33 1/3 Series of books

i see someone pitched one on kid a this year. MMM HOW IMAGINATIVE. if i was pitching one, i'd feel it was incumbent on me to at least go for something not completely entrenched in the canon.

Same here. Beautifully structured. By comparison, the sub-Greil Marcus choppiness of Armed Forces is currently driving me around the bend.

― The baby boomers have defined everything once and for all (Dorianlynskey), Sunday, December 5, 2010 1:11 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it would be one of the best books in the series if the author hadn't committed to the goofy alphabetical organization and had just laid it out in a more natural, intuitive way.

do any of the others have an unusual angle/approach to their subject?
Most of them do. Or at least, the four or five I've read all take completely different approaches.

Court and Spark is one of my favorites in the series: he understands the music even when I disagree with his insights (especially when he dismisses the post-CAS records).

(are the pj harvey, nas and joni mitchell ones good?)

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Sunday, December 5, 2010 1:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the Illmatic one isn't bad per se, but it's the kind of thing that virtually any fan of the album could have written, and a lot of them could have written it better.

Check out Master of Reality and 20 Jazz Funk Greats, even if you don't like the music. Master is basically a novella and Jazz is like the coolest, best written avant-PHD thesis.

i've said it before and i'll say it again, but the 'there's a riot goin on' book is just marvellous, a fantastic read.

i see someone pitched one on kid a this year. MMM HOW IMAGINATIVE.

*cough*

I agree with your 'not completely entrenched' idea, I also think it would have been much harder to pitch and have accepted. Not impossible, by any means.

(are the pj harvey, nas and joni mitchell ones good?)

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Sunday, December 5, 2010 1:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the Illmatic one isn't bad per se, but it's the kind of thing that virtually any fan of the album could have written, and a lot of them could have written it better.

― It's Long Like Donkey Dong (some dude), Sunday, December 5, 2010 12:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

This. It told me nothing that I didn't know prior to reading it. Still, it's not bad or anything.

do any of the others have an unusual angle/approach to their subject or are they mostly more straightforward?

as davek says, the Master Of Reality one is excellent, and neither requires nor imparts any especial knowledge of the band or album

raheem morris opts not to go for it on 4th and a foot on the falcons 40 even though blount's been killing it. thanks bro.

shit, wrong thread.

Anyone in LA... I'm having a little celebration at the Mandrake Bar in Culver City tonight for my 33 1/3 book on Spiderland. 7-10 pm. More info here.

is Let It Be the only Beatles album to get the 33 1/3 treatment? odd choice

x-post

Funny stuff re the Spiderland book release:

The best part is there will be a bunch of bloggers there so even if you're not online, you can still argue about whether the mediocre Arcade Fire album or the hit-and-miss Deerhunter album or the consistently good but rarely awesome LCD Soundsystem album are the best of the year. You don't have to live in two worlds!

Lex: the PJ Harvey one is a collection of clit lit short stories based on the song titles. I've got nothing against this in theory but I found this out while desperately looking for books on PJH to read before an interview with her that got dropped in my lap with little warning. If you're the sort of person who just wants the facts or some theorizing about the album, then I guess it will unavoidably make you quite angry.

I would have pitched Metal Machine Music just because I've got a lot of raw interview material that I could use. (If that's what MMM is.)

Lex, interested to hear what you thought of the Celine Dion one...?

clit lit?

is Let It Be the only Beatles album to get the 33 1/3 treatment? odd choice

It and the Replacements album are back-to-back numbers, har har.

Did the Tori one threatened/promised many years ago ever surface?

― piscesx, Monday, 30 August 2010

Anyone?

"clit lit?" That was bored trolling tbh.

But it's a collection of stories that appear to be about female protagonists with eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, mental health problems, self-harm etc. Like I said, I've got nothing against it, just not what I was after. I managed two of the stories. Didn't make much of an impression one way or the other. I'd imagine that Continuum don't have the luxury of commissioning books like this any more.

What doesn't help the Rid of Me book is that it's terribly written.

Also, of the 33 1/3 books I've read, the ranking would go something like this:

1. Master of Reality
1. Let's Talk About Love
3. 20 Jazz Funk Greats
...
(some great distance)
...
blah. Swordfishtrombones
ugh. Rid of Me
eh. Loveless

Oh, literally just bought the Loveless book.

Interesting that even Carl Wilson's Celine Dion book is outsold by the Neutral Milk Hotel one.

Why is this in any way surprising?

the Wilson book has probably had the most press of any book in the series, the author interviewed on the Colbert report, etc. but yeah i wouldn't say it's exactly surprising that more people are buying a book about an album they actually like instead of an intellectual exercise about something they probably don't.

more people are buying a book about an album they actually like instead of an intellectual exercise about something they probably don't.

otm

yeah. i mean, is that even a surprise?

Lex, interested to hear what you thought of the Celine Dion one...?

i liked it - a lot of his thoughts on taste i found rather obvious, but he articulated them really well; and i found a lot of the cultural background stuff (on québec, on the origins of schmaltz) really interesting. the chapter where he talked to her fans was prob the highlight - wish there'd been more of that.

do interviews w/the artist (or their producers, co-writers, engineers, record label staff etc) tend to be part of these books or are they verboten? would've loved to read about a carl wilson/céline dion interview.

i'd be interested to know whether the dion book actually convinced any prejudiced music fan who didn't think she was worth taking seriously

i say that because the book seemed to be a culmination of a lot of music crit thought about stuff like that, about why the auto-dismissal of certain artists and genres that had been traditional and endemic in criticism was actually wrong. and in the years since it was published, music crit seems to have defaulted to that exact position again, stronger than ever.

I've found something rewarding in every book except Dusty in Memphis.

*every book I've read

just read *Another Green World* and *Forever Changes* back to back, and man reading such wildly different books/albums/authorial voices in sequence is giving me whiplash- Geeta is poised and calm and Hultkrans is feverish, but I think each book nicely models what Dave Hickey called the "air guitar" of criticism- the critic more or less consciously strives to re-enact the moves that produced the art by reverse engineering the effects that certain art/lyric/production details had on him/her as they listen- so there's a weird mirroring between artist and critic going on which is inherently a gamble- because such effects might be personal to the listener and unrelated to artistic intentions. But however much both Eno and Arthur Lee arrive on the page already are endowed with auteur-status and control freak reputations that precede these books, both books admit that their artistic intentions might be headed in one direction while the actual outcomes of what made it onto the record might cash out differently because of contingencies that are built into the group nature of the recordings themselves, or the private contingencies of the listener's reception, or (more likely) some messy mix of both. It's so hard to celebrate something without overstating the imagined control of its creator over its every detail.

ugh bad grammar fast posting sorry

thats okay, but i might have to read that post, like, three times. but i have only had one cup of coffee so far. i'll go get another one.

i had trouble reading that air guitar book too!

okay, i think i got it now.

sorry, my jetlag is causing (unusually) tangled, pretentious writing

hot air guitar is more like it

ha ha "hot air guitar"= i am busted

no doubt people could balk at calling Eno an auteur but i think it still fits- I mean Eno's use of "oblique strategies" seems all about destroying the idea of personal, subjective auteur-ism in favor of some kind of distributed and non-subjective process approach, but he's got such a singular production fingerprint that even his supposedly self-less work sounds like him really clearly

the Love outtakes where Arthur Lee is making his guitarist go over a complicated pattern over and over til he gets it right are pretty direct evidence of his control freak grip on the recording process

but both books also wanna talk about "scenius" (in the case of Eno) or broadly shared public moments of revolutionary political feeling (in the case of Love/Lee) and not just bottleneck the whole thing through celebrations of an individual creative genius

so that figure/ground tension seems to be going on in even in two books which are really, really different from each other at the level of tone and sound and stuff

i am buying john d./drew/geeta books for myself for xmas. i am lame for not getting them before now. i've wanted to read them since i heard of them. sorry, guys!

do interviews w/the artist (or their producers, co-writers, engineers, record label staff etc) tend to be part of these books or are they verboten? would've loved to read about a carl wilson/céline dion interview.

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:37 AM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've read about a dozen books in the series, and out of those only 3 or 4 had interviews with anyone involved in the making of the album. of course, sometimes the artist is deceased, or so famous that they're not necessarily accessible to the author, and sometimes their approach is kind of more about their reaction to the album and they might not want the artist involved, although it's definitely not 'verboten' in general.

but yeah a Celine interview totally would've been a better climax for that book than "and now I'm going to actually listen to the album and talk about the songs besides the one from Titanic."

xxxpost My surprise at NMH outselling Carl Wilson comes from how much coverage the latter got outside of music-geek circles - the James Franco plug being an extreme example - but I clearly underestimated the cult of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

xpost I thought the Loveless one was fine if you just want lots of back story and insight from Shields. Obviously the s(t)olid ones get overshadowed by Masters of Reality, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, etc but there's a place for books which just give you the facts in a likeable, readable way, which brings us back to the NMH book. Often I buy these for work-related research so maybe I'm more sympathetic to straightforward narratives than if I was buying them for dazzling prose and leftfield strategies.

my Bieber book is coming out next year

now i gotta listen to the little fucker

the book might be better if you didn't - keep it conceptual, yo

I'm psyched for the Tusk one--I work with Rob Trucks' wife and he is a super nice guy