79 Till Forever - Adam Yauch Memorial
A legend’s influence on hip-hop is a very peculiar thing.
Hip-hop is one of the few genres of music (or anything really) that will consistently cite the same group of artists as the greatest. It’s a near guarantee that you’ll hear Tupac, Nas, and Jay-Z as the faces of the culture.
But at the same time, some of the music released today is so different in quality and value that one has to wonder how credible some of these name drops are. The radicalism and urban struggle of ’90s hip-hop is dead, and it gets hard to find some of these past greats’ specific influences. Biggie doesn’t feel integral to the argument, but rather an important source to stick in the works cited page.
Unfortunately, we don’t reassess just how important some of these greats are to today’s hip-hop culture until it’s too late. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way people are.
What eases the tragedy of Adam “MCA” Yauch’s passing this Friday is that this wasn’t the case. The community got a chance to honor MCA and his crew one more time at last month’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction. But the loss hurts even with that sense of closure.
There’s so much that has been said about the Beastie Boys’ impact on hip-hop, but there hasn’t been enough to make praising them a cliché. I doubt there will ever be enough laudation for that to happen.
No hip-hop fan could be tired of hearing the Beastie Boys’ lyricism. Sure it was cheesy sometimes, but that was the point. The early Beastie Boys were so absurd with some of their self-aggrandizing lyrics that you just had to have fun with it.
These Jewish kids from Brooklyn were all over the place. In 1989, MCA was dying harder than Bruce Willis (“Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”), while just a few years later he became cooler than a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce (“So What’cha Want”).
Nobody dies harder than Bruce Willis and cucumbers are irrelevant fruit (editor’s note: seriously, they’re fruit, check Google). But the Beastie Boys were far too cool for us to question their systematic similes and methodical metaphors.
The Beastie Boys were sort of a silent rebellion. In a time when rap represented an urban movement, the Boys decided to take a completely different route and elevate the art form. These Brooklynites blended punk and rap into something relatable to everyone with a pulse, and they essentially became an evolution within the revolution.
What I loved most about the Beastie Boys, however, was that they were never used as a symbol or scapegoat for anything. They weren’t considered white rappers in a black genre, Brooklyn representatives, or anything of the sort. They were just the Beastie Boys.
MCA, Ad Rock, or Mike D’s biography didn’t matter. It was the music that impacted people the most. Most music aficionados dream about the true quality of music speaking for itself.
A legend’s influence on hip-hop is a very peculiar thing.But at the same time, some of the music released today is so different in quality and value that one has to wonder how credible some of these name drops are. The radicalism and urban struggle of ’90s hip-hop is dead, and it gets hard to find some of these past greats’ specific influences. Biggie doesn’t feel integral to the argument, but rather an important source to stick in the works cited page.
Unfortunately, we don’t reassess just how important some of these greats are to today’s hip-hop culture until it’s too late. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way people are.
What eases the tragedy of Adam “MCA” Yauch’s passing this Friday is that this wasn’t the case. The community got a chance to honor MCA and his crew one more time at last month’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction. But the loss hurts even with that sense of closure.
There’s so much that has been said about the Beastie Boys’ impact on hip-hop, but there hasn’t been enough to make praising them a cliché. I doubt there will ever be enough laudation for that to happen.
No hip-hop fan could be tired of hearing the Beastie Boys’ lyricism. Sure it was cheesy sometimes, but that was the point. The early Beastie Boys were so absurd with some of their self-aggrandizing lyrics that you just had to have fun with it.
These Jewish kids from Brooklyn were all over the place. In 1989, MCA was dying harder than Bruce Willis (“Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”), while just a few years later he became cooler than a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce (“So What’cha Want”).
Nobody dies harder than Bruce Willis and cucumbers are irrelevant fruit (editor’s note: seriously, they’re fruit, check Google). But the Beastie Boys were far too cool for us to question their systematic similes and methodical metaphors.
The Beastie Boys were sort of a silent rebellion. In a time when rap represented an urban movement, the Boys decided to take a completely different route and elevate the art form. These Brooklynites blended punk and rap into something relatable to everyone with a pulse, and they essentially became an evolution within the revolution.
What I loved most about the Beastie Boys, however, was that they were never used as a symbol or scapegoat for anything. They weren’t considered white rappers in a black genre, Brooklyn representatives, or anything of the sort. They were just the Beastie Boys.
MCA, Ad Rock, or Mike D’s biography didn’t matter. It was the music that impacted people the most. Most music aficionados dream about the true quality of music speaking for itself.
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