It was one thing when folks like Joey Ramone or Wendy O. Williams or Joe Strummer or Jeffrey Lee Pierce or Johnny Thunders or Lux Interior died. While certainly tragic and shocking, these idols of mine were older than I was. It's not that they were necessarily old enough to check out when they did, but there was still that important distinction. Today's news of the death of Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys, however, hit me in a completely different, sobering way.
When the Beastie Boys were first making headlines, part of their endearing charm was the inherently amateurish nature of their whole aesthetic. The veritable personification of the punk ethos of "do it yourself," the fledgling Beastie Boys did exactly that. What made them so damn cool wasn't the caliber of their music -- hell, anyone probably could have made those early records like Pollywog Stew and/or "Cookie Puss." No, what made the Beastie Boys cool was that THEY were actually doing it, ... and you weren't. These guys were in my peer group -- they were my age! Hell, my friends and I used to walk past them on West 8th Street on our way to record stores. But while we were busy consuming that music, they were busy making the music. They were out there doing it. For that alone, the Beastie Boys were fucking heroes.
We all know the rest of the story. They morphed from "least-likely-to" clowns to become veritable, genre-spanning titans and elder statesmen. Everyone knows a Beastie Boys song. Even folks who claim to hate Hip Hop.
But fandom for the Beastie Boys aside, the hook that really stuck me today was that Adam Yauch was only in his forties ... just like me. At The Job, my colleague Mish Whalen assembled a great tribute slideshow, and included a picture from 2001 of Yauch cradling his little daughter. It's a familiar type of shot of a father holding a toddler -- much like several shots of myself and my own children, and really stopped me in my tracks. See that slideshow here.
Pour one out for MCA. It's really the world's loss, but fuck it -- New York City has lost one of its greats. Rest in peace.
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