Dropping Science Like Galileo Dropped the Orange

I was surprised this morning to read about the death of Adam Yauch, MCA of the Beastie Boys*. I knew that he had been fighting cancer but was under the mistaken impression that he was recovering from the disease and likely to survive. What surprised me most about this news, however, was how upset it made me. I haven't really listened to the Beastie Boys much in the last ten years or so, but from the age of 11 or 12 through most of my teenage years, they were one of my favorite bands. And, for whatever reason, MCA had always been my favorite Beastie Boy.

I don't really know why MCA was my favorite Beastie Boy but he always was. I suspect that it really didn't have to with much more other than the fact that, as Gabe Meline astutely articulated, he had the coolest voice of the three. When I first started listening to their music, I had a hard time differentiating between Adrock and Mike D's similarly nasal voices, a problem no doubt compounded by the way that all three MCs would share verses and lines. So MCA's laid-back, scratchy delivery made him immediately recognizable and thus easier to single out as my favorite. I also think that when I began to play the bass at age 14, I probably felt a bit of a kinship with Yauch as the bassist of the group. But ultimately, I alway thought that MCA seemed like the coolest of the three in an essentially indescribable way.

Not only were the Beastie Boys one of my favorite bands for many years, but they were probably the first favorite band that I discovered more or less on my own. Up to that point, I had found out about most of my favorite music through either my parents or, on occassion, my friends. But I first discovered the Beastie Boys from one of my other favorite things from childhood: that wonderful, glowing box known as television.

My recollection is that MTV broadcast the music video for "Sabotage"** roughly 300 billion times between when it first premiered in 1994 and when the Beastie Boys came out with their video for "Intergalactic" in 1998. I would estimate that I saw the video many thousands of times during that time period and I was thusly hooked. Accordingly, I remember going to the Last Record Store with my mom and buying the issue Grand Royal Magazine where Mike D interviewed Weird Al (Yoko Ono was also involved, if I remember correctly). Next I bought their albums and listened to them voraciously (except for License to Ill, which never really appealed to me for some reason, aside from "Time to Get Ill" and "Brass Monkey"). I even bought a couple of EPs of theirs from a friend of mind once I had already purchased all five Beastie LPs (and I unsuccessfully attempted to get my friend to return my five dollars after I went home and actually listened to Aglio e Olio). The Beasties Boys were undoubtedly a big part of my life for several years.

When I was in middle school, I figured out how to reprogram all the basic Windows sounds on my mom's computer. I changed it so that the sound effect for the primary click function was a one second clip from "Super Disco Breakin'". I think I also programmed it so something played the weird, secret sample hidden between two of the songs on Hello Nasty. It was pretty annoying and my mom did not find this amusing, eventually forcing me to change everything back to the default sounds.

When I was a freshman in high school, I started a terrible (and, surprisingly, still somewhat-extant) band called Drunk Jesus & Billy Brodwal. From the very beginning, our stated intention was to sound like a cross between Johnny Cash, The Germs, and the Beastie Boys. We never really managed to exhibit those influences, other than maybe The Germs, in our music. But we did post a photo on our website where we mimicked the Beastie Boys pose from the "Three MCs and One DJ" music video.

Eventually, I stopped listening to the Beastie Boys on a regular basis, but I never completely lost my affection for their music. I would occasionally be reminded of how much they had once meant to me and would indulge in nostalgic listening and video watching sessions. But I thought I had moved on, for the most part.

I've spent the whole day listening to my Beastie Boys albums, reading all the stories about Yauch that are being posted all over the internet (this is my personal favorite), and just feeling generally bummed out. I first found out about Yauch's death from a post on the Fake Criterions Tumblr that read "RIP, MCA. Thank you for making great music and funny things." For whatever reason, I originally read that as "Thank you for making great music and fun things." I think that misreading is actually a good explanation of why the Beastie Boys meant so much to me: so much of what they did was just a whole fucking lot of fun.

Rest in peace, Mr. Yauch. And thank you, and your fellow Beastie Boys, for making so many fun things.

Post Script - This isn't one of my favorite Beastie Boys songs, but it's a great example of how they were always able to make things fun:





*Random Beastie Boys Fun Fact: "Beastie" is actually an acronym for Boys Entering Anarchic States Towards Internal Excellence.

** Another Random Beastie Boys Fun Fact: Spike Jonze, the director of the "Sabotage" video, claimed that he first met the Beastie Boys because his sister and Yauch had attended the same-traffic school class. This was, unfortunately, a lie.