Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Professor Booty” by Beastie Boys:

I’ve never considered myself a big fan of the Beastie Boys, but on the other hand, I’ve always listened to the Beastie Boys quite a lot, and I’ve never not considered myself a fan of the Beastie Boys, and anyway if you don’t like the Beastie Boys you need to, um, check your head. Thinking about it earlier this week, I realized that part, if not most, of the reason I feel how I do about the Beastie Boys is because they’ve more or less always been there in my musical consciousness, since I was nine years old and “Fight for Your Right (To Party)” hit the radio and MTV with just the right level of silliness for a kid in the fourth grade. As I got older, the Beastie Boys’ silliness changed with my own; Paul’s Boutique and Check Your Head formed part of my teenage soundtrack. But the Beasties aren’t just silly. If a nine year-old doesn’t care about musical sophistication as much as he does hollering and jumping around, a fifteen-year old at least starts to, and the Beastie Boys’ music got smarter and more complex more or less in line with my own development into (I guess) a smarter and more complex person, without sacrificing on the fun. So the evolution of the band ran parallel, though not exactly parallel, to my own, and, I suppose in some way, of my generation, all the way into my/our mid-thirties. The Beastie Boys have soundtracked my life in ways that haven’t always (or even, probably, ever) been deeply meaningful or provided specific focal points in the ways that other bands and artists have, but they’ve nonetheless provided significant thread to the fabric of my musical life. That’s probably why, whenever I think about it, which is often enough to surprise me, it seems impossible and impossibly sad that Adam Yauch is no longer alive.  Though his music, of course, is.