Posted 5/6/2012 by cal
Friday was a weird day. The death of
Adam Yauch weighed it down considerably. Pretty tough to get through a Gen-X life without feeling the impact of the
Beastie Boys, and with Yauch out of commission for some time and the band in general having kept a pretty low profile for most of the past decade or so, it had been easy to forget how influential they were on our world.
Licensed To Ill was the soundtrack to my fifth grade year, which may have been life-altering in imperceptible ways (certainly the most perfect fifth-grader fantasy record ever, if nothing else), but the real game-changer was seeing the band at
Lollapalooza in 1994. I didn’t even know they played instruments until that day. It was like seeing five bands at once, and the energy they projected from the stage made pretty much every show I’d seen up to that point (and the
Smashing Pumpkins set that followed) seem boring as hell. Suddenly I realized it was okay for an alternakid to dig hip hop and R&B and jazz too, and life would never be the same.
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