Time to get Ill, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #179 | @MDWorld

May 8, 2012 Arthur Tebbel 2 Comments

Dear Art,

This has been a terrible week for me. My close friend and bandmate Adam Yauch, better known as MCA, died after a long battle with cancer. The outpouring of support from our fans has been really touching. As a fan of our music I’m sure this must be a hard time for you as well. What are you doing to get through this hard time? Any advice you want to offer to other fans?

-Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz

Ad-Rock,

I am a huge fan. I listened to Hello Nasty in its entirety pretty much every day of my freshman year of high school. Licensed to Ill was always in the wallet I kept with my Discman. That is a sentence that will mean absolutely nothing to my children. The loss of MCA, and the accompanying realization that there will never be another Beastie Boys album, has been pretty devastating. All that aside, I’ll tell you the thing that bothers me the most through all of this: You guys still get played on alternative radio instead of on the hip hop stations.

I get that it must be hard to program a radio station. They aren’t really stewards of musical genre as much as they are whores to advertiser dollars and therefore viewer attraction. The Beastie Boys started as a punk band and their breakout single sounded like a rock song. I get that there are people for whom The Beastie Boys are the only rap act they listen to. I’m also completely sure that race plays a big factor in all of this. All I know is that when I was looking for a Beastie Boys tribute from my XM Radio package this weekend I was directed to the alt rock station. The hip hop stations carried on like nothing had happened. That is completely fucked up.

I guess I don’t need to tell you this. You know what kind of music it is that you make. When you were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame you chose Chuck D to give the speech. You toured with a DJ and very rarely played instruments. You weren’t kidding anyone.

This week, through the magic of the Internet, I saw a clip of the Oprah Winfrey Show doing a segment about how terrible your music and live shows were and what a bad influence you were going to be on an entire generation of children. It was so stunning to see because of how not the case that turned out to be. You shed that thoughtless party image shortly after that and became one of the most thoughtful interesting acts in all of music. If someone had played for that audience To The 5 Boroughs, the absolutely beautiful record released after the September 11th attacks, they would scarcely have believed it to be the same group. If, as the entire world seems to be speculating, MCA’s death means the end of the group it’s really sad to see you go. You were probably the most influential musicians of my lifetime and it sucks that we won’t get to see you rot to death on stage like we have all those bands from the generation prior.