...just wanting to talk to you for a second. It's been a while since we seen each other, or at least it really seems like a long time.
Remembering back to a church-sponsored skiiing trip in January of '85. Mom let me stack up on comics at the grocery store and I picked up "Crisis on Infinite Earths #1." The issue was framed on each cover by a piece talking about how the DC Universe was too confusing and they were going to consolidate it and "nothing would ever be the same" again.
The story had what I felt at the time were a bunch of DC second-stringers, most of whom I didn't know and had to look up in "Who's Who: The Definitive Guide to the DC Universe" (an encyclopedia in monthly installments of all the DC characters and major concepts, but only Vol 1 had come out yet). A gothy looking dude named Pariah was flashing in and out of different universes in the multiverse, and everywhere he showed up, he'd be forced to watch white antimatter ate up the place and people until he would flash out and flash in to another. It was really creepy and ominous and I wondered how even Batman and Superman would stack up against this existential threat. Pariah would pop up and have to watch as this freaky white stuff ate up everything and there was nothing left and he'd head out and have to watch it all happen to some other group of people and their universe, again and again.
Cut to last week. I was working late (big surprise) and hit the NPR website and learned Adam Yauch had died. Lately, Whitney Houston ate it and it doesn't seem too long since Michael Jackson kicked off. This stuff happens and, no offense to them, but they were pretty easy to shrug off either b/c they were on borrowed time anyhow or they had squandered their talent and mismanaged their lives and creatively speaking...well, nevermind b/c it's really mean so I won't even say it. You know where I'm going and let's just leave it at that.
But losing MCA almost moved me to tears. I didn't know the guy and never really obsessed about him at all in any sort of youthful hero-worship sort of way, but I just felt that something was lost that will never be here again. I mean, all of these dead celebrities are people and they leave folks behind that actually do know them and will mourn them, but this guy was different.
I was never the world's biggest Beastie Boys fan as some of my pals were, but they really did mean something to me. I wore out "License to Ill" in seventh grade in my Walkman and at summer camp. We could rap every song. When Paul's Boutique came out, the new aesthetic blew my mind and I initially rejected it, but after a while I came to see it as the superior work that it was, and a step toward creative freedom and more importantly, a jail-break out of a very narrow and self-limiting sort of young white male persona into an infinite one, one that could grow and shift as you got older. And of course, by the time Check Your Head came out, I was a believer and admirer forever more.
They consciously made the jump from snarky meatheads to young men actively trying to create a culture, and to me that's the real boon of hip hop (not the macho swagger that gets mistaken for it). On PB, they recovered a lot of the pop culture artifacts from their childhood. It wasn't coherent, but they were creating the context of their own existence, referring to this, referring to that.
I learned that Adam was studying Tibetan Buddhism around the same time that I was studying Zen and Daoism rather intensely (though it's hard to be a Daoist in the Army) and there was some validation there. Certainly it was a jump from the beer guzzling lady-harassing dude he presented himself to be initially. They started putting instrumentals on their albums. I'm sure there were other instances, but these guys showed you could be who you wanted to be. You could be a Jewish kid from Brooklyn but also be into hiphop; you could be a loudmouth jerk and morph into a Buddhist; you could take all the "crap" that you wasted your time on as a kid (comic books, sports, tv shows, etc.) and that really meant something to you, though you were told and sort of knew it was junk culture, and hold it close, work with it, extract the good stuff from it, and use it to make something new that expressed how you felt. Even though it was '89, I think the 90s began the day Paul's Boutique was released. I'm not the only one who had to let it sit for a while before I could get into it, but it gave middle class white kids a new paradigm from which to live, and those of us who haven't lost our souls to work and life and all that's happened over the intervening years, it's because on some level we still live that way. I'm reading too much into it?
Sure.
That's the whole point.
So when I read the NPR post, selfish as it was, I knew I'd never get a new Beastie Boys album again and I was sad. It was,with apologies to Hemingway, the end of something.
I hadn't bought the last two BB albums, much less even bothered to listen to them. Yep, I'm one of those people that make me cringe...not appreciating anything until it's gone and only then I celebrate it to the stars. It all rubs rawer the wound of recently losing a beloved stepfather who I know I didn't appreciate as much as I should have before he was gone, and now I'll never go over to his house and watch TV or drink a glass of sweet tea with him again. I think that's what it's really about, but it's all the same thing.
It's got me thinking about all those other 90s staples who moved me in a permanent way who I "outgrew"...the Chili Peppers, Pavement, Beck, all staples of that new paradigm of looking at the world, about as far from the Stones and the Beatles and the hippies as you can get, yet incorporating a lot of the stuff they discovered and moving beyond it into the new. With me, it's all about the new and interesting concept, but you can't think about all this without thinking about how you need to honor the old stuff that made you, too.
And it got me thinking about you. I haven't talked to you in a while. Sometimes sheer inertia keeps me away; I'm ashamed, because it's been so long and I know it will probably be awkward and a bit painful at first. I keep waiting for the right time, for when things settle down and we're less busy, when I have something good to say to you. But I don't want to wait anymore. Let's make some time for each other. If I don't call you, please call me and tackle me and tell me how it's all going. I miss you and all the stuff we use to laugh about, and I want to know you're ok b/c as much you might think I'm aloof and dodging you like I owe you money, I really do think about you all the time. I hope you're doing OK.
By the time January of '86 came around, they figured out how to deal with the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and the series wrapped. Some stuff was just plain lost forever. But a lot of stuff from the various universes/old multiverse was recovered and they slammed it into one big chaotic universe and it was in this weird state of reboot/"same old, same old." A completely new place, but with the past as prologue
I don't know if it can really work that way, but I'll talk to you soon. Please look after yourself until then.
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