“My man MCA has a beard like a billy goat”

“Well I got to keep it going keep it going full steam / Too sweet to be sour too nice to be mean / On the tough guy style I’m not too keen / To try to change the world I will plot and scheme.”

– Adam “MCA” Yauch on “Intergalactic” (1998)

Music is an important but often overlooked component of any camp out. Bill mentioned it in an email last week (having someone in charge of music), and I agree completely.

When no one is in charge of the music, the results can be disastrous. The playlist continues unchecked and, before you know it, we’ve listened to an entire Nickelback album, and that’s no fun for anyone. Sure, you can avoid that torture by putting the playlist on shuffle, but then you end up having AC-DC followed by Britney Spears. Have you ever listened to “Thunderstuck” and “Baby One More Time” back-to-back? Your ears will bleed.

So yes, we definitely need to get the “music situation” under control.

I wasn’t really sure what the solution was or what the playlist would include (who am I to decide what tunes should be played?), but then something terrible happened: Adam Yauch died.

Most of us know Adam better as MCA, the gravely-voiced, big brother-like member of the Beastie Boys who spit rhymes like “droppin’ science like Galileo dropped the orange” (“The Sounds of Science”) and “I’ve got more rhymes than I’ve got gray hairs, and that’s a lot because I’ve got my share.” (“Sure Shot”).

For millions of 30-something year old white guys like me, the Beastie Boys were our first foray into hip hop and defined music for us for 25 incredibly awesome years. I consider myself very lucky to have seen the Beastie Boys in concert, even if it was only once (with Bill in 2004 at Philly’s Wachovia Center).

It’s funny how the Beastie Boys and I continued to be linked by camping. My earliest memory of listening to the Beastie Boys, and probably the moment I really fell in love with them as a group, was listening to “License to Ill” in a tent with Brian Hanford during a Boy Scout campout in 1988. (Was it a Boy Scout campout with Brian Hanford? I don’t remember him being a Boy Scout, but in my memory, he was there.)

We were listening to “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and “Paul Revere” on a shitty little boom box and it must have been a little too loud (is there any other way to listen to the B-Boys?) because one of the adult Scoutmasters came over and yelled at us to turn it down. For a 13-year-old boy, that moment of rebelliousness was like a drug and I’ve been hooked on the Beasties ever since.

And so, to pay homage to Adam, I propose that the music at this year’s campout be a 50/50 mix of Beastie Boys tracks and whatever else dares to go up against it. Hell, if it were up to me, it would 100 percent Beastie Boys, but sometimes you have to listen to other stuff in order to realize how awesome a band really is, right?