Explaining MCA’s Death to My Mom

When the artists we love die, what do we actually lose?

It was an unlucky coincidence that my mother’s birthday happened to fall on the same day that Adam “MCA” Yauch died.

The moment I got on the phone with her, she noticed that something was off. I seemed vaguely sad, and she wanted to know why. Which put me in the very weird position of having to try to explain to my mom why I was so upset about a dead rapper.

“I didn’t even know you listened to rap,” she said.

“Well no, not all the time,” I told her. “But the Beastie Boys were different.”

“Because they’re white?”

“No, no, no!” I barked a little too defensively. I couldn’t think of the right words to explain why that wasn’t true, because a part of me was terrified that it probably was. “They’re from Brooklyn,” I reminded her, like that somehow canceled out their whiteness. “And they’re Jewish.”

I don’t know where I was going with that.

“Well that’s fine,” she said. “I’ve just never heard you mention these Beastie Boys before. I didn’t realize they meant so much to you.”

Neither did I, honestly. But for some reason, it felt important that she understand what a big deal it was that Yauch was gone.

I rehashed every cliché I’d read in countless magazines and online obituaries and tributes. The Beasties represented a New York City that didn’t exist anymore. A New York that, coincidentally, I never experienced firsthand. The closest I got to the ’80s New York rap and hardcore scene was walking around Lincoln Mall in the south suburbs of Chicago listening to “Shake Your Rump” on a Walkman.

I’m not sure the two things have anything in common. Unless the ’80s-era New York that everybody over-romanticizes revolved around a Chess King and the mostly abandoned parking lot near JC Penny where everybody went to get handjobs.

I don’t feel stupid about this. My nostalgia for things that had nothing to do with me is pretty common. I’m not the only one who owns a CBGB t-shirt despite never having set foot in CBGB.

“They don’t make records like that anymore,” I told my mom. Which isn’t even an original observation. I stole it from a Slate writer who said exactly the same thing, and I’m pretty sure neither one of us was being ironic.

I’m not suggesting that music should sound exactly like it did in 1989. That would be insane. They don’t make medicine or fingerless gloves like they did in 1989 either, and our world is better for it. When I say “They don’t make records like that anymore,” what I’m really saying is “I’m not 19 like I was when it was 1989 anymore.”

A few days later, after the dust of Yauch’s passing had settled, I got into a heated argument with a female friend about whether a dead Beastie Boy was as big a cultural deal as a dead cokehead who sang about children being our future.

“Yauch’s death is sad,” she said after we’d polished off a bottle of red wine. “But it’s not tragic, like when Whitney Houston died.”

If I’d been a little more emotionally mature, or at least less drunk, I would have acknowledged that we clearly had different feelings about and attachments to these particular artists. Whitney Houston had a bigger impact on my friend’s life, so she was more affected by Houston’s death. For me, the Beastie Boys made a more lasting imprint, so Yauch’s death felt more significant. That’s not a value judgment, it’s just what happens when people co-exist in a complex and diverse musical landscape.

But I didn’t say that. I said something along the lines of: “A 47-year-old rap genius dying from cancer is not the same thing as a 48-year-old karaoke singer drowning in a bathtub because she did too much coke.”

“You’re on the wrong side of history,” she hissed at me. “Twenty years from now, liking the Beastie Boys will be like saying Men at Work is your favorite band.”

“You’re a fucking moron,” I laughed. “Do you listen to any music that isn’t sold at the check-out lanes at Target?”

We said terrible things to each other, as people usually do when somebody tries to tell them that the music they love sucks.

It’s an argument you can never win, although I’ve never learned that lesson. I seem to have these arguments every time a popular music artist dies. I became especially irate after Michael Jackson made an early exit. I understood why his family and friends were devastated. But just owning the Thriller album doesn’t mean your world has been forever changed by his passing.

All the public grief about Jackson’s death was puzzling to me. It was like turning on the news and the top story was “They’re no longer making red leather jackets with lots of zippers in them.” Okay. I guess I’ll put on a brave face and try to soldier on.

It wasn’t like when Clarence Clemons died. That hit me where it hurt. When I first heard the news, I stayed up all night listening to the sax solo in “Jungleland” over and over and crying.

It wasn’t nostalgia. I go to Springsteen concerts, I watch his videos, and I buy his new albums. Clemons’ absence haunts my current music-listening experience.

Things weren’t as clear-cut with Yauch. I loved the Beastie Boys, but my affection is mired in the past tense. Paul’s Boutique and Check Your Head will always hold a special place in my heart. The two albums after that, the ones with “Sabotage” and “Intergalactic,” respectively, I own them both but only listen to “Sabotage” and “Intergalactic.”

When Yauch died, it didn’t change my life in any meaningful way. Nothing was missing for me because he was gone. My musical memories weren’t fractured by his terminal cancer. When he shuffled off this mortal coil, he didn’t take Check Your Head with him. It was a horrible loss for his family and the people who loved him. But that kind of loss happens every day. At least a dozen people gasped their last breath in the time it took you to read this sentence. So what of it? When my dad died and it felt like my heart was going to explode, I didn’t expect a call from Ad-Rock.

The problem I’ve been grappling with since Yauch’s death is this: I just don’t know whether to trust my own grief anymore. I can’t tell when I’m experiencing a real emptiness at an artist’s death and when I’m just a Pavlov dog for my Google news alerts.

Some days it seems like everybody on social media has fantasies of becoming obituary writers. It’s an endless scroll of heart-breaking eulogies to Jimmy Buffett or Robbie Robertson, Tina Turner or Tony Bennett. When Sinéad O'Connor passed, my friends publically despaired like they’d been listening to “Nothing Compares 2 U” when they got the news.

My friend who loves Whitney Houston called me not long ago. We’d long forgotten our drunken disagreements about which dead musician deserved more posthumous respect. There were fresh bodies to be culturally reassessed. We discussed the untimely death of the Smash Mouth guy, whose liver finally exploded, and laughed at how lyrics like “the years start comin' and they don't stop comin’” feel less true the older we get. And we both got weepy over the surprising but not really surprising death of Chandler (sorry, Matthew Perry), which sent us spiraling into nostalgia for a sitcom we spent much of our respective youths actively avoiding.

I’m always shocked at the intimacy I feel for strangers who soundtracked my life. I’m never going to be okay that Adam Yauch died too young, and David Bowie’s absence in the world will always feel weird and wrong. If you’re like me—a middle-aged Gen Xer with a growing (if grumbling) acceptance of his own mortality—you know that the losses are going to keep on coming (and they don't stop comin’, as the Smash Mouth guy would warn us) as we all get older. So you steel yourself for the inevitable.

We’re moving away from the “your favorite band is going on a reunion tour” stage of our lives and into the “he went peacefully surrounded by friends and family” stage.

I’m mentally preparing for the day Morrissey dies. And Robert Smith. And Paul Westerberg. I’ll even bawl inconsolably when Jon Bon Jovi passes. Every artist who ever serenaded our prom dances, our first kisses, our college dorm room weed parties, our wedding receptions, our road trips to the jobs we weren’t sure we wanted, our birthing classes for the babies we weren’t sure we wanted. The people who made the songs that accompanied all of it, they’re going to leave us. Probably sooner than we’d like.

And when it happens, we’ll wonder why we’re mourning so hard for people we barely knew.