We Are Alive

A profile in the latest New Yorker by David Remnick captures the life-giving payoff that's come with being not just a lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen's music, but of attending multiple shows over the course of (for me) 30 years. Remnick quotes Springsteen extensively throughout:

Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.
__________
For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.
__________
You’re the shaman, a little bit, you’re leading the congregation. But you are the same as everybody else in the sense that your troubles are the same, your problems are the same, you’ve got your blessings, you’ve got your sins, you’ve got the things you can do well, you’ve got the things you fuck up all the time. And so you’re a conduit. There was a series of elements in your life—some that were blessings, and some that were just chaotic curses—that set fire to you in a certain way.
__________
My parents’ struggles, it’s the subject of my life. It’s the thing that eats at me and always will. My life took a very different course, but my life is an anomaly. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose. (gesturing toward the band onstage) We’re repairmen—repairmen with a toolbox. If I repair a little of myself, I’ll repair a little of you. That’s the job.
__________
My issues weren’t as obvious as drugs. Mine were different, they were quieter — just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. It’s both things: there’s a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There’s no room for them. There’s one voice, the voice you’re speaking in.

RIP Adam Yauch

I burn the competition like a flame thrower
My rhymes they age like wine as I get older

Pretty good as far as epitaphs go, but I doubt Adam Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys, wrote that couplet from 2011's Hot Sauce Committee Part Two with that in mind. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the salivary glands in 2009 but the spirit of the Beastie Boys since their 1986 smash Licensed to Ill was the antithesis of surrender, morbidity or self-pity. They'd carefully stepped back from the post-adolescent cock-rock of those days but as MCA rapped on their most recent album, even cancer couldn't tone down his street confidence.

But it could take his life.

The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, who attended St Ann's high school in Brooklyn with Adam's bandmate Mike Diamond, wrote a moving tribute that included insight into the last few years of his life:

Yauch died today, at the age of 47. In 2009, he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor he described at the time, in this interview with The Stool Pigeon, as "located in the perotic gland and the neighbouring lymph node." He fought back, ebbing and strengthening and dimming, as the disease progressed. Friends exchanged messages. "Adam’s doing O.K." "He’s kinda tired." Minimizing the situation by using simple language felt like the least hysterical trick you could play on yourself. Sometimes, it felt like a memory might work. "Your remember when Tom and Adam went under the bridge with that car and they almost went into the river?" Nope. Just made it worse, recalling the skinny, loopy kid who took any dare and inflated it until it was beyond foolish. The kid who would think the only problem with cancer is that it wasn’t a good enough punchline.

Chuck D of Public Enemy also paid tribute:

Last night I took a 14 hour flight to Sydney Australia from LA embarking on PEs 80th tour in 25 years. I landed I got 65 texts with the news. Adam and the Boys put us on our first tour 25 years and 79 tours ago. They were essential to our beginning, middle and today. Adam especially was unbelievable in our support from then till now even allowing me to speech induct them into the Rock hall of fame. I consider my self a strong man and my father says be prepared to lose many on your post 50 path of life. Still Im a bit teary eyed leaving this plane R.I.P. Adam Aka MCA

My contribution to the eulogy is typically suburban. In the mid-90s I shared a house in the working-class town of Dumont, NJ with a guy named Rich. He was pushing 30, losing his hair, and doing his best to piss off his well-off parents by being the family fuckup. (I was Copy Chief of the Barnes & Noble book catalog in Rockleigh on the NJ-NY border, perfecting my own style of fucking up, but that's an unrelated tale in itself.) Rich and I didn't speak much. Another housemate, a NY Jets season ticket holder named Wayne, occasionally attempted to initiate normal, friendly conversation that you'd expect among people living in the same house but most of his time was spent having sex with his fiancee in his bedroom. So Rich and I did our best to co-exist, his comments generally relegated to the attractiveness of Janine, my then girlfriend.

One day in the old house on Madison Avenue we fell into a conversation about the Beastie Boys. This was in 1994, after the release of their amazing Ill Communication album. Rich hated it. Matter of fact, he said, he hated everything they'd done post-Licensed to Ill. When I told him I loved 1989's Paul's Boutique he snuffled. "Figures," he said, with a typical blank stare. This was a putdown of both the Beastie Boys and me, as my appreciation of the band's evolution from party boys to groundbreaking hip-hop artists was scornworthy to the likes of Rich, for whom the Beasties' breakthrough (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party) was the anthem of his drinking years. Everything after that, according to Rich, was music for pussies, a group to which I obviously belonged since I read books for fun and spent afternoons drifting through NYC museums. The Beastie Boys still acted goofy but the schoolyard swagger had been replaced by musical exploration and a creeping spirituality, an act of treason to Rich. This conversation proved he and I were never going to be friends. Such was the power of the Beastie Boys.

Judging by how the Beastie Boys continued to evolve and take up causes like Tibetan freedom -- a cause close to the heart of Buddhist Yauch -- I have to assume the band was happy to shed their testosterone fanbase. That bullshit aside, the opening guitar and drum blast of Ill Communication's Sabotage recalls LBI shore houses and doorless Jeep rides stamped with the band's white-boy, basement-rock funk that's aged as well or better than anything released from those days. I listened to Paul's Boutique yesterday and was blown away by its sonic landscape, its 'up yours' to music biz dogma, and the band's refusal to be pigeonholed as frat-boy rappers. How the Beastie Boys would have entered their AARP years is a question nobody could have predicted would have relevance when they were performing onstage beside an inflatable penis, but the 'Boys long ago became men. Now, with MCA's passing, they become something dearly missed and beloved.