33 1/3 Series of books

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

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

Well, that's exactly why I bought the Loveless book, so perhaps I'll be quite satisfied by it. And obviously I agree with your latter point since that's just the kind of book I wrote for Spiderland!

as a louisvillian who was once accused of being a "slint-worshipper" by crustypunks, i can't wait to read the Spiderland one, so thanks for writing it!

thanks! hope you like it.

as a louisvillian

And I'm all "What did LJ ever do to you?"

as a louis-villain

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

Sort of? I'm old-ish; fairly rockist but open minded; need to have my hand held with a lot of cultural critical thinking... and I found a lot of it really interesting and eye-opening (and, most importantly, never condescending to anyone on any side of his arguments).

Or are you wondering if haters read the book and then, like, bought the album and now embrace and blast it?

Whiney you are ridic

http://i934.photobucket.com/albums/ad184/sdolnack/f6fa2dd6.jpg

lol

lmfao

Rly loving the <3 dotted "i"

<3bbbottt

You've got the same handwriting as my crazy ex-gf.

omg i want one of those

Well they make great stocking stuffers and are available on Amazon now!

yes, but signed w/ whiney dotted-i hearts?

Hate to spoil the lolz, but that is not whiney's handwriting(!)

omg you fraud

Phew, glad I was able to cancel my Amazon order in time!

Hate to spoil the lolz, but that is not whiney's handwriting(!)

― mmmm... yung hummus (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, December 22, 2010 10:48 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm just going to continue to believe that it is

Oh God... why is she pretending to be an American rock critic...

can I just

http://i934.photobucket.com/albums/ad184/sdolnack/efab5013.jpg

no puppy no crumblability

got a couple 33 1/3s for xmas, just finished the Radio City one, which is really good and gives a much more direct and detailed look at Big Star than most stuff written about the band, but it's also easily the most sloppily edited book in the series I've ever seen, just a really disconcerting number of sentences that are missing a word or a clause and barely make sense.

scott, your book is great! you did an outstanding job. especially your descriptions of the actual music. i'll be honest, these are usually the parts of music books - the detailed descriptions of songs - that make me zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz unless a writer is really good at it. and you are really good at it. congrats on the whole thing! write more books for me to read.

and i feel like a big jerk for not reading more of these. no excuse. haven't read geeta's or drew's yet!? that's just so wrong. i am going online to get them.

am reading the Born In The U.S.A. book at the moment and really diggin it

thanks man, I appreciate it. Definitely working on another book though I'm at the earliest possible stage in the process - the basic idea and list of what the content will be. All that's left is me writing 50-75k words.

out of curiosity, what is the avg wordcount of the 33 1/3 books?

Something like 35-40k I think? Mine was right in that window. I'll never forget printing the whole manuscript when I was done and saying to myself "I spent a year and half on this and this is all I wrote??"

i just picked up yr book this weekend scott! about 50 pgs in and you've already shed so much light on the band.