Thank you so much for everything you've done. It's hard to express exactly how important you've been to me, but I'll do my best to explain it to you.
My earliest memories of you were from 1986 when you were acting like a crazy person on MTV. As a ten-year-old boy, your beer guzzling, tv set sledge-hammering and pie fights from the (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!) video were AWESOME. Also, I'm not sure if it was your idea, but nice use of two sets of parentheses in one title! I remember making a dub of the Licensed to Ill tape, complete with a photocopied cover and liner notes. Sitting in my bedroom, on the bus, mowing the lawn, wherever my walkman would take me, there I was, memorizing the lyrics to Paul Revere.
Then, we took a break. I moved away from your shenanigans and into a phase that I'll just call "The Dark Times." I'm not sayin' that I listened to Poison, and I'm not sayin' that I didn't. I'm just sayin'. MCA, I'm sorry I stopped listening to you. I'm also sorry that I had to retroactively discover the musical masterpiece that was Paul's Boutique. I was only 12! I had no idea that a revolution in music was happening. What did I know about samples? What I did know about hip-hop? During that time I had shifted from "The Dark Times" into various other phases including punk and hardcore. Ironically, that's what brought me back to you. Your own roots. Sometime in high school, I was loaned a copy of Check Your Head and my life changed. Beastie Boys replaced U2 as my "favorite band ever" and again I had a dubbed version of your tape (I had not yet made the transition to CDs in 1992). It was the first time I experimented with negative space as I used a black sharpie background to leave Beastie Boys and the album title behind in white in an attempt to replicate the graffiti-style typeface of the cover (no photocopies this time).
MCA, without any exaggeration, this album changed everything I thought about music(and more). I worked as hard as I could in a pre-interenet world to learn everything about you and your band. Your genesis as a hardcore band of teens in New York City exposed me to the exciting world of the big city. Your transition from a bunch of dopey idiots to a sophisticated 3 piece with instrumentals, huge hip-hop beats and samples was inspiring. But best of all, this album rocked. When I got to college, and my roommate had a CD player, this was the first CD I bought. It was quickly followed by Paul's Boutique (sorry it took so long for me to hear that one!) and Licensed to Ill. When you dropped Ill Communication and Sabotage, you solidified your place in my heart. The 10 minutes that we were allowed to make noise during finals, the glass shook as we slid in that disc and turned it all the way up. On my first trip to Washington DC (you know, the one where I realized that I didn't have to live in Wisconsin for the rest of my life?), I found this in used CD store.
My earliest memories of you were from 1986 when you were acting like a crazy person on MTV. As a ten-year-old boy, your beer guzzling, tv set sledge-hammering and pie fights from the (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!) video were AWESOME. Also, I'm not sure if it was your idea, but nice use of two sets of parentheses in one title! I remember making a dub of the Licensed to Ill tape, complete with a photocopied cover and liner notes. Sitting in my bedroom, on the bus, mowing the lawn, wherever my walkman would take me, there I was, memorizing the lyrics to Paul Revere.
Then, we took a break. I moved away from your shenanigans and into a phase that I'll just call "The Dark Times." I'm not sayin' that I listened to Poison, and I'm not sayin' that I didn't. I'm just sayin'. MCA, I'm sorry I stopped listening to you. I'm also sorry that I had to retroactively discover the musical masterpiece that was Paul's Boutique. I was only 12! I had no idea that a revolution in music was happening. What did I know about samples? What I did know about hip-hop? During that time I had shifted from "The Dark Times" into various other phases including punk and hardcore. Ironically, that's what brought me back to you. Your own roots. Sometime in high school, I was loaned a copy of Check Your Head and my life changed. Beastie Boys replaced U2 as my "favorite band ever" and again I had a dubbed version of your tape (I had not yet made the transition to CDs in 1992). It was the first time I experimented with negative space as I used a black sharpie background to leave Beastie Boys and the album title behind in white in an attempt to replicate the graffiti-style typeface of the cover (no photocopies this time).
MCA, without any exaggeration, this album changed everything I thought about music(and more). I worked as hard as I could in a pre-interenet world to learn everything about you and your band. Your genesis as a hardcore band of teens in New York City exposed me to the exciting world of the big city. Your transition from a bunch of dopey idiots to a sophisticated 3 piece with instrumentals, huge hip-hop beats and samples was inspiring. But best of all, this album rocked. When I got to college, and my roommate had a CD player, this was the first CD I bought. It was quickly followed by Paul's Boutique (sorry it took so long for me to hear that one!) and Licensed to Ill. When you dropped Ill Communication and Sabotage, you solidified your place in my heart. The 10 minutes that we were allowed to make noise during finals, the glass shook as we slid in that disc and turned it all the way up. On my first trip to Washington DC (you know, the one where I realized that I didn't have to live in Wisconsin for the rest of my life?), I found this in used CD store.
My very first bootleg. To be honest, at the time I had no idea what a bootleg even was. I did know that I was staring at Beastie(Beasty?) Boys CD that had tracks on it that I had never heard before. That, and the fact that it was $30. I'm not sure if you remember the time when $30 was a lot of money MCA, but I spent an eternity in that store before I spent the dough. I'm also pretty sure I skipped dinner that night.
3 years later, the internet had been born and everything was different again. Sitting in the office of my summer job with a tape deck connected to a computer, we "downloaded" the new tracks from Hello Nasty in the build up to my most eagerly awaited album release of all time. And yes, MCA, we did leave work to go to the store and buy it the minute it came out. The videos from that album basically inspired everything that I did creatively for about three years. And that summer, when I saw you live in Minneapolis from the second row of your revolving stage - bliss.
Since then, you've released so many albums, I've bought them all, including almost every side project, special edition and more. I've moved to Korea and Bangladesh and India and every time I travel to a new place, I alway stop in record stores to see if there are Beastie Boys special editions. How many Japanese discs did I come home with after my second trip to Japan? 8? 9?
The time that you took a hiatus from the band and went "to find yourself" snowboarding in the Himalayas is in the back of my mind every time I cut a long slow line down a mountain and is a major inspiration for my eventual trip to Gulmarg.
The thing about your band, MCA, is the fact that it's so much more than a rap group, or a even a band really. When I heard the news that we lost you to cancer this morning, I grieved your loss. Not just as an inspiration, but almost as a friend. So much in fact, that my friends have recognized it.
My loss. It's everyone's loss. Then I started thinking about it. Why are the Beasties so important to me? The Beasties represent so much. Positive growth, change over time, reinvention, maturity to name just a few things. You continued to evolve and grow, but you always went back to the basics. You stayed true to your roots and you always stood up for what you believed in.
And now you're gone. And you were only 47. And you'll be missed. Rest in peace, MCA.
I'm just interested in the B-Boys,
jason
"I don't see things quite the same as I used to. As I live my life, I've got just me to be true to."
~Stand Together, Check Your Head
It's weird (aside from the fact that you don't know me at all) because MCA was usually, but not always, my least favorite of the Beasties. Granted, we're talking about a limited selection of people, and someone has to be last, but I guess I just never really took the time to realize that while some of his rhyme schemes were simplistic, they were generally less boastful and more honest. He just struck me today as the one Beastie I'd be most interested in striking up a convo at a bar or (even better) have a random dinner with and blast him with questions.
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