rip mca, damnit.

A sad pause today when a friend came up and told me MCA had died.


I remember the first time a friend mentioned MCA.  In my middle school gym class we had been broken into teams and assigned to perform aerobic dance moves to a song of our choice.  The cool girl lead her team in showing off their moves to Brass Monkey.  We were all so jealous that we hadn't had access to use that song, too.  It's hard to get your hands on the latest cassette tape when you don't have older siblings or an allowance.

I later borrowed the tape from a friend in class, James (also, RIP) and took it home to play over my parents stereo system.  I plugged in the tape upstairs then rushed downstairs to the remote kitchen speakers mounted high on the wall and stood on a chair so my ear would be just next to the emanating beats.  I was loving every song and starting to catch the words and learn which voice belonged to which emcee.  My mom, concerned with this new *rap* music, came and accused the Beastie Boys of having foul language and therefore I shouldn't listen to them (may be why she never got the chance to witness me listening to DJ Quik).  I assured her they only had one bad word in the whole tape.  And it wasn't even the eff word.

I know I later saw the Beastie Boys somewhere, can't remember what the first time was.  I was at the Free Tibet Concert in San Francisco.  Can't recall if it was the first or second year or both.  Bjork was there.

My favorite show watching them was during their Hello Nasty tour at the Oakland Coliseum.  At that show I learned how those screaming girls in the clips of Beatles fans felt.  I couldn't stop screaming during the show.  Oh, I wasn't screaming when we all (the whole 50,000 person audience) recited the lyrics to Paul Revere.  Is it Ad Rock who starts it off?  All he said was, "Nooowwww" and we all went at it.  THAT's got to feel amazing.  To have so many people jump in and know shit you wrote.  And knowing they've had to have known it for the past decade, plus.  Yum.  Good Feelings.  Props on that.




*title inspired by @biorhythmist