"As a co-founding member of Beastie Boys, Brooklynite Adam Yauch (a.k.a MCA) was responsible for th the first rap album to reach No. 1 on the pop charts (1986's Licensed to Ill) and helped propel the Beasties into household names--ultimately earning them a place in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. MCA embodied the band's evolution. He went from dangerous and debaucherous to a socially conscious beacon who was instrumental in organizing the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. The rapper was renowned for a smooth flow and a gravelly dleivery, yet his talents expanded to the bass guitar and beyond the stage. He also directed videos (as goofy alter-ego Nathaniel Hornblower) and full-length features as part of his film company, Oscilloscope Laboratories. It was Yauch's deft ability to translate his passion into music that resonated so deeply with his fans. "If you can feel what I'm feeling," he once rapped, "then it's a musical masterpiece."
Pretty tidy.
It was going to take me a few thousand words to do what Apple's editors did in about one hundred and fifty. The end quote was the title for my essay. But it strikes me that the line that follows is perhaps the more revealing line when it comes to MCA. At the opening of "Pass the Mic," Yauch opens with the "masterpiece" line, an invitation to all the Beastie Boys acolytes to be as hyperbolic as they wanna be. To me and many others, Check Your Head was a musical masterpiece. One could argue the first three Beastie Boys records influenced music and culture more than any other three consecutive recordings since Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper's. I might be one who would do so.
But the second line of "Pass the Mic" goes like this, "Hear what I'm dealing with, and that's cool at least."
And there's the essence of who Yauch became. Hip-Hop pioneer, filmmaker, Buddhist, political-activist, generally a person who was inclusive of everything he experienced, and in the end an extremely positive force on the world at large. And even if you didn't think what he was doing was a musical masterpiece, even if you were just listening to the Beastie Boys because they were fun, or because the rest of your friends were and you were relatively ambivalent, that was fine. That was cool.
