I remember MCA. I never had a chance to actually meet him, but I miss him, every day.
I’ll always remember the uncommon goodness of Adam Yauch, de-facto leader of The Beastie Boys, and a man whose rap lyrics and music were something new and different at the time.
Traditional media likes to stereotype rap as a “black thang,” but from what I’ve seen, they have yet to comprehend one slender thread of their own institutional racism, as evidenced by their dismissal of a music genre, and as ever, falsely attributing the “shock” of it to people of color.
The Beastie Boys were hopelessly irresistible to the teenage geek girl I was, growing up in New Orleans, restricted to my room (99% of the time).
When MC Adam died of nasopharyngeal cancer at the age of 46, he had imprinted every teenager of the 90s, and even some of our parents, to see beauty and meaning in the day-to-day we don’t even notice.
Brave, brilliant, equipped with a mordant wit, a man who feared nothing, even his impending death, this was MCA.
