NYTimes: Adam Yauch – The Lives They Lived

There’s three of us but we’re not the Beatles,” Joseph (Run) Simmons declared — defiantly, if confusingly — on Run-DMC’s 1985 single “King of Rock.” There were also three Beastie Boys, and they weren’t the Beatles, either. But no rap group charted a more Beatles­esque career arc. They started out as lovable goofballs who still seemed to present a threat to parental authority; they went on to inspire a generation just by growing up in public. And of the three Beasties, it was Adam Yauch — also known as MCA — who grew up the most.

Story by ALEX PAPPADEMAS // Photos by Glen E. Friedman & Arabella Field

Yauch and the other Beasties — Adam (Ad-Rock) Horovitz and Michael (Mike D) Diamond — came from circumstances that had previously not produced any rappers of note. They were white Jewish New Yorkers who played together as a teenage hardcore band before they made hip-hop records; when they started rapping, they bent the music to their own concerns without robbing it of its outlaw appeal. They rhymed about beer, girls and mischief in screwy, squirrelly voices over music — by the producer, Def Jam co-founder and would-be Beastie-Svengali Rick Rubin — that pilfered ’70s dirtbag metal, old-school funk and the “Mr. Ed” theme song. They were somehow both credible and ludicrous, a joke about hip-hop that never felt like a joke at hip-hop’s expense. Their debut album, “Licensed to Ill,” from 1986, was the first rap record to top the Billboard 200.

There is, as David St. Hubbins once observed, a fine line between stupid and clever; most of “Licensed to Ill” walks that line brilliantly. The one big exception, the Twisted Sister-ish frat-rap shoutalong “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party),” became the kind of huge hit that can handcuff a band. “Fight for Your Right” created expectations; the Beasties met those expectations by touring with cage dancers and a giant inflatable penis and hosing one another down with Budweiser onstage. But they weren’t those guys, not really. Yauch was a punk back at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn; his early influences included the righteous Rasta-punk band Bad Brains and the pointedly abstemious hardcore outfit Minor Threat. He served the outrage as gleefully as anybody on those early Beasties songs — rhyming “a lot of beer, a lot of girls and a lot of cursin’ ” with “.22 automatic on my person,” wrapping up the story of a ménage-a-trois with sisters by saying “their father had envy, so I shot him in the head” — but it was a regression. “I went and got drunk and made some stupid music,” he’d say to the Buddhist journal Shambhala Sun, years later, after he became the kind of artist who gives interviews to publications like the Buddhist journal Shambhala Sun.

Even in “Licensed to Ill”-era interviews, you can see the Beasties already growing weary of playing the roles they’d assigned themselves. Supposedly Yauch wanted to leave; the band could have dissolved at that moment. Instead they severed ties with Rubin and made a record seemingly custom-designed to bewilder the meathead fan base that took their debut’s ironic misogyny and violence at face value. “Paul’s Boutique” was a kaleidoscopically referential art-rap memory palace, constructed out of a thousand samples, at more or less the last moment before copyright law made that kind of music-making fiscally impossible. The album didn’t sell, and the president of Capitol Records, who signed the band, lost his job, but critics recognized it as an evolutionary leap, comparing it to “Sgt. Pepper” and “Blonde on Blonde.”

“Paul’s Boutique” was mature without clobbering anyone over the head with its maturity. The song about throwing eggs at people reflected the band’s ongoing interest in throwing eggs at people. But you could hear them becoming more reflective, if you were listening for it. The deepest moment was a song called “A Year and a Day” — Yauch alone in the studio, rapping about mixing Bass Ale with Guinness Stout, but also addressing spirituality and impermanence. He always seemed like the soulful one in the band. Maybe it was his voice, a hoarse old-young-man bark that anchored the zanier deliveries of Diamond (whiny) and Horovitz (nasal). “A Year and a Day” was him embracing that role in a more profound way.

Did Yauch’s evolution as a person drive the Beasties’ evolution as a band? Did they grow in order to keep up with him? It’s hard to know. But he continued to be a motivating force in the years that followed. It’s Yauch who raps, “I wanna say a little something that’s long overdue/The disrespect to women has got to be through” on “Sure Shot,” from “Ill Communication” (1994). Should it have been obvious from the beginning that disrespecting women wasn’t O.K.? Sure. But now they were calling themselves on their own failings of judgment. In the early ’90s, they made a video for a hazy, ominous funk jam called “Something’s Got to Give.” It’s a collage of stock footage from a world in turmoil, sort of a Beastie version of “Koyaanisqatsi.” There’s only one actual Beastie in the video — Yauch, who wrote the song’s lyrics. We see him in grainy camcorder footage, on a patio in a red T-shirt and sneakers, his hair cut short like a monk’s. Calmly, he lifts a sledgehammer and brings it down on what appears to be a 9-millimeter pistol, smashing it to pieces. Then he smiles. Why he owned a gun in the first place doesn’t matter; what matters is the look on his face when he breaks it, when he has ceased to be the person who owned it. Of all the things the Beastie Boys rendered cool by association — ’70s cop-show mustaches, outlandish golf attire, throwing eggs at people — the idea that you could change, that in order to be cool you had to change, was the most important. The fact that they’d been unrepentant knuckleheads made their transformation into repentant knuckleheads seem heroic.

In 1991, while trekking in Nepal, Yauch encountered a group of Tibetan refugees en route to Dharamsala to join the Dalai Lama. “What struck me at the time was that, although they had just crossed these high snow-covered passes with barely any possessions, they carried themselves in a way that resonated love and kindness,” he wrote a few years later in the Beasties’ publication Grand Royal. Yauch became a Buddhist. Later, on two tracks from “Ill Communication” — “Shambala” and “Bodhisattva Vow” — the band sampled the chanting of Tibetan monks. Yauch’s efforts to properly disburse the royalties from these songs led to the founding of the Milarepa Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to the Tibetan cause, and to four Tibetan Freedom Concerts. Tibet remains under Chinese control; mosh pits full of fans chanting “Free Tibet” couldn’t change that fact. But effects aren’t the point of activism; the point is committing to something larger than yourself.

I’m making him sound like a man whose spiritual quest consumed him. It’s not the whole truth. He also found time to direct Beastie Boys videos under the pseudonym Nathanial Hornblower, a supposedly Swiss auteur who dressed in lederhosen and gave interviews in a preposterous accent. And he kept making Beasties records, on which he came off wise but never serious, too sweet to be sour, progressively raspier but still cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce. Even after he was given a diagnosis of parotid-gland cancer three years ago, the idea of a world without Ad-Rock and Mike D passing the mic to Yauch seemed inconceivable. It shouldn’t have been. Rock history — human history, really — is full of evidence that we’re not here long, that we should get our houses in order and do something of value with our time. The lesson of Yauch’s life was that it is possible to make that happen.

Alex Pappademas is a contributing writer for Grantland. He last wrote for the magazine about Jonny Greenwood.