Every Day I Take A Wee: The Beastie Boys And The Untimely Death Of Suburban Folklore – A Single Notes Book

by Christopher R. Weingarten

Every Day I Take A Wee is an uncomfortably personal memoir of shame, obsession and neuroses, told through growing up in shadows of the brattiest, snottiest, jerkiest, booger-wipingest record that every existed, Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys. Not only a tale about hip-hop's earliest effects on the suburbs, SPIN senior editor Christopher R. Weingarten traces his early years — “pretty much the straight line between ‘fat kid’ and ‘rock critic’” —in hilarious detail. Exploring music's relationship with suburban folklore and urban legends, misheard Beasties lyrics conjure up shocking fantasies, album art minutiae sparks high school screaming matches, and White Castle eating contests are strongly discouraged.

Genres: Music

33 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 12, 2012

Reviews

[Byron · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this were any longer than the instructions on a box of Minute Rice, it would be one of my all-time favorite music books. It's way better than Weingarten's 33 1/3 book on PE's Nation of Millions, which I read a few months ago and didn't really care for. Even more so than some of the other 33 1/3 books that I've read, it just read like some dumbass kid synthesizing everything you've already read about that album a million times. Every Day I Take a Wee, then (nullus), is a revelation. Ostensibly, it's about the first Beastie Boys album, License to Ill, but what it really is is a (madd brief) memoir about what it was like being a music fan back before there was a such thing as the Internets. You couldn't just use Rap Genius to figure out what a song was about. (Not that you can now.) Maybe this is just me being a semi-old fart, but I think being a music fan was a more fulfilling experience back when there was a lot more work involved. It was definitely more amusing. Some of this shit - especially the part about a chick witnessing him blowing his nose and then using the same rag to wipe the sweat from his brow - is just plain hilarious.