They were obnoxious. They just were. Even kids from their own generation, kids like, well, me…were kinda grossed out by their merry prankster “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party),” a whining bit of strip-mall hip-hop brattery that had none of the street real take of a Run-DMC or Kurtis Blow. It was just a whole lot of suburban entitlement without well, anything urban, but everything I hated about those kinda rich, white obnoxious kids.

The song struck a vein with a whole lotta suburban smart alecks who were a whole lot like them. Every kid I ever hated—and I wasn’t alone—suddenly had an anthem to rally around. Heck, a rallying cry as the whiggered-out, beer-guzzling ass-grabbing was the joint for a chaotic wave of detritus, puke and spent condoms found in their wake.

For too many slackers, it was everything they’d ever wanted to impale with their voices raised, fists in the air and straight people leaping out of their way. The album—Licensed to Ill—was the first rap record to debut at #1; suddenly, rap was out of the ’hood and across America.

Boy, can first mass impressions be deceptive. The Beastie Boys might’ve had a streak of party-hearty merry prankster—like most young 20-somethings jacked up on hormones, tall boys and their parents’ credit cards; but what they were really working was a strong sense of skewering hypocrisy.

Working a plethora of hard-rock riffs, they’d built a bridge from Grandmaster Flash to the kids banging their heads—and mocked the antiquated, poodle-haired, spandex-clad arena rockers in the process.

“No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn” flipped the dynamic hard. Suddenly, Rick Rubin, the NYU student who brought them to friend/Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, looked like a visionary, not a dorm mate taking care of his homey. He, too, saw the synthesis between spot-on rhymes, deep beats and the hard-rock punch that had previously owned the strip malls.

There was a truth here that was as rebellious and resonant as NWA would be. It just wasn’t about class systems, racism or a harsh world where gang war was a fact of life, flesh traded and castigated with a raw brutality. The Beastie Boys had struck a nerve.

And it’s not like the hipsters didn’t understand. Madonna had already taken them out on tour before their first album dropped. The prank calling “Cooky Puss” was low art in the cheapest form. Run-DMC and LL Cool J were part of the fold they’d come out of, part of the group of artists who’d become the texture of the post-pioneer hip-hop acts.

It was crazy. It was awesome, especially as the trio—Adam Yauch, aka “MCA,” Mike “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz—evolved.

The metal samples and loud guitars gave way to a deeper sense of texture, more complex rhythms, funk, jazz and techno seeped in. The samples that made the Dust Brothers-produced Paul’s Boutique so dense you were dizzy picking through it created almost another dimension for music to exist in.

Never jarring, always lava lap morphing into a sound that was, well, Beastie. Even in that, though, they were still the guys with the songs that pressed at the sensitive places, still the punks showing off how fucked the stuck in gridlock conventional thinking was, who would expand your mind with whole new ways of looking at the word.

What was once obnoxious was now provocative; what was grating was transfixing. You couldn’t turn away, you had to listen. To albums—albums, mind you, not tracks—like Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head and Ill Communication right through to last year’s Hot Sauce Committee Pt 2.

They stacked ’em up, one after another. Each one more intriguing than the next. Rarely a lapse in the quality, but usually growth and an increased artistic commitment.

The same could be said for their videos. Shifting aesthetics, DIY feels, trippy production values. They were moving targets with a sense of time and place that was their own, and in turn, provided nuance and a reality for an entire generation.

Sitting in a Cuban restaurant in working class Indianapolis with CNN playing at a mind-numbing level of loud, no one else speaking English, the update about Adam Yauch shattered my road-numbed non-thinking. Suddenly, I was present…I was engaged…I was staring at the screen, at a story no one around me seemed to care about.

It was about as Buddhist present as you could be. Suddenly, there was only this moment, and nothing else.
Yauch, who’d battled salivary cancer since 2009 and had been reticent to talk about the reality of his treatment’s success, had missed the trio’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner, where The Roots teamed with Kid Rock and Travie McCoy of Gym Class Heroes to help Diamond and Horovitz celebrate the ferocity of the upstart punks-turned-hip-hoppers assault on everything we thought pop music was. Yes, he’d been too sick to attend; but die?

Yauch was incandescent, a visionary. The Beasties had formed their own label, their own magazine Grand Royal—and helped break ground with other iconoclastic bands that stood out.

But it was more…

It was a shift in worldview, in disciplines, almost morality. Yauch founded the Milarepa Foundation, which staged a series of Tibetan Freedom Concerts across the globe—harnessing the power of music to raise awareness and money for the disenfranchised Buddhists exiled in their homeland.

He directed videos under the name Nathaniel Hornblower—exploring the medium’s possibilities, empowering young talent like Spike Jonze and eventually starting his own film company Oscilloscope Laboratories that have two Oscar nominations, been involved with over 50 films ranging from the Beasties concert film I Fuckin’ Shot That! to the down in the trench basketball documentary Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot, even helping distribute street artist Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Wild creativity. What can we do next? What can’t we do next?

They produced music at their pace. They headlined Bonnaroo. They engaged their generation, made them realize it was a big world—and they needed to not just be aware, but invested.

That first Tibetan Freedom Concert—in Golden Gate Park—drew over 100,000, the largest benefit since Live Aid. When the Twin Towers fell, they hit at the curb again: organizing New Yorkers Against Violence to help the people most likely to fall through the cracks for aid.

They never toned down. They were always flagrantly Beastie. But what was once mayhem was now a chronic artistic thrust…

And in that, as well, Yauch’s Buddhism saw him shifting his truth palpably. Suddenly the sluts they’d been chasing became human beings, and his words came to aggressively express that women deserved to be respected.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Not just for Aretha and Gloria Steinem anymore, but rather men of conscience who recognized that the skank before you was still somebody’s daughter, not to mention a fellow being in the realm of humanity.

If you respect yourself, you respect your fellow traveler.

At a time when “bitches & hos” culture was rampant, the Beasties began suggested another way. In a world where opportunity’s diminished, frustration and rage on the rise, here was a cultural force suggesting a kinder, saner option.

Yauch didn’t preach mind you. Didn’t rave or swagger. Just put it out there, flat and even. You could hear the wisdom in the words, it rose up from the tracks and made you pause, made you think.

Like I’m doing right now. Heck, like I did all weekend. It seems like I’ve been writing a lot of goodbyes over the last year or so…

But this one is different for too many reasons.

How does someone so young, so vital with so many resources flicker and die? He was just 47, and even if they’re 25 years into a career, they’d never shown any signs of having peaked.

He has a wife, a 14-year-old, parents, friends. He had so many interests to pursue, so much to live for.

Heck, he’s my peer, someone I grew up with, not on. It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s not supposed to be the ones who stand up for something more, embrace something good, motivate people to give back, inspire and support young talent trying to break down their own limitations in the name of art who are struck down.

It’s made me disoriented, given me emotional vertigo.

In Indianapolis in a working-class honky-tonk called the 8 Second Saloon, where they still let the patrons smoke with their drink, I felt like I was moving through Jell-O. I was taking it in, yet nothing truly registered.

In Nashville, at the hipster Mercy Lounge, I watched the coolest local talent work their way through Neil Young’s Harvest. Each taking a song, finding the sweet spot, bringing their own creativity to it.

Neil Young was an iconoclast icon, too. Someone who found success and jettisoned that for dissonance and feedback. Listening to the crunchy, burlap songs of bucolic lonesome, I just felt detached.

I won’t say it makes me feel futile. I’m a Catholic. They raise us on the dust-to-dust pretty hard. But if you’re around Jesuits, they give you a pretty strong dose of hope, too…

Maybe I was a sucker for it. The notion that someone who gave that good, who represented at the highest levels of grace, there was some sort of dispensation.

After all, the Beasties were a band that changed everything. Made rap a genre for more than just the ghetto. Made punk a force of irony and insight. Made throwing down the party gauntlet an art form of Zeppelin-esque proportions, and they did it with tongues in cheeks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The N.Y. Times already said all that. But what they also did was make it okay to be a fuck-up as long as you were considering what else there might be, as long as you’d consider respect and engagement.

At a time when it’s all about fame, it’s hard to remember the jaw-dropping moment of hearing Paul’s Boutique for the first time. Just like their popularity creating a force of social change and moving power to people, well, my age.

It’s three days later, and I still don’t know what to feel. Beyond lost, lost and found and here and well… Because what do you say? Who will change things like that when we’re obsessed with fame and acquisition? Who will make music mean more, break creative ground, suggest that the galvanizing factor of youth coming together under the umbrella of song can make a difference?

I don’t know. I can just be. Invite the sadness to tea, wait for it to pass.

Growing up, the lady who looked after me—in a home where the parents could be considered high impact—used to balm my disappointment over broken promise after broken promise with the wise words: “Hear what they do, not what they say…”

It was a mantra. And my erratic parents did many crazy wonderful things amongst the wreckage.

The Beasties were like that a bit. They spewed wreckage, but they emerged as a potent social force, innovators and encouragers to color outside the lines.

What they did was so much more than what they rapped. And the raps were potent. But they stood tall to creativity, to breaking ground, to realigning the expectations.

I’ll be listening for what we do in the wake of Adam Yauch’s light shining on us all. I’ll try believing we can be inspired by what we loseand we, too, can do rather than just speak the words of the grieving and the exalting those who’re gone.