REST IN BEAST
MCA dies at age 47
BEASTIE BOYS co-founder Adam Yauch — the pioneering hip hop group’s raspy voiced, spiritual elder statesman — died Friday morning after a three-year battle with cancer. He was 47.
The Brooklyn-born rapper, known as MCA, had been fighting the late stages of his untreatable case at New York-presbyterian hospital since mid-april, a source told the Daily News.
His wife, Dechen Wangdu, and 13-yearold daughter Tenzin Losel were by his side as he remained lucid until the end, the source said.
Yauch was diagnosed in 2009 after a tumor was discovered in his salivary gland. He was too sick to attend the group’s recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“Adam was incredibly sweet and the most sensitive artist who I loved dearly. I was always inspired by his work. He will be missed by all of us,” Russell Simmons, the group’s first manager, said.
Yauch, who grew up in Brooklyn Heights and attended Edward R. Murrow High School, formed the Beastie Boys as a hardcore band with Mike (Mike D) Diamond on his 17th birthday. Adam (Ad-rock) Horovitz joined later, and the all-white group broke through hip hop racial barriers with the blockbuster 1986 album “Licensed to Ill.”
Melding punk, rap and humor into a sound that helped bring hip hop to the masses, the group cemented their superstardom with the anthems “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” — and the classic followup albums “Paul’s Boutique” in 1989 and “Ill Communication” in 1994.
“May a great musical pioneer rest in peace,” Jay-z said on his website. “Adam Yauch brought a lot of positivity into the world, and I think it’s obvious to anyone how big of an influence the Beastie Boys were on me,” Eminem said in a statement.
“Struggling to find words to describe the grief I feel over the passing of MCA,” rapper Talib Kweli Greene, who toured with the Beastie Boys in 2004, wrote on Twitter.
A practicing Buddhist and staunch supporter of Tibetan independence, he helped organize the Tibetan Freedom Concerts of the late 1990s. Initially optimistic that surgery and radiation would spare his life, Yauch later asked fans to meditate with him “to smash apart all the cancer cells” in the world.