It was shocking to read about the death of Adam Yauch. My mind had not grasped that it was MCA who had cancer, and simply believed that if a Beastie Boy had cancer he was in remission. I had finished meeting with a client and was opening my homepage when I saw the headline, three headlines down from the top.
"Oh my God, Adam Yauch died!" I exclaimed from my office, loud enough that my assistant heard me.
"Yes, it's sad." She murmured, engrossed in an assignment and unaware of my experience. The keyboards kept on clicking, but I was still. Memories came, and my eyes began to glisten. My cousin, Amanda Vine, told me there was this rap group, and they were white. Three boys from New York, and they made this song Brass Monkey. A truck drove by, blaring Brass Monkey from its speakers, and we laughed. My generation, Generation X, was a gloomy, sulky lot, overshadowed by the failures of the Boomers and raised on punk rock and Reagan/Bush, and here were three men who knew the world was tiresome, but instead of moping and shrinking their souls to fit the new size of the small world they ripped a whole in the space time culture continuum, proclaiming life to be fun and themselves wild, funky professor cowboy gangsters of joy. Big dumb boys loved the Beasties, they thought the music was made for them, but they were wrong. The whole point of this music was The Ladies. Having a good time means women. Life was now a party and we women were still the object, but what else could we do? Might as well join in the fun. It was just too danceable not to care.
I could hear the keyboards of my office returning, but then another memory arrived. I was riding in Rob's mini truck, the drummer from Three Blind Mice, and he said, "Paul's Boutique is one of my favorite albums. You've got to hear it." We drove around, sub woofers pumping, and I fell deeply, madly in love. We spent an entire day switching back and forth between Paid in Full by Erik B and Rakim and Paul's Boutique. They were so goddamn smart, infecting every molecule of the beat with humor, funk, and cocksure'edness. The album contained hundreds of pieces of musical history and re-purposed it, giving it new life, creating a new language that ignored the wreckage of the failed purpose of the Boomers. It was a great time, a journey to the edge of the universe on a spaceship of Brooklyn Picassos. As I proclaimed on Twitter days before MCA's death, even now I can recite every word of this album as it is played.
Then something magical happened. Something very, very !#@$*&% important. This is critical, and it means everything to all of us: They evolved. As humans. They had reached a height previously musically unsurpassed, and so they just went into a new direction, again re-making the space in front of them in their image. They played instruments. But it was more than that--they developed social consciousness. They explored spirituality, politics, and decided to better themselves and the world around them. Gone were the beers, drugs, and sex, all to be replaced with their own instruments and pondering about the nature of life and the universe. It was a miracle, and it was like watching a fish develop legs and crawl on to the sea shore. It's the reason we are all here on earth.
So when MCA died of cancer, I was sad, but only for a moment. MCA in particular was a Bodhisattva, and for me he had one of the lines that forever changed my perception of hip hop, "I want to say a little something that's long overdue, the disrespect to women has got to be through, to all my mothers and my sisters and my wives and friends, I want to offer my love and respect to the end." It is a feminist statement made by a man in a male dominated art form, and it means we can all do better in our lives. Bodhisattva MCA had transformed. His voice sang out yesterday, Generation X heard his lines and repeated them in our space, cyberspace, and it became a chorus of his spirit that I believe was his way of joining us all in his moment of transformation. Saying hello and goodbye, leaving us happier than we were before, and sprinkling a path of lotus flowers for us to follow on our own slow journey to enlightenment. As my friend Jesa said, "Namu MCA Bodhisattva." Thank you.
