Adam Yauch (best known as MCA from the US hip hop group the Beastie Boys) wasn't larger than life. Beneath the dynamic stage presence, over-the-top rhymes and highly stylised videos was someone who was quite humble and even soft-spoken in interviews.
One almost gets the feeling that Yauch and his MCA alter-ego were two separate people. The hole that both leave in modern music, however, is immense.
After Yauch's death from cancer at the age of 47 on May 4, a staggering number of artists — Black and white, from across the musical spectrum — paid tribute to the profound way Yauch and the Beastie Boys helped expand music's boundaries.
In 1998, when Chuck D of Public Enemy was presenting an award to the Beastie Boys at the MTV Video Music Awards, he described the shock of the group's emergence in 1987: “In those days, hip-hop was truly from the streets, and everybody rapping was Black.
“All of a sudden, these three punk-rock white kids … transcended their style and crossed into hip-hop with the shock of Jackie Robinson in reverse …
“[They were] accused of being wannabes, but eventually gaining respect in the school of hard knocks. And at the same time expanding and giving to music the diversity that it claims today.
“I'm proof of that. They helped me get put on, and I was on their first tour ...”
The Beastie Boys started out as a hardcore punk group. Yauch, aged 14, decided he wanted to form a punk band after seeing Black Flag in 1978. The name was chosen by he and Mike Diamond (a.k.a. Mike D) because they liked the idea of sharing initials with Bad Brains.
The US punk scene was an unstable animal, however. As it evolved and fractured into countless sub-genres in the 1980s, hip-hop began to take center stage.
By the time the Beastie Boys had recruited Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz in 1983, thus rounding out the trio, they were already drifting in that direction.
This was New York City after all, and they weren't the only excitable white kids aching to embrace the style as their own.
"Cooky Puss", a prank call to a local Carvel ice cream store goofily set to sampled beats, is named by many as the Beastie Boys' first hip-hop track. It unexpectedly became a hit in the NYC underground club scene.
It showcased a zany sense of humor that always remained part of the group, but was particularly prevalent in the days of Licensed to Ill, their first full-length album in 1986 that made them superstars.
Paul's Boutique, released in 1989, saw the outlandishness somewhat tempered as their musical style matured.
(Not everyone got the joke; Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Centre hated these albums, which to anyone who actually respected music meant they were doing something right.)
In 1992, Check Your Head was the most organic fusion yet of all things Beastie. The beats and scratches ran alongside some of the best of New York City hip-hop's then-ongoing Golden Age, but they were complemented by a razor-edged live instrumentation.
The band's sneering bravado was infused with just enough wink-wink-nudge-nudge — sure, you were outside the realm of respectability, but that's where the most fun was anyway.
Music fans of all types had tired of the Vanilla Ices of the world, and bland opportunistic crossovers were looked on with suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Check Your Head didn't fall into this category, though. It had authenticity to spare.
This wasn't "white boys playing Black music" — nor was it an anticipation of the testosterone-laden rap-rock that emerged later in the decade.
Rather, the Beasties were a key link in a broader musical moment that was all too brief. It wasn't just about white artists embracing hip-hop, it was Fishbone and Suicidal Tendencies, Tracy Chapman and Me'shell Ndegeocello — artists of color innovating in genres of music that had for too long been erroneously considered the purview of white musicians.
For many, it was a sign that maybe, despite all the attempts by the industry to keep rock and rap separate and the scenes divided, they had a lot more in common.
That the Beastie Boys remained a fixture in the mainstream even while many others from the era receded to the underground is a testament to how easily they've been able to run the gamut. There aren't many acts whose comfort zone is so unpredictable.
Their hardcore roots were never fully relinquished (there was even an EP of punk songs in 1995). Their love of jazz and funk was always obvious, always combined in new and innovative ways with their scratches and beats.
Hip-hop continued to evolve, morph and come into its own in the 1990s. The Beastie Boys, however, could never be accused of merely following the trend.
The respect they got from artists of all styles was well deserved — and considering the early accusations of cultural piracy, it was all the more impressive.
Likewise, Yauch expanded his own creative horizons in the 1990s. Under his eccentric alter-ego of Nathanial Hornblower, he directed several of the group's videos, and began experimenting with film-making in earnest.
Oscilloscope Laboratories, the indie film company he founded in 2008 with THINKFilm executive David Fenkel, has released almost 50 titles to date.
Yauch also became a Buddhist, which obviously had much to do with his increasing involvement in the campaign for a free Tibet. The Tibetan Freedom Concerts he spearheaded with his Milarepa Fund were instrumental in raising awareness of China's unjust treatment of the Tibetans.
How many social justice music festivals could attract everyone from Rage Against the Machine to Sean Lennon to De La Soul to Bjork?
Yauch's political enlightenment, so to speak, went much further than the Tibetan cause. Starting somewhere around Check Your Head, the sexual braggadocio that had characterised the Beastie Boys' early work started fading away.
The group had always claimed it was a joke, but now he was declaring, on Ill Communication's "Sure Shot": “I wanna say a little something that's long overdue/The disrespect to women has got to be through.”
As the decade progressed, it seemed that Yauch was increasingly aware of the unique platform he and the group had been afforded. Just as he had provided a crucial link in the Beastie Boys' creative process, so now was he providing a political rudder for the group.
When the Beasties accepted the Video Vanguard award from Chuck D in 1998, it was three weeks after President Bill Clinton had ordered missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan — supposedly in retaliation for the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Among the buildings demolished by the US strikes was the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which almost certainly caused the deaths of thousands of Sudanese from treatable illnesses.
Yauch took the entirety of his acceptance speech to speak out against the bombings: “I think it was a real mistake that the U.S. chose to fire missiles into the Middle East … I think that another thing that America really needs to think about is our racism— racism that comes from the United States toward Muslim people and toward Arabic people.
“And that's something that has to stop, and the United States has to start respecting people from the Middle East ...”
Yauch's comments foreshadowed the New Yorkers Against Violence concert the Beasties organised in October 2001, straight after 9/11, that noted for its opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The group released "In a World Gone Mad" as a free download to protest the invasion of Iraq.
The song, quite frankly, was bad. Really bad. But the lyrics also revealed an awareness of Islamophobia that many other anti-war liberals were happy to let slide.
The 1999 was a formative one for the "millennial" generation. The Battle in Seattle, Napster's debut, the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York and other events were causing many of us to question whether the present order was the best we could do.
The Beastie Boys ushered in the year being protested by cops.
Police groups were up in arms about a huge concert at New Jersey's Meadowlands, co-headlined by Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys. The show was a benefit for Mumia Abu-Jamal, an anti-racist activist on Death Row after being framed for shooting a police officer.
In the end, 16,000 people attended the concert.
The first (and unfortunately only) time I saw any of the Beastie Boys in person was in 2000 at DC's MCI Center. Ironically, it wasn't a concert; it was a super-rally for Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate.
Yauch was one of Nader's most up-front supporters, and unlike many other Nader 2000 stalwarts, he never apologised for it.
I'm not alone in saying that the Beastie Boys played a formidable role in shaping my politics. It wasn't just the fact that someone famous was lending their face to this or that cause. It was deeper than that. It was what their music represented.
That three white Jewish kids from Brooklyn could be taken into the world of hip-hop, even be allowed to innovate it by their peers, seemed to point a way toward something ineffable, something better.
The Beastie Boys weren't cultural colonists — they were artists adding to the conversation, and taking the conversation seriously to begin with. Such a musical stance took big-time guts.
Yauch's gutsiness came across in another form when I got this Tweet from Occupy Wall Street after the news of his death: "Adam Yauch marched with us in November over the Brooklyn Bridge. He was a visionary artist who never lost sight of his community."
Here was Yauch, battling cancer's final stages, marching arm-in-arm with Occupiers and union members as police swung their batons. That's some rare bravery.
But then, artistic vision requires bravery. Yauch's music and art revealed him to be always curious, always searching, always seeking to chart new territory.
In short, he was someone who understood that art simply doesn't respond to boundaries. He also understood that, to a real artist, this meant breaking more than a few rules along the way.
[Abridged from Socialist Worker. Alexander Billet maintains Rebel Frequencies]
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