I first heard about The Beastie Boys in 1986/87 when I by coincidence watched the ‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party)’ video on Danish then-monopoly TV. That experience ignited a series of events that made … me.

“Kick it!”

I was 12 at the time, and living in a distant rural corner of Denmark in a small town with 350 souls. Any conception I had of what music was or could ever be was completely disrupted by that track and that video.

Maybe a year before – again by coincidence – I watched ‘Style Wars’ on TV and was blown away. I had found my calling and my cultural home. Graffiti, Rap music and Hip Hop as a whole was where I belonged – not this small town, not in Denmark, but in this intercontinental state of mind that was Hip Hop.

Craving knowledge about this amazing new thing I had discovered, I started collecting clippings from newspapers, reading about the tidbits main stream media was able to handle. Once in a while nuggets of value turned up, that in turn led me on to the real stuff.

Beastie Boys were touring with License To Ill, somebody made the first Danish window-down whole car in Copenhagen and made a centerfold appearance in a major newspaper, along with reports from Beastie’s tour featuring beer can injuries, trashed hotel rooms and moral indignation.

I absolutely loved it.

That thing called Hip Hop, that I knew I loved was finally getting so mainstream that it could reach me, deep in that hidden corner of Denmark.

Later my dad was going to New York – I guess it must have been in 87/88 – and I was dying from envy. That old guy was going to the spiritual capital of ‘me-hood’ and I wasn’t even invited. Having given up on the local record store, and leveraging the fact that my dad was morally obligated to bring back excessive presents, I made it clear that I wanted three key albums: ‘License To Ill’, ‘It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’ (Public Enemy) and ‘Bad’ (LL Cool J – and ‘any other rap album that he could get his hands on’.

A week later he returned, bringing those three albums. Finally. The real deal.

At first, it was ‘License To Ill’ day in, day out. My cousin from Copenhagen came to visit, and we made a rap band of our own, biting shamelessly from the Beasties. He mimicked MCA’s characteristic raspy voice quite accurately, and I felt assured that our band had a great future. We were called ‘The Q-Cumber Club’ and our adventure lasted for a few days at most, until he had to return to Copenhagen.

Then I moved along to LL, RUN DMC and Public Enemy. Beastie Boys took the back seat, while I felt connected with Chuck D’s activism and blackness. That flirt however never survived beyond that single album.

Then suddenly, visiting my cousin in Copenhagen, finding myself in a proper well-equipped record store…

‘Pauls Boutique’

The iconic street panorama and the whole multi-fold-out cover thing. I didn’t even now that Beastie Boys had released a new album and I didn’t realize that this in fact was it until after I had fallen for the cover.

So, disruption happened. It felt like something completely new all over again. Everything I thought I knew about what music could be, was put in perspective, shaken up and re-composed into this deeply original, endlessly creative, imaginative and wildly inspiring thing called – of all things – ‘Pauls Boutique’.

Should I ever end up in a situation where I could bring one album only to a deserted island, well, ‘Pauls Boutique’ it is.

Every single album from the Beastie Boys since then have somehow strangely fitted into my liking, although without having the same disruptive force as the first two. Like musical phases the Beastie Boys went through, somehow perfectly correlated with the phases that I went through in my life. Every chapter of my life was given a unique Beastie Boys soundtrack. I rose to meet their expectations – and they to mine I’d like to think.

Fast forward to 2000. I’m in 26 and I’m in New York for the first time on a 5-day business trip. I’m at a sponsored party in Manhattan somewhere. Free bar, free food. RUN DMC is headlining the event. I feel like I’m 13 again, living the dream of that kid whose dad was stealing his trip to the Big Apple. Everything is perfect – Or, it would have been perfect, had it been Beastie Boys on stage.

Now, 12 years later, that event feels like the closest I’ve been to the Beastie Boys. I never saw them, never heard them live. In retrospect I wish I had. My only explanation is, that I did not realize how important it was to me.

I’ve always felt kind of weird about people who cared so much about some celebrity that they would go all sad and get carried away. It took me completely by surprise that I would get hit so hard as I did when learning that Adam Yauch had passed away.

It is just now that I’m learning why.

Adam Yauch and The Beastie Boys have been an instrumental force in the formation of me.

Their monumental body of work, their rebellion, their ethic, their be-what-you-want-to-be-attitude and their uncompromising creativity is deeply embedded in me. As something I strive for and I’m continuously inspired by. As cornerstones of that thing I call me.

I recently told my business partner that I wanted our company to be like the Beastie Boys. What I meant was something along the lines of a treehouse were you can play with friends while doing what you love. A world-changing force of creativity. A strong unit extremely capable of reinventing itself again and again. A state of mind where you are what you want to be. An inventor. A leader.

My condolences to Adam Yauch’s family and those close to him.

Adam Yauch. Gratitude. Make some noise. Namaste.

Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.

http://www.marco.org/2011/10/20/how-to-bring-good-design-to-a-platform

The amount of *shit* on TV never cease to amaze me. The colossal efforts that go into producing, broadcasting and watching *shit* completely blows my mind. If anybody really wants to make a real change in the World starting with figuring out how to exchange all this energy to something valuable — really valuable, not just monetary value to producers — would free enough time, thinking and energy to jump-start a global landslide of progress.

Fragmented, aimless browsing, reading and shuffling has slowly but surely conquered that time and mind space where my thinking otherwise would fit in. The void that I was supposed to fill with thinking, has been filled with fluff, noise, random thoughts from random people, stuff with no deep or lasting value to me.

Some would argue, that checking Twitter streams, Reader feeds, Facebook updates, news and what not is good for many reasons. Get inspired! Learn about stuff! Follow your friends’ lives! I used to think that it served a purpose to follow all those sites in Google Reader. I guess I still kind of hope it does?

But at what cost? Follow a steady stream of never-ending whatchamacallit instead of spending time thinking? Seems a bit stupid when you think about it, doesn’t it?

Fine, thanks, I’ve been fine. I’ve been working a lot. I’ve been spending a lot of time at home with the Missus and kids. Also, I have been reading. Quite a lot more than usual. Books, even. And blog posts and news and tweets and status updates. And what not.

Kids are growing, and the company is doing well, thanks.

I’m sort of working on this typeface from time to time…