One of my
childhood idols passed away today. Adam Yauch, ‘MCA’ of the Beastie Boys, died
this morning after a three-year-long struggle with cancer. His death marks the
end of the Beastie Boys’ 26 year career that began with the release of their
first album, License to Ill, in 1986.
The
Beastie Boys have held a special place in my heart ever since I turned to
hip-hop music as a kid. Growing up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in
southern California, I was one of the only white kids who lived on my street. When
the African-American dominated hip-hop culture reached what I would call its
peak in popularity (around ’99), I was nearly ten years old – and the target of
bullying on my block. It was easy for the other kids to pick on the presumably “racist”
white kid.
At such a
young age, all of this was a lot to handle; I was a little boy, simply trying
to fit in, and I had to live with the fact that I was hated because I was
labeled as hateful. The constant prejudice from my peers made me feel like it
wasn’t okay for me to be white. Trying to cover up my ‘whiteness’, in the years
leading up to my teens I constructed an identity that would help me fit in: I turned
to hip-hop music as my teacher and became a stereotypical suburban wanna-be,
obsessed with gangster rap and clothes two sizes too big.
The act
didn’t always work out in my favor. Sometimes, when I was able to play it off
well enough, I was accepted, but, other times, when it was clear that I was
pretending, it only made the teasing worse. I suppose I had hoped that
pretending to be my bully would solve all of my problems; now, I can see it was
only a social defense mechanism, but then, at the time when I was talking like
Tupac, it was all that I knew – and the Beastie Boys seemed to have the act
down perfectly.
I’m not
ashamed to admit that the Beastie Boys were something like role models to me in
my childhood; I was an impressionable white kid trying to be ghetto-cool, and
here were three whiter-than-white jewish boys who were able to pull it off. I
followed their lead, and I eventually learned how to be confident in my hip-hop
mask. It doesn’t seem to have pointed me in the wrong direction.
The Beastie Boys made me feel comfortable in
my gangster-rap costumes, and I am thankful not only for the confidence that
they gave me when I was desperately searching for myself, but also for the
passions that they helped me realize I should pursue. I am pretty sure that the
quick trip that I took when I went through my hip-hop phase set a love for
language deep inside of me. To this day, though I no longer wear that mask and
indulge in the hip-hop culture nearly as much as I used to, I still admire the
Beastie Boys’ music, which taught me about the craft that it takes to make a
simple rhyme and tell a lyrical story.
On that note, I’ll end this blog with a Beastie classic from their first album, one of my all-time favorites, “Paul Revere”:
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