I was in my fourth meeting of the day when I got the news that Adam Yauch had died.

Most guys my age knew Yauch as MCA, the throatier member of the Beastie Boys, with a coarser voice and smoother flow than the nasal machine-gun delivery of his band-mates Mike D and the Ad Rock.

He was also known as the conscientious Beastie, the one who organized the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Concert.

Yauch, who was raised in a Catholic/Jewish household would eventually become a Buddhist and a pacifist, making him the only Anglo-Buddhist, let alone pacifist, I knew.

When he took to the podium at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards to accept the Video Vanguard Award from Public Enemy’s Chuck D, he warned that the recent firing of cruise missiles into Iraq would only perpetuate a cycle of violence.

“I think it’s very important the United States starting looking at non-violent ways of solving conflicts,” he said calmly.

He received cheers from the crowd when he said, “Most Middle-Eastern people are not terrorists,” a statement that only a few years later might be met by boos or stunned silence.

This was a significant moment for me, and I’m guessing for many other fans of the Beastie Boys. This band whose lyrics came to define a style and an arch sense of humor that I wanted to emulate (“Jerry Lee Swaggert, Jerry Lee Falwell…You like Mario Andretti ‘cause he always drives his car well…) was now a band whose politics I could get behind.

And while Yauch’s statements didn’t come close to the poignancy of Bono whipping arenas of Midwesterners into chants of “No War!” MCA’s humble political statements struck me on a deep level.

Here’s why:

The Beastie Boys are the only band that made me want to stand in line to buy an album on its release date. I recall buying Check Your Head at Camelot Music in Hickory Point Mall, the same record store where I previously bought U2’s The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, and REM’s Document and Green.

I remember driving fast to my friend’s house to listen to it on his stereo—he had the best stereo of anyone I knew: a pair of crisp, punchy Advent speakers hung suspended from the ceiling by picture hanging wire, angled downward so that if you stood in just the right spot you felt completely enveloped by the music.

I was sixteen years old—old enough to feel that I was worldly but young enough that I failed to directly connect the lyrics of the tenth track on the album, “Something’s Got to Give,” with what was going on in the world beyond the small city in central Illinois where I grew up.

I wish for peace between the races
Someday we shall all be one…

There’s something coming to the surface
There’s fire all around
But this is all illusion

Tension is rebuilding
Something’s got to give…

Jesus Christ we’re nice.

While I didn’t grasp it on the level that MCA, Ad Rock, and Mike D meant it, I listened to the song so many times over the years, how could I not internalize its deeper messages?

I was practicing a kind of secular lectio divina. How could I not eventually hear how the words “fire” and “illusion” combined with the refrain, “Something’s got to give,” became a prophetic statement? How could I not hear how the last line drips with the irony of Ghandi’s famous statement, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians”?

But that was 1992. I was only sixteen. It would be years before these lyrics coalesced, gestalt-style, into anything resembling a coherent political and theological stance.

Two years later, just after graduating from high school, Ill Communication was released. Listening to that album, I was immediately struck by MCA’s lyric on “Sure Shot”: “I wanna say a little something that’s long overdue / The disrespect to women has got to be through.” It was a stunning turn away from the misogynistic lyrics of earlier albums where women are “crafty” and “loose,” as in “I think her name was Lucy but we all call her loose.”

Again, I can’t say that I immediately internalized this message. I didn’t think it applied to me, really. But now, nearly eighteen years later, a professor at a women’s college, married with a six-year- old daughter and a two-year-old son, the line rings loudly and with increasing urgency.

As is so often the case with our favorite bands and songs, the music of the Beastie Boys was the soundtrack for significant milestones in my life. But what was different about MCA and the Beasties is that they were like the older brothers I never had. I learned from watching them grow and change. I watched them grow up, get married and have kids. I listened while their subject matter moved away from quarts of beer, wiffle ball bats, and skateboards to songs about world peace.

Now with the death of Adam Yauch, the first B Boy to go completely gray, I’ve begun looking at my own graying temples in the mirror and thinking about what my legacy as an artist and person will be.

As of yesterday afternoon, this lyric, delivered by MCA in “Root Down,” is tacked on the wall above my computer.

Bob Marley was a prophet for the freedom fight
If dancin’s praise to the lord then I shall feel alright
It feels good to play a little music
Tears running down my face ’cause I love to do it
And no one can stop this flow from flowing on
A flow master of disaster with a sound that’s gone
I’ll give a little shout out to my dad and mom
For bringing me into this world and so on