The Beastie Boys and the Meaning of Life: An Ode to MCA

It would be impossible for me to remain silent following Adam Yauch’s passing. The Beastie Boys meant more to me than any other musical group ever has or ever will. They hit me at a time in my life when music, self-identity and youth were swirling around in a nebulous morass, and they provided a bit of a roadmap on how to view the world and how to act in it. It may seem like I am overstating things, but they really meant that much to me. They really did.

I grew up straddling two different worlds. On one side was the mostly white, working-class, Italian-American town I grew up in. Not a half-mile down the road was one of the roughest cities in Massachusetts, largely Latino and immigrant. It wasn’t like living in a cosmopolitan cultural hub such as New York City, but it made me more worldly than you’d expect, and it exposed me to various aspects of each culture. One of those aspects was music.

From the white kids in my hometown, I encountered 80s pop and hard rock. I fell in love with hair metal and cheesy 80s hits, both of which I adore today. From the Puerto Rican and Dominican kids (and from Yo! MTV Raps), I heard hip hop and rap music. I felt like I was one of a select group of people whose taste inhabited both worlds. During my early teenage years (a time when music is an integral part of your self-identity), I wasn’t sure how to navigate these contradictory tastes. I wasn’t one thing or another; I was a lot of both. When Check Your Head dropped in 1992, everything suddenly started to make sense.

One of the most enduring memories I have of junior high is me and two friends running around my house with the TV cranked up full blast dancing and rapping along to So What Cha Want. Here was a band I could finally relate to. They not only rapped, but also played their own instruments. It felt almost revolutionary at the time.

This is all well and good, but what did the Beasties teach me?

Follow your muses. Be true to yourself. Do some good in the world. And have a little fun doing it. Aren’t these lessons we could all learn from?

One story has always stood out for me that highlights this lesson. This is from DMC writing about the Beasties in Rolling Stone:

“The first time we toured with the Beastie Boys was the Raising Hell tour in 1986: Run-DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. We were playing the Deep South — Crunkville, before there was crunk — and it was just black people at those shows. The first night was somewhere in Georgia, and we were thinking, "I hope people don't leave when they see them." But the crowd loved them, because they weren't trying to be black rappers. They rapped about shit they knew about: skateboarding, going to White Castle, angel dust and television. Real recognizes real.”

It may seem like a cliché, but I saw that staying true to yourself and following your interests in an authentic way was a great step toward finding yourself and gaining respect. This is critical for any teenager, or even any human being, to learn. 

I wasn’t a hip hop guy, I wasn’t a rock guy, I wasn’t a jock, I wasn’t a nerd. I was a mix of all those things. So were they. They rapped about Isaac Newton, doing illicit things to girls with whiffle ball bats, the New York Knicks and even tried to free Tibet.

This mix led them to become perhaps the most influential tastemakers in pop music in the 90s. They released a criminally underrated magazine (Grand Royal) that popularized the term ‘mullet’ for the haircut, they had their own record label and influenced fashion to the point that I looked like Mike D for a good 8 year stretch.

But let’s bring things back to Adam Yauch. He wasn’t necessarily my favorite Beastie; that was always Ad Rock. But in reading the obituaries and listening to the interviews with other members of the Beastie Boys and people close to them, it has become clear that Adam was the beating heart of the group. And in the end, Adam was the one I probably came to respect the most.

He started off just as wild as the other two, if not the most wild. Although they were parodying the frat boy lifestyle, they eventually embraced it. MCA was perhaps the first to see how empty it could be. While recording Paul’s Boutique, he began to take hallucinogenics and explored his spirituality. This eventually led him on a journey to Asia, where he encountered Buddhism.

The wildest of the Beastie Boys was now on a spiritual quest. Part of this was discovering the plight of the Tibetan people in China. He organized the now-legendary Tibetan Freedom Concerts that helped the issue attain a prominence in America that surprised many observers. But when the cause started to overwhelm him, he knew to step back and return to his first love, music.

Despite this increasing spirituality and attention paid to social justice issues, Adam never lost his sense of humor. He created a Humpty Hump-esque alter ego, the famed director Nathaniel Hornblower, who supposedly hailed from a nook in the Swiss Alps. He even crashed the stage at the MTV movie awards dressed as Nathaniel when Sabotage didn’t win best video of the year in 1994:

Adam also embraced growing up and maturity without ever losing that sense of playfulness. He rapped about having grey hair. He felt contrite about some of his antics and misogynism he displayed as a youth. In response, he dropped a few legendary lines on Ill Communication’s 'Sure Shot' about having respect for women, something you don’t hear much of in hip hop, a fact even a lover of the genre such as me has to admit.

Perhaps the thing that really stands out to me now is that he kept trying to stretch his artistic boundaries and follow his interests where they led him. He started to branch out into film, making a well-received documentary about standout high school basketball players in 2008 called Gunnin for that #1 Spot. His production company Oscillascope helped distribute the ill-as-hell Banksy “documentary” Exit Through the Gift Shop in 2010. Yauch was also behind the incredible Beastie concert film “Awesome, I Fuckin Shot That”, which was put together using hand held cameras from the audience.

That’s probably the last lesson the Beasties gave me, and maybe the most important. Never stop growing. I’m 34 and I just started to teach myself piano. I made a vow to start writing more. There are plans to learn another language. We may grow up, we may grow older, but we have to keep challenging ourselves and embracing what life throws at us. We need to put ourselves out there, but also know when to withdraw and move on. And maybe most critically of all, we need to have a sense of humor about everything. Life is too short to take ourselves too seriously. Maybe you shouldn’t dress up like someone from the Swiss Alps on MTV, but definitely have some fun once in awhile.

So Adam Yauch and the Beastie Boys: thank you for everything. You helped me make sense of my life during a pretty confusing time. You showed me that things would be OK if I stayed true to myself and followed what I loved. You taught me that it’s essential to keep searching. And, most critically, to have a sense of humor about it.

 RIP Adam Yauch aka MCA aka Nathaniel Hornblower. You certainly left the world a better place. Namaste. 

Paul's Boutique: The Science of Shaking Your Rump

Yo yo yo yo. Guess who’s back? That’s right, your boy Perspicacious P aka the Vanilla Thrilla aka White Steve Prefontaine aka the Avenging Methuen Disco Godfather. This was going to be in my last post, but it would have made it incredibly long and I know the masses can’t take my brilliance in such vast quantities. It’s almost like seeing the face of God. Let me tell you folks, I’ve seen that face and it’s FANTASTIC.

Any damn way, today is a special treat. A review of a book about one of my favorite albums ever, Paul’s Boutique.

Paul’s Boutique – 33 1/3 (Book 15 of 25)

This book is a history of the Beastie Boys’ best album, Polly Wog Stew. OK no. It’s actually about Paul’s Boutique, which to me is the greatest hip hop album ever recorded, with all due respect to NAS, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Lil Wayne, Lil B, Dr. Dre, Justin Bieber and Public Enemy.

Let me start by saying I am one of the biggest Beastie Boy fans in the world. The greatest moment of my concert-going life was when I was front row at a show in 1998 at the Worcester Centrum. Mike D kept sweating on me and I was so dehydrated that afterward I almost passed out. 

Obviously it was totally fucking awesome.

Of course, we can’t talk about the Beasties without mentioning MCA’s recent passing. This was the celebrity death that has affected me more than any other. I wasn’t moved to tears or anything, but I was pretty bummed out. I’ll write a post in the future on what the Beasties meant and still mean to me, but let’s stick to the book for now.

After License to Ill (Fight for Your Right to Party, Girls), the Boys got into a dispute with their label, Def Jam. They eventually left their native New York and went to LA to escape the madness of the East Coast, start a new album and embrace the madness of the West Coast.

They hooked up with the Dust Brothers production team (who eventually went on to work with Beck and um…Hanson) who were the perfect partners for this stage of the Beasties’ career. Paul’s Boutique was simultaneously sampling’s greatest moment and final act. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to make this record in 2012 because of all the lawsuits it would spur or money it would take to clear the samples. One member of the production team said it had between 100 and 300 samples. Many are changed/slowed down/twisted beyond recognition, showing how sampling isn’t simply ripping something off, but instead artistic recycling in its highest form. These layered samples, when mixed with the Beasties 70s pop culture obsessed rhymes and breakneck delivery, created a pastiche collage of brilliance.

The book itself is more about the production team and the creation of the music than it is about the writing of the lyrics or the Beastie Boys themselves, which allows for a different perspective than most have heard. That said, more from the Boys would have given the book another layer of depth that second-hand accounts simply can’t provide. Although the author interviewed Mike D, Ad Rock and MCA are noticeably absent. It would have been immensely interesting to hear their take on the album. 

One especially compelling passage was when the Dust Brothers were surprised--and almost hurt--that the Beasties never called to work with them again. The Dust Brothers thought that it would be the beginning of a fruitful creative relationship, but apparently the Beasties wanted to explore their own impulses and kept production largely in-house on subsequent albums.

The book also explored the corporate side of the album and the bidding war that preceded its creation. After the Boys left Def Jam, they went to Capitol Records, who were hoping to get an album whose sales would be on par with License to Ill. Unfortunately, Paul’s Boutique was a commercial disaster upon release, and many in the corporate office who were supporters of the Beastie Boys soon found themselves without a job. Eventually the Beasties made good on their end of the deal, but it wouldn’t be until 1992’s Check Your Head. Paul’s Boutique would also ultimately go platinum, but in 1989 it was a bit too much for most to take in.

I read this EXTREMELY fast, at least by my standards. But by the end I slowed myself down because I didn’t want to finish the book. The inside story of my favorite album from my favorite group was like crack to me. All the details in their acid-dropping, blunt-smoking and egg-throwing glory.

My one wish would be to have a time machine to go back to 1989 to hang out with the Beastie Boys and their crew while they made this album. Since I can’t do that, this is the next best thing. I recommend it to any Beastie Boys fan. It’s a Delorean in paperback form.