Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch (1964-2012)
Adam Yauch, founding member of the The Beastie Boys, passed away today after a three-year bout with cancer. He was 47.
Adam Yauch’s artistic, personal and musical development arc was extraordinary. The Beastie Boys started out as a D.I.Y/hardcore band, ditched it for the hip hop/B-Boy culture, went back to it, then incorporated both, yet remaining true to both.
License To Ill, challenged the hip hop – and musical – landscape forever. It was the first rap album to hit Number 1 on the Billboard Album Charts, where it remained for 5 weeks. The single, Fight For Your Right To Party, cracked the Top 10 and remains an anthem. With sales over 5 million copies, it was the best-selling rap album of the 80s. The License To Ill tour – plagued by lawsuits, arrests, riots and charges of sexism (the stage show featured women dancing in cages and an inflatable penis) – is the stuff of legend.
But as hip hop ventured deeper into the celebration of self, the glorification of violence and mass consumerism, Adam Yauch brought humanitarianism and compassion to the genre. He embraced Buddism and denounced all forms of racism and sexism. Yauch founded the Milrepa Fund, which in turn, produced The Tibetan Freedom Concerts, which raised money and awareness for the repressed people of Tibet. After 9/11, Yauch spearheaded the New Yorkers Against Violence Concert, which benefited The New York Women’s Foundation Disaster Relief Fund and The New York Association for New Americans September 11th Fund for New Americans. Since 1995, one dollar from each ticket sold at a Beastie Boys concert goes to local charities.
Yauch repeatedly championed and acknowledged hip hop pioneers and contemporaries. When James Brown went to prison in 1988, he openly advocated for an early release (there’s even a FREE JAMES BROWN reference in the video ‘Hey Ladies’). Yauch insisted that Public Enemy – then an unknown entity nationally – open for The Beastie Boys on the License To Ill tour. Yauch was instrumental in bringing Bad Brains back from the creative dead on two separate occasions when he produced their comeback albums God Of Love and Build A Nation. As co-founder of Grand Royal Records, Yauch gave exposure to artists such as Atari Teenage Riot, At The Drive-In (which later morphed into The Mars Volta), Sean Lennon, Luscious Jackson and future Beastie Boy DJ Money Mark.
Yauch’s talents extended beyond music. As a director (sometimes under the name ‘Nathaniel Hornblower’), Yauch directed several Beastie Boys videos including Intergalactic, So Whatcha Want, Ch-Check It Out and Fight For Your Right Revisited. He would later form Oscilloscope Laboratories, which released his directorial film debut, Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot. Oscilloscope would also go to distribution the films Wendy and Lucy, The Messenger, Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop, Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze’s Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait Of Maurice Sendak, and much more.
B-boy and D.I.Y until the end, Yauch is survived by his wife Dechen, his daughter Tenzin Losel, and his parents Frances and Noel Yauch.
Rest peacefully MCA.
Visit stereogum.com to see 20 great Adam Yauch moments.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdJ5e70Q8mw&feature=player_embedded].
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzRKkXk56iE].
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr1Qe2m8oOA&ob=av2e].
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhqyZeUlE8U&ob=av2e].
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Elvis Costello and The Beastie Boys – Radio Radio by anchelito
