In losing Adam Yauch -- the musician and lyricist known to most as MCA -- music has lost an icon, yes. But beyond that, for those who love what's become known as "remix culture," a musical movement is now minus one of its founding fathers.
Yauch, who rose to fame in the 1980s with fellow Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz (Adrock) and Michael Diamond (Mike D), was just one of three -- and all contributed equally to the group's style. But they were also like Voltron, strongest when they were together and cooking up magic (see: "B-Boy Bouillabaisse"). As a trio, they were a force that taught a generation of musicians that they -- as Wired's cover put it in 2004 -- had to fight for their right to copy.
Yauch died Friday at age 47 after a prolonged bout with cancer. His passing comes at a time when the Beastie Boys, a group whose music on classic albums like Paul's Boutique and Ill Communication would come to define the art of sample-based music, had just received one of its highest honors. The group's massive influence on music was recognized just last month when the Beasties became the third rap group in history to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (the ceremony will air Saturday on HBO).
Yauch was too ill to attend the Hall of Fame ceremony, but expressed his thanks in a letter he sent with Horovitz and Diamond. Yauch joked about getting the accolade a couple years ago when the topic of the Beasties' eligibility for the Hall was brought up.
"Let's just say, can you get a placard?" Yauch told Wired and a few other journalists when asked if he'd be honored to be inducted in 2007. "I would be honored to receive a placard."
For fans of hip-hop and remix culture, however, Yauch is deserving of much more than a placard or even of a place in a hallowed Cleveland hall. His work as both a studio master and video director (he created the videos for the Beasties' "So What'cha Want" and "Intergalactic" under the alias of Nathanial Hörnblowér) made him a renaissance man for the remix age.
"No one really knows what I'm talkin' about/Yeah, that's right, my name's Yauch." That line appears on the Beastie Boys' second album, 1989's Paul's Boutique, but by then MCA had already cemented his role in the trio. He might have been less than a year older than Mike D, but he was somehow the mature one, the guy who held it all together. Part of that was his voice: a hoarse bark tuned well below the wriggling puppies of Mike D and Adrock's nasal yelps.
More than that, though, or his graying hair, it was his attitude: Even on the group's hyper-frattish debut Licensed to Ill, he was the amused uncle, the hung-over camp counselor who shrugged, threw on some sunglasses and waded into the fray. Hip-hop had always been a collection of archetypes -- lover men, braggarts, tough guys -- and Mike D and Adrock took all those images and turned them on their head.
MCA, though? MCA was just there to slow the entropy without ruining the fun.
Specifically, he was the thoughtful one when it came to the Beasties' ethos on sampling, telling Wired in 2004 how the group approached sampling and how he felt about other artists borrowing from Beastie Boys' cuts.
"It's totally context. And it depends on how much of our song they're using and how much of a part it plays in their song," he said. "We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other sounds on top of it. It's not even a recognizable sample at that point. Which is a lot different than taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that loop."
In the early days, he seemed like he was just happy to be part of the madness, but a sea change happened somewhere in the middle of 1992's Check Your Head. Yauch was anchoring the group as always -- this time as the bassist on the many live-instrument tracks -- but even rapping on "So What'cha Want," he sounded like he had a learned a secret: "But little do ya know about something that I talk about/I'm tired of drivin', it's due time that I walk about."
By the time the album ended, on the existential meditation "Namaste" (and think about that title choice in 1992, years before sun salutations had pervaded mainstream culture), it was pretty clear that someone in the Beasties was on some other shit. Gone were the spraying Budweiser tallboys and dusted provocations that had pervaded their first two albums, and taking their place was a more reasoned approach. It was almost, we thought listening to it at the time, grown-up.
And it was. It really was. While they thankfully never became The Beastie Men -- their sense of fun remained ever intact, doing live shows dressed as pharmacists or astronauts -- they did continue to grow. Yauch's nascent interest in Buddhism became a full-fledged spiritual journey, and his vocal advocacy for Tibetan rights predated your favorite rapper's favorite cause by many years. He became a surprisingly talented video and documentary director. And along the way, the Beasties became éminences grises not just of hip-hop, but of music itself, from Licensed to Ill to the remix-ready 2007 joint The Mix-Up to last year's Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. The kids who had beer-bonged their way into rap when it was at its most insular had become men with families, but they still managed to put their mic where their mouth was and rock a crowd.
It's too early to tell what Horovitz and Diamond will do following Yauch's passing, but what is clear is that a truly brilliant -- and distinctly gravelly -- voice in music has been lost.
Wired culture reporter Angela Watercutter contributed to this story.
