Goodbye MCA + KISS...by pemora

For personal + professional reasons, I have been thinking a lot about challenges + loss. Mostly I wonder about my own reserve of strength, flexibility + patience, traits that seem to belong to a greater person than me. Because I like to keep UR a bit more superficial than this, I wanted to write about the recent departure of 2 icons in my life -- MCA and 98.7 KISS FM.

Why would I even compare a person to a radio station?

MCA's life cannot be reduced to the span of a station. But the void left in the music world really must be acknowledged.

It hit me, this morning, that we will never ever again see the Beastie Boys perform. Remember how every couple of years, very randomly, they would show up to the MTV Awards? And regardless of what they performed or how they did, I would always step back and say, "damn, they rocked." I had this long-standing dream to convince 2 other girlfriends to do Intergalatic with me at Hip-Hop Karaoke. During college, whenever I felt particularly homesick, I often found myself reaching for a Beastie cd. They're sound, they're lyrics, they're antics, felt so much like NYC to me. Hello Nasty and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill were the soundtracks to my junior year.

I am still confused about the disappearance of 98.7 KISS FM. I can clearly remember getting dressed for middle school, attempting to create the perfect side ponytail, listening to freestyle music on KISS. At the time, my cousin was a back-up dancer for Cynthia and a number of the artists had made their way to my childhood home. It was exciting to hear their songs on the radio and I loved the sounds that these Latinos were creating. Later, I listened to the 'friend in my head' Wendy Williams. When I returned to NYC from college, I often tuned in to KISS for some good ol' R&B.



These losses are pretty darn sad to me. I am not even sure that we (or maybe just me) have fully realized how big a loss we are experiencing.