My friends in middle school spent a long time feeling sad about Kurt, going over and again over the tragic details.
Found dead in his home in Seattle. Age 27. Shotgun wound to the head.
Despite living relatively easy lives in Southwest Michigan, we were already skilled at what one might call “competitive grieving”—the impulse to try and out-mourn one another. This behavior was likely influenced by teachers’ and parents’ endless warnings about the “roller-coaster moods” that accompany puberty. We interpreted this as, “Step right up! Take a free ride on the Hormone ‘Coaster!” Or maybe sheer boredom. Definitely Lurlene McDaniel’s dying-girl books.
When a member of our group, let’s call her Melissa, announced she and her family were moving 95 miles east to Lansing, there was some unspoken agreement that we’d all be devastated for a month, minimum. In fact, there was so much random crying/attempts at crying about her impending departure—in class and between classes and all throughout lunch—that the school guidance counselor called us down to his office, where he gave us these informational packets about coping with grief. (Forever in debt to your priceless advice, Mr. B.)
Not sure any of us thought we needed grief packets, but we loved the attention.
More useful would’ve been a packet on coping with the loss of a pop-culture icon/larger-than-life arbiter of cool, because soon Kurt Cobain’s death was all anyone could talk about. I remember hanging out at Kristen’s house after school, CD jewel cases scattered across the floor of her bedroom—her enviable room with the sea foam green walls, a paint color she’d picked out herself—while she sprawled on her bed, like a swoony woman of Russian lit, in mourning dress (black Nirvana concert tee) as “All Apologies” played on repeat.
What else could I write? I don’t have the right.
Some of the crying made sense to me. Gone was our golden boy of grunge, the main reason we wore loose-fitting flannel shirts stolen from our dads’ closets and watched MTV—or, I should say, why my friends watched MTV. My family didn’t have cable, so I taped Nirvana songs off the radio instead, putting a lot of effort into memorizing the lyrics.
It was becoming obvious, though, that the band was nearer and dearer to my friends’ hearts and Discmans than to my own. It was getting tiring.
In Kristen’s sea foam green room, I picked up the CD booklet to Ill Communication and decided I’d memorize Beastie Boys lyrics instead.
I was a fan of the the New York–bred hip-hop trio from then on and, as is often true with heroes/crushes (celebrity or non), I wanted to be them a little. See, in this case: mimetic desire, the gentrification of hip hop and the timeless appeal of the “bad boy.”
When I got to high school, I looked around and noted all the kids who were copying the Beastie Boys’ style — or else copying other kids who were copying their style: knit caps, nylon jackets, baggy chinos and old-school Pumas and Adidas.
I attempted to sartorially follow suit, sourcing more items from Dad’s closet. I screamed/sang along to “Sabotage” at school dances and recited “Get It Together” at the Waterfall. The Waterfall was what the stoners called this off-the-beaten-path, litter-strewn spot near a dam in the Kalamazoo River, a few miles from school. Sometimes we’d go there during our 25-minute lunch break and smoke weed from Steve’s kazoo pipe—or try. I never quite mastered it.
The senior whom I obsessed over as a freshman, a snowboarder and skater with a habit of trying to pass off Jack Kerouac’s poetry as his own, looked particularly Check Your Head-era Beastie Boy–like. Did he know I could spit out all the words to “So What’cha Want” with a precision not usually found in youth group–going freshman? Probably not.
Despite all that, I was surprised when the death of Adam Yauch/MCA in 2012, a year and a day ago, affected me the way it did.
Age 47. Cancer of the salivary gland.
I didn’t sprawl on my bed in a mourning tee, go to a counselor’s office or cry. But I did fall into a weeks-long Internet K-hole, where I went over and again over the sad details. Lost his battle with cancer. (An expression I hate.) A death premature and tragic. Then the journalist in me kicked in—the part that loves filling in knowledge gaps with info., Q’s with A’s, to get a fuller picture. With strangers, getting this specific for no reason might be classified as stalking. With people in the public eye, it’s conveniently called “research.”
I learned more about Yauch’s many creative projects, the origins of his involvement with Tibetan activism and Buddhism, his wild times heli-boarding in Alaska—documented in Grand Royal—and how he recorded “A Year and a Day” alone in his Koreatown apartment in Los Angeles, wearing a jet pilot’s helmet equipped with a microphone.
“What happened to the three of us together and all that crap?” Ad-Rock remembers thinking at the time. “But then I heard the track… He rapped his ass off.”
I discovered, via watching multiple interviews, that MCA might’ve been the only person on Earth who chewed as much gum as I do. Even while performing. Never without gum.
My research wandered off in weird directions to find the YouTube-based cooking show of Mike D’s wife, Tamra Davis, and remembrances by Yauch’s old girlfriend, circa Licensed to Ill, on Facebook about their “conscious and loving decision not to get married,” having set out down their own spiritual paths.
Unrelated but interesting: Some credit Mike D with coining the term “mullet”!
When it comes to coping with the loss of a pop-culture icon, one of the first things we in the gen pop do is to publicly assert our proximity to the deceased. It’s often in the form of a tweet: “RIP, MCA. Thanks for letting me play basketball with you that one time before Lollapalooza.” (To use a hypothetical example.) There might be sympathy and gratitude in these public statements, but isn’t the real point bragging that you once played pickup b-ball with a B-Boy?
To deride this impulse would be to criticize all of social media, which is fundamentally about validation, affirmation and self-interest. I’m guilty—it’s no different from my middle school friends and I lamenting Kurt’s death or Melissa’s move—and I won’t. But last spring, I did struggle with the fact that I was so consumed by the loss of a famous person, having never experienced this emotion before and not even sure I should let myself experience it. For one thing, there were other, more proximate people and things to worry about. There always are. For another, while I wanted to watch Tammy D prepare a healthy tempeh reuben for her kids, I also had freelance assignments to finish. (Get it together is right.)
Furthermore, there were and are way bigger Beastie Boys fans in the world. I liked a lot of other music in high school, including (yep) this and this. And I didn’t hear Paul’s Boutique, start to finish, until after college. I can still do the rap breakdown in “The Sound of Science” and love jogging to this, but that’s really the extent of my 31-year-old fandom.
So, why so rapt? There’s the obvious answer that losing cherished celebs—especially someone like MCA who managed, even as he grew older and got sick, to stay deeply engaged in the world and interested in other people, and thus to never really age, not in spirit—reminds us of our own mortality. Shouldn’t that youthful energy stave off death?
Oh right, we remember. Nothing can. Not even dropping science like Galileo dropped the orange.
I think the real reason I was so moved by what I learned about Yauch, while reading articles and magazines and combing the far corners of the ‘net like a true creepster, is the realization that beyond being a great artist, he showed a steadfast commitment to transforming himself for the better. Once he stopped chugging beers and wrecking hotel rooms and womanizing (ca. early fame), he started moving in more thoughtful, mindful directions—quietly, when necessary (meditating, living a relatively private life), and loudly, when required (grabbing the mic, revising his worldview). He became someone who owned up to his mistakes.
Thinking back to school: a lot of those cocky skater and stoner kids that hung out by the Waterfall at lunch turned out pretty well. We’re still turning. One of the positives of social media is that I’ve been able to find out that a lot of them, including my senior crush, now have creative outlets and causes and kids. Some especially visionary ones have started small businesses in developing countries or are working for social justice orgs. And of course, some are still down by the river, holding down the fort.
What else could I write?
I think back, a year later, on MCA’s life, not death, and the fact that he lived fully and humbly.
Want to cop that style.