motherjones:

Alan Light, author of Skills to Pay the Bills, a book on the Beastie Boys, remembers MCA: “If you look at the way the band evolved and transformed and think about the unbelievably surprising ways they were able to transform from what they started as, nobody really embodied that more than Yauch. In the beginning, he was the most obnoxious, and then he became the conscience of the band and was one of the leading political activists of his musical generation. He changed more than any of them.”