When Beastie Boys co-founder Adam “MCA” Yauch died of cancer on this day in 2012, the tributes came fast and furious from all corners of the music world. Madonna, Nas, Thom Yorke, Q-Tip, Questlove, Eminem, Chuck D, LL Cool J... it would probably be easier to name the major music figures who didn't post heartfelt public messages than the ones who did. Also among those paying tribute was the Dalai Lama, who expressed his condolences and said: “Adam had helped us raise awareness on the plight of the Tibetan people by organizing various freedom Tibet concerts, and he will be remembered by his holiness and the Tibetan people.”
Twenty five years prior, the gravel-voiced MCA could often be spotted onstage swilling Budweiser and rapping frat-boy anthems in front of a giant hydraulic penis. By the time of his death at age 47, he was a figure important enough to be eulogized by Tibetan Buddhism’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning global holy leader. To understand how this happened is to understand the truly extraordinary personal and spiritual evolution of Adam Yauch.
Yauch (left) with fellow Beasties Michael 'Mike D' Diamond and Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horovitz at SXSW in 2008.
A key element of the Beastie Boys' magic was the fact that the group contained three very different men, with three distinct personalities, yet they all seemed to share an almost telepathic connection. There was no official “leader” of the Beastie Boys, other than the weird collective spirit that appeared to overtake them whenever they gathered in the vicinity of turntables and microphones.
And yet, listen to either of the surviving Beasties — Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Michael “Mike D” Diamond — talk about the group's dynamics, and they’ll mention again and again that Yauch was the heart of the band. It was Yauch’s idea to start the group in the first place. Yauch was the oldest, the most authoritative, the most adventurous, and — even in the earliest days — the Beastie most likely to lock himself in a room with an instrument, a drum machine or a sampler in search of exciting new sounds.
As Horovitz recalled of the trio's nascent days in the group memoir Beastie Boys Book: “Yauch was on to tape loops before ‘you should loop that’ was a ubiquitous phrase. He told me that he’d heard about Hendrix and Sly Stone doing tape loops and he wanted to try it. Where did he hear about it? There was no Google or YouTube.”
The Beastie Boys' 'Licensed to Ill' was the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard 200.
The Beastie Boys catapulted into global superstardom with the release of Licensed to Ill, which became the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard 200, and would go on to sell four million copies in just its first year of release. The group's subsequent tour was a bacchanal of legendary proportions, with the Beasties making a point to live up to the image they'd crafted in videos like "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)." By the end of the jaunt, however, Yauch had grown thoroughly disenchanted with the group’s lunkheaded early image, at one point even telling friends that he planned to quit. Instead of dissolving, however, the trio decamped from their native New York to Los Angeles to work on their second album, and made a break with producer/mentor Rick Rubin to collaborate with innovative beatmakers the Dust Brothers. The result was Paul’s Boutique, a genuine hip-hop landmark that has since earned comparisons to everything from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.
As Dust Brother Mike Simpson recalled of the album in 2015: “I think that they really wanted to be born again... Of the three of them, I was the closest with Yauch, While I enjoyed hanging out with all those guys, Yauch was the one who spent the most time with us in the studio.”
Yauch quickly grew disenchanted with the group's early image and hard-partying lifestyle.
Sonically, Paul’s Boutique represented a seismic leap over Licensed. Lyrically, however, it generally saw the Beasties up to a lot of their same old mischief, with plenty of sophomoric humor and boorish jokes at the expense of women. (And that mischief wasn’t just confined to wax: the track “Egg Man” was inspired by Yauch’s particular passion for throwing eggs at unsuspecting bystanders on the streets of L.A. during recording.) But by the time of 1994’s triple-platinum-selling Ill Communication, the band’s fratty sensibilities and casual misogyny were gone. Yauch was the one who made the shift the most explicit, rapping on one of the album’s biggest singles, “Sure Shot”: “Wanna say a little something that’s long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to be through / To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends / I want to offer my love and respect to the end.”
To be clear, there was no real external pressure on Yauch to say this. Sure, plenty of feminists found the Beasties’ early lyrics obnoxious, but sexism was wildly prevalent in rap, rock and pop, and decades before #MeToo, there was no commercial imperative to profess this sort of enlightened allyship. (If anything, there was a huge commercial imperative not to.) No, Yauch rapped this lyric apologizing for his early misogyny simply because he believed it was the right thing to do.
What accounted for the change? Probably quite a number of things, but chief among them was the fact that Yauch spent much of the early 1990s undergoing a profound spiritual awakening. The Ill Communication album also contained the track “Bodhisattva Vow,” an MCA solo showcase in which the man who once rapped lines threatening to “steal your honey like I stole your bike” was now spitting lyrics like: “For the rest of my lifetime and even beyond / I vow to do my best, to do no harm / And in times of doubt, I can think on the Dharma / And the Enlightened Ones who've graduated Samsara.”
By the middle of the decade he had fully converted to Buddhism, become a vegetarian, and founded a nonprofit called the Milarepa Fund to benefit the Tibetan independence movement. In 1996, Yauch and a young activist named Erin Potts organized the first ever Tibetan Freedom Concert, drawing more than 100,000 people to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for what was then the largest benefit concert since Live Aid. The concert became an annual event, and by the end of the decade Yauch and Potts had raised nearly $3 million dollars for the cause.
Increasingly, Yauch began to take on an unexpected role of generational moral authority. Accepting a lifetime achievement award at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1998, Yauch took the opportunity to speak about the dangers of anti-Muslim prejudice and American imperialism. After the disastrous events of Woodstock ’99, Yauch spoke fiercely about violence against women, and he was a passionate opponent of the Iraq War in the early 2000s.
Never miss a story — sign up for the Q newsletter for the latest music news on all your favorite artists, all in one place.
In his later years, Yauch became a genuine force in independent film.
What was perhaps most remarkable about Yauch’s evolution (as well as that of Diamond and Horovitz, who followed his lead into socially responsible adulthood) was the way he managed to speak his mind without becoming a hectoring scold. He used his platform to advocate for important causes, he never compromised his principles, he spoke truth to power... and yet the Beasties never lost their sense of fun and absurdity, either. (Diamond later remembered Yauch’s ability to reconcile his Buddhist beliefs with his offbeat sense of humor and love for prank comedy, saying: “When we were running around smashing up cars, wearing disguises in the ‘Sabotage’ video, Yauch was like, ‘Monks play tricks on each other all the time.’”)
By the time Yauch was diagnosed with cancer in 2009, he had become a legitimate force in an entirely new arena, founding the company Oscilloscope Laboratories to produce and distribute adventurous indie films and documentaries like Meek’s Cutoff, Exit Through the Gift Shop and We Need to Talk About Kevin. (Yauch’s partner at Oscilloscope, David Fenkel, would later co-found the current indie film juggernaut A24.) And yet he still made the time to record one last Beastie Boys record even in the depths of his illness, with 2011's Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 drawing raves for its irrepressible playfulness and optimism. (A review in the Los Angeles Times enthused: "This is vintage Beasties, all exuberant pass-the-mike battle rhymes and gritty break-beats so funky, it’s near impossible not to head-bob through the entire record.")
Mere weeks before Yauch's death, the Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Yauch was too ill to attend in person, but he sent along a message for his bandmates to read aloud, in what would be perhaps his final public statement:
“I’d like to dedicate this award to my brothers Adam and Mike who have walked the globe with me,” he wrote. "To anyone who has been touched by our band, who our music has meant something to, this induction is as much ours as it yours."
