Happy memorial day weekend. The tradition is to lick someone. That’s what I was told & the possibility thy someone lied is too overwhelming.
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I wrote this about MCA. It’s pretttttttty lame.
After smoking a joint and listening to B Boy Bouillbaisse around the Los Angeles dreamscape, I realized I had no identity in high school. I mean, i knew that then, i shuttled between theater dork, wannabe lacrosse/basketball player, wannabe gangsta, pretty much wannabe anything. I connected them all the same i do now as I shuttle between parts I play— laughter. I went to a mostly black/Latino school. You had to choose your music wisely. I could only get into a few bands that were popular with the masses, the masses that could kick asses. The beastie boys were at the forefront of the facade that included knowing enough about Tribe Called Quest to have an educated conversation about them with a gansgsta hip hop head kid so that he didn’t expose me for the fraud I knew I was. See, I don’t really like music, don’t understand it’s magnetism for so many people. But I did always like the beastie boys. Even when License to Ill was too young and crass, i appreciated that it would be the genesis for Ill Communication, which was too adult at times for me to understand, but I appreciated that they were growing. Always growing and changing as artists, still wearing silly chains and caps, philosophers dressed as clowns, all in the hip hop exaggerated ridiculousness and never taking themselves too seriously. I bought Hello Nasty and Hot Sauce Committee without previewing them in a world where music is to be sampled before sold. I knew they would be good. They were always good. That was what I connected too. I didn’t understand their cultural importance or why my sister Callan thought they were her rebellious youth’s soundtrack. But I understood they were funny, and they saw themselves as funny. They could see what was funny about them, and they still worked like mother fuckers to put out some serious music. A lot of it. And it’s all good. I may not like all of it, I may not be as zealous about free Tibet as Adam Yauch, or even hold my own baloney to such a high standard of art, but I thought he was one third of my favorite band, the only music from my own youth that I totally got into. That I connected to, even if that connection was a pussy ass version of me pretending to “get” anything about music. I do love them, and I was sad when MCA died. I am sad at the realization that everything great ends, but if they leave behind such a cool soundtrack to drive around this hell hole life we dwell in, that’s awful nice of them.
#RIPMCA
Or I will be. Soon. Oh, how hard I’ve worked to get to Cuyahoga Falls OH. I hope the people there think I’m amusing….
