Adam Yauch

                                                            08/05/1964-05/04/2012

        Adam Yauch died of Cancer today he was 47. I first got into Yauch’s band the Beastie Boys in the summer of 1998 when Hello Nasty came out. What drew me in was the video for their song Intergalactic, it was a giant tribute to Godzilla movies, which I was really into at the time, and part of it was even shot it Tokyo!

        Ever since then Beastie Boys were I band I enjoyed, and linked with offbeat movies.  There video for Boy Movin' referenced Mario Bava’s wonderful comic book adaptation Diabolik. Spike Jonze directed the video for their song Sabotage as an elaborate tribute to cheesy 70s crime movies. The logo for Adam Yauch’s production company Oscilloscope was modeled after the old Toho logo. If you ever get to watch any of their videos they were always memorable, never boring, and often as it turns out directed by Adam Yauch himself. Yauch later got to direct a feature film, the documentary Gunnin for that #1 Spot, which was released by Oscilloscope.

        Around the time Yauch’s documentary was being released I was Living in New York and waiting in line to see Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, which by the way is an amazing movie you should see, and right behind me was Adam Yauch. I asked him how his movie was doing, and he said he was getting a lot of good feedback; he was really friendly and talked about the movie for a few minutes. After that I went into the theatre and watched Tandanobu Asano, tear ass all over Asia. Everyone I talked to who met Yauch said that he was a really nice guy to them as well.

               One last thing, in the late summer of 1998 just as a guy in Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden started popping up in headlines, and Clinton was bombing the parts of Afghanistan where he was supposed to be hiding, The Beastie Boys were winning an MTV Video Vanguard award.  Yauch took his time at the mike to criticize the bombing, as well as saying the Americans need to stop hating Muslim and Arab peoples and work towards building unity. There wasn’t a real loud response some cheers in the crowd but if you consider how many people were in the room it sounds like most people didn’t even know what he was talking about.

So goodbye Adam Yauch you were a talented man, a successful artist in many fields, a supporter of unpopular views, and a hip-hop icon. You will be Missed