The Beastie Boys were my Beatles. My father would preach the gospel of the Fab 5 while me, too young to give a shit, wanted to wear baggy clothing and be MCA. You’d think I wanted to be Mike D due to the ‘4th letter in the alphabet’ connection, but nope. Yauch was cooler to me.

MCA was no bullshit. The only one of the three that I would be afraid of. Yauch was my Lennon. Leave the bubblegum to McCartney. Here’s the real shit.

“I can blow you away or you could ride with me.” -MCA, Paul Revere

My world stopped when a friend of mine sent me a text, telling me MCA passed away. I’ve lost people. It’s always a different reaction based on the closeness of the relationship. I’ve never met Adam Yauch, but it felt like I lost a family member. We never shook hands, or greeted each other, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours, over the course of 20 plus years, with him and the Beastie Boys in my headphones.

No offense to, but I wasn’t one of those tweeting how they were going to spend their entire weekend listening to the Beastie Boys, in memory of MCA. I’ve been listening to them consistently since the late eighties. Not a week goes by that I don’t have one craving to listen to a Beastie Boys song.

I knew I had to create something for him. I didn’t want to record the typical tribute song. MCA wasn’t typical and deserves better. I wanted to take it back to my childhood. The childhood they had impacted so heavily. I wanted to take it back to me, rapping Pass The Mic in a comb in front of a mirror in my bedroom, hat backwards, in my father’s work jacket. These were the moments that drove me to become an artist. And MCA helped me steer.

Thank you, Adam.

Alexander was convicted of three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for firing into a wall near her husband and his two young children at their Jacksonville home in 2010. Alexander has maintained that she wasn’t trying to hurt anyone and that she was standing her ground against a man who had over the course of nearly a year punched and choked her on several different occasions. Alexander says that she believed she was protected that day under the state’s Stand Your Ground Law, which gives people wide discretion in using deadly force to defend themselves.

A judge and a jury disagreed.

The State Attorney’s Office offered a plea bargain that would have sent Alexander to prison for three years, but she rejected it, hoping to convince a jury that she had been defending herself when she fired the weapon.

Alexander’s case has become the latest battleground in a fight against what Alexander’s supporters call the misapplication of the Stand Your Ground Law and Florida’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which offer stiff sentences for crimes involving guns.

According to Florida’s 10-20-Life statutes, anyone who pulls a gun during a crime receives a mandatory 10-year sentence. Firing a gun during the commission of a crime equals a mandatory 20-year sentence. Anyone convicted of shooting and killing another person during a crime is sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.