The Beastie Boys Book is the size of a damn social studies book with the same kind of textbook cover. Not since Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please have I had to carry around such a heavy ass book on the subway. (Yes, Please was made out of this really heavy paper stock that was shiny and good for photos, I guess. It was like a brick.)

Do people know about this book? I was reading this while waiting for the R train and a guy roughly my age, roughly my style, a guy who lives in Brooklyn asked me what the book was and if it was an authorized biography. Yeah, it’s authorized, it’s by Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond.

I’ve only read to the point where they’ve just gone from being a hardcore band to meeting Rick Rubin but I’m pretty drawn in. Ad-Rock and Mike D are both great writers and really great storytellers. Horovitz’s story about a guy named Dave Parsons who owned a record store called the Rat Cage provides a glimpse into the lives of New York kids in the eighties as was as a portrait of a man who lived a hell of a life.

This book manages to pull off something that is hard to put past me: it talks about New York like it used to be without pissing me off. Somehow they talk about an older, more dangerous, freer New York in the seventies and eighties without that extra tone of, “and it sucks now, you don’t even know.”

So far there’s not too much name dropping, a lot of pictures from back in the day, and some interstitial chapters by people like Luc Sante, Jonathan Lethem, and Colson Whitehead that are pretty damn cool.

The Beastie Boys mean a lot to white suburban kids like me. When I was really young I didn’t like them. You know the kid in the Fight For Your Right video who says, “I hope no bad people show up”? I thought they were bad people. I mean, I was nine and I thought they did drugs. (They did.) They weren’t as good as the rap trio that I really liked, The Fat Boys.

I didn’t really pay attention to them until “So Whatcha Want.” To this day, Check Your Head is my seminal Beasties album. Matt Brigham was my friend who was cool enough to understand that Paul’s Boutique was the true masterpiece but my favorite was already sealed. Then came Ill Communication which was the soundtrack to my junior and senior years of high school.

Are the Beasties cultural appropriators? Do they make hip hop palatable for a white audience? I’m white, so, I can’t really tell. All I know is they defined style for me for many decades (I eventually came around to License to Ill) and continue to do so, even with this book.

One last thing. In a who’s your favorite Beatle kind of way, I was always an Ad-Rock guy. But the more these two write about him, the cooler Yauch sounds. I hate it when people who never knew a celebrity say, “I miss that guy,” so I won’t do it. But Adam and Mike miss him a lot.

This book could make a harsh turn into unreadable in a few chapters but I doubt it. I recommend it.