RIP Adam Yauch/MCA of the Beastie Boys

this one made me laugh: http://www.criterion.com/explore/57-adam-yauch-s-top-10

When I was in college in the 90s my group of friends often disagreed about what should be playing on the stereo at any given times. Usually it was a fight between Grateful Dead and Classic Rock vs. Rave music. Beastie Boys seemed like the one thing that made everyone happy.

I still have a couple of the Grand Royal magazines. They seemed like the coolest thing in the world when they first came out. B-Boys were definitely ahead of the game with the whole unearthing of retro culture.

It's hard to even think of all the stuff I was intro'd to by the beastie boys. I definitely checked out Lee Perry because of a name drop in a Beasties song, and their instrumentals got me into 60s/70s Soul Jazz breaks.

damn, rip. didn't even realize he was still sick. ;_;

iirc remy bean has a great story concerning yauch, not sure he posts anymore tho?

oh he's around

I slept in his bed once, and barfed in his mom's commode (he wasn't there). RIP duder.

― Olivia Newton John Justen Bieberheimer Schmidt (remy bean), Friday, May 4, 2012 1:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wanna hear this story sometime.

Apologies if this has already been posted but it cracked me up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/arts/l-ch-check-it-out-one-goat-on-account-996904.html

I slept in his bed once, and barfed in his mom's commode (he wasn't there). RIP duder.

― Olivia Newton John Justen Bieberheimer Schmidt (remy bean),

oh ha

the version i got in person was longer and funnier

I still have a vivid memory of this guy Peter I worked with at a record store right when Licensed came out. He was quite large, wild red hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and (no exaggeration) he had the album memorized word for word within days of its release. Working the floor on a packed Saturday afternoon, with Peter on cash lip-synching to "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" (with lots of corny hip-hop moves thrown in), was really something. Also remember him describing and quoting from the Joan Rivers appearance the following day in great detail: "Do I detect a note of jealousy?"

other things the Beasties introduced me to:

Lee Dorsey
Richard Pryor's standup
Eddie Harris' "Silver Cycles"
Led Zeppelin (to some extent, heard Rhymin and Stealin before I heard the Ocean for ex.)

Rod Carew

yeah, i got lee dorsey & eddie harris from them, too

The Beasties basically introduced me to late seventies sitcom pop culture.

they also made me think there must have been some minor Knicks player named Evan Bernard

this is the only time i've ever really felt bad after hearing a celebrity died. fuck...

ooh also Les McCann and Eugene McDaniels

xp

i missed their heyday but in 98 every time i turned on mtv i hoped to see the "intergalactic" video

I think the Whatcha Want video and the Sabotage video had a similar pull for me.

Intergalactic is a great one too!

I went to Space Camp between 4th and 5th grade. To shuttle us between our dorms and the giant warehouse that Space Camp was in, we had this bus driver who seemed really old at the time but was probably about 20 and basically like Otto. We were a rowdy bunch of kids and you could smell your back sweat getting stank against the 90-degree interior seat cushions of the bus, but he knew how to keep us quiet -- "If you all sit down, shut up, and don't throw anything out of the windows, I'll playLicense to Ill each time you get in." It had come out the winter before but I mean that shit was a rare, hot currency among 9- and 10-year-olds. So we did as told and he popped the tape in and we all felt like the coolest, most rebellious little shits that week.

whoa

Yauch's mom talks to the NYT briefly about his passing:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/adam-yauch-of-the-beastie-boys-dies/?hp

ha Dare, that is great

RIP
Fuck you, cancer.

the beastie boys are the three stooges of rap. moe howard died may 4, 1975.

When I was in college in the 90s my group of friends often disagreed about what should be playing on the stereo at any given times. Usually it was a fight between Grateful Dead and Classic Rock vs. Rave music. Beastie Boys seemed like the one thing that made everyone happy.

A guy I knew in high school was an obstinate Beatles/Robert Fripp/Richard Thompson/early blues fan was also the very first person I knew who had a copy of License To Ill. I remember visiting him in his dorm room and we'd blast that and Psychocandy like a couple of idiots.

The Mets are all using Beastie Boys as their walkup music tonight

Super bumer. Wrote some thoughts here.

i saw them at the ritz for the first show (i think?) of the licensed to ill tour and its still one of the best shows i've ever seen. but i was in high school and probably really drunk. i was up against the stage and got my picture in newsweek magazine. i was bruised from head to toe. skinheads, jocks, b-boys, it was friggin' mayhem. packed to the rafters.

http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/93/a6b56de2761e1153caa43a0650994202/l.jpg

jon pareles review of that show has a great headline: ROCK: THE BEASTIE BOYS, RAP-METAL GROUP

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/29/arts/rock-the-beastie-boys-rap-metal-group.html

I am now listening to Hello Nasty and am about to open my second beer.

RIP once more for good measure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJAGJ8ckmZY

unlike many people itt, I was taking no news as bad news, but that's made it still feel sudden.

From Tim Sommer.

― Ned Raggett, Saturday, 5 May 2012 06:45 (3 hours ago)

this is on facebook, does anyone want to post?

Born and Bred in Brooklyn, U.S.A., they call him Adam Yauch, but he's M.C.A. RIP Adam. #beastieboys #nosleeptillbrooklyn

Chuck Schumer
7 hours ago
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this is kinda fucking me up. they represented so many firsts for me. first album i ever bought myself with license to ill. maybe first non-kiddie album i owned period? and even at age eight i knew you wanted to grow up to be the one in the leather jacket who hadn't shaved in three days. entire crowds of children losing their shit like the audience at a black flag show whenever the roller rink dj would plsy a beasties song. first album i ever really had to work to get with paul's boutique. (so many years in between! i thought they'd fallen off the face of the earth. then i saw the "hey ladies" video on vacation and made my parents drive me to every place near colonial williamsburg that even remotely seemed like it might have records. then not being able to make heads or tails of it for months.) i feel like you could almost explain what happened in the 90s, musically and maybe just pop culturally, to a space alien by playing it the three 90s beasties albums.

My wife just suddenly broke into the chorus of "Girls" last night during dinner. Been dancing to Check Your Head with my two year old for the last hour.

Anyway RIP, damn that dude was way too young.

also everyone otm about the trickle-down influences thing. fugazi may have said they were influenced by dub in interviews but the beasties actually gave you artists, albums, whatever to track down.

Almost forgot I saw the Beasties live in '92 in Tempe. Great show. This is fucked up. We've already lost musicians from my youth for reasons of drugs, suicide and murder, but now they're dying of natural causes. too young RIP

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