and he would almost certainly keep branching out. Kind of surprised I never knew he was behind Oscilloscope.

The Coldplay is the oddest tribute I've seen - on the one hand fuck no! on the other I'm kind of touched by how far his influence spread, and that the band must have spent some time on this, when absolutely no-one would have expected it of them.

well fuck me i cried during that goddamn coldplay tribute fuck you ilx

I'm not meaning to hate on Coldplay here, but Chris Martin has always seemed to be more than a tad self-conscious about his coolness factor or lack thereof, so his love of the Beastie Boys is surely a no brainer, as there was literally no one cooler than the Beastie Boys.

Just talked to a friend who I guess, back in the day, was one of the group's #1 Toronto fans, and hung with Adam the most. She said he was the nicest guy, and that his lifestyle was so clean and had-been for years - vegan, no drinking (I think?), no drugs, not even smoking pot. She's pretty shocked by his death, especially because she had lost touch and, in her current life, hadn't really been following the group.

the beasties more than any group (except maybe tmbg) are a symbol of my childhood and adolescence...this feels like the milemarker from which i will know ever after i am an adult and i don't like it.

i saw them at bonnaroo in 09 and remember not having high expectations, you know, about ten minutes of beasties then i'll go see david byrne. but they put on one of the best shows of my life...i remember being really disappointed after a 60 minute set that they weren't the headliner that night (which was either springsteen or phish).

well fuck me i cried during that goddamn coldplay tribute fuck you ilx

Jesus Christ me too and I really didn't expect it

my little girl was dancing real hard to Check Your Head while we went grocery shopping this morning. Up until "Time For Livin'". That made her cry.

Soul fire
And we ain't got no water

I thought I had written a pretty good bass part until a few years later when I realized I had subliminally stole it from Track 6 of License to Ill.

http://soundcloud.com/r-mantlebakken/come-on-inside

yeah, actually watched and will remember the coldplay video. if I meet him in hell, we'll shake hands

Really emotional watching then get inducted into the rock n roll hall of fame right now

Ha mixmaster mike chopping it up on the wheels with a nuclear assault t shirt is about perfect for the era that birthed the beasties

this is hilarious: Adam Yauch's top 10 films released by Criterion http://www.criterion.com/explore/57-adam-yauch-s-top-10

well fuck me i cried during that goddamn coldplay tribute fuck you ilx

Jesus Christ me too and I really didn't expect it

― cosi fan whitford (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, May 5, 2012 2:50 PM (4 hours ago)

yeah

lol at that criterion list [sniff]

Really emotional watching then get inducted into the rock n roll hall of fame right now

― l0u1s j0rdan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, May 6, 2012 1:56 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha mixmaster mike chopping it up on the wheels with a nuclear assault t shirt is about perfect for the era that birthed the beasties

― l0u1s j0rdan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, May 6, 2012 1:59 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. but the vibe was kinda ruined when we had to watch Kid Rock and Travie McCoy butcher them. Questlove and Black Thought made up for it though.

Really fucking loved that Questlove had the ABA basketball logo on his kit.

i've seen that banana photo in a couple places accompanying obits/death coverage and it always brings a smile to my face

Perhaps I'm out of it but I blessedly don't know who that travie guy is

Yeah the performance was just ok

So far bette midlers speech about laura nyro and-surprisingly- Mick Hucknall of simply red subbing for rod stewart have been the highlights

Travie McCoy is the dude from Gym Class Heroes and did that "Billionaire" song recently. I'm sure you've heard some stuff he's done.

rip

rip

rip

Awesome, SNL just showed a short little snippet of the Beastie Boys as tribute after the fake news. Has the show ever done that before?

i feel like i might've seen something similar before but still yeah, it was nice, especially using that 'love and respect to the end' part of "Sure Shot" as the clip

Seems like Roy Orbison died on a Friday and the next night, they showed him doing "Crying" in its entirety (at 11:53 pm CST)

keeps hitting me

so sad for his daughter

;_;

vegan, no drinking (I think?), no drugs, not even smoking pot.

he stopped smoking cheeba / that was part of the key

Maybe the least assholey thing I've seen in Perry Farrell in a while:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/perry-farrell-remembers-adam-yauch-20120504

Watching their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right now on HBO. Just Ad Rock and Mike D. Industry folks must have been tipped so this could happen before he passed away.

LL Cool J said they were the ones who played his demo to Rick Rubin which is how he got signed.

Ad Rock read a note from Adam -- whose folks were in the audience. Pretty special.

Forgot about them being in Beat Street for about five seconds.

All their stuff was such a huge celebration of life. We went to the baseball park on Friday night and they were playing "Johnny Ryall" between innings while the kids ran laps around the concourse. Beeps and I walked past two concession guys who were trading off lyrics to "Paul Revere". There was sadness, but this weekend has definitely felt like more a wake than a funeral.

If this is how you mourn a poet, I hope we do it like this every time.