33 1/3 Series of books

So then I guess he didn't read the 100-odd pages in which Matos discussed Prince.

DeRo is a FUCKING MORON.

Yeah, it's all info, no prose. A lot of the 33 1/3 books seem to forget how much people like that.

Someone should do Tom T. Hall's greatest hits.

seriously though, i realize the books have to sell, hence the more mainstream angle. i'm sure there are a ton of albums the writers would love to write about that aren't commercially viable for the publisher.

actually do you think they would let somebody self-33 1/3? if it was some famous musician?

Morrissey is not attracted to Morrissey.

Carl Wilson is writing one about Celine Dion's "Let's Talk About Love".

This is more or less happening with LD Beghtol writing about 69 Love Songs. No idea how it's coming along; I haven't talked to him since the EMP Pop Conference.

The Stone Roses one was okay, not much in the way of new info and insights really (though I did learn that what I previously thought was just a guitar string squeak in "Elizabeth My Dear" was really supposed to be a silenced gunshot.)

The Riot one was excellent. I especially liked his first chapters talking from the point of view of someone who was there.

I had high hopes for the Endtroducing one since it's one of the few (only?) hip-hop books but it was really just one long interview with Shadow. Very boring, gross hyperbole at the beginning (the author says something along the lines of Endtroducing not sounding like anything before or since type crap) and Davis himself is not the most interesting of interviewees.

The VU and Nico had some informative info but Joe Harvard's writing style and attitude just rubbed me the wrong way.

For this series, I've really enjoyed both the personal takes and insights gained from repeated close listenings that the authors bring to their books and the Endtroducing one was more like "here's an oral history of DJ Shadow" and it didn't focus enough on Endtroducing.

I think the format that was used for the Paul's Boutique book would have served Endtroducing a lot more, ie. context, process, funny stories behind the samples...

oh, excellent. one of the best post soviet bands and one of the best post soviet albums. i still remember seeing the Tantsi video when it was first broadcast.

Have to say the upcoming Erotica book sounds fascinating

Everyone wanted Madonna’s Erotica to be scandalous, even pornographic. In the midst of the early 1990s culture wars, conservatives wanted it to be proof of the decline of family values. The target of conservative loathing, gay men reeling from the AIDS epidemic wanted it to be a celebration of a sexual culture that had rapidly slipped away. And of course Madonna herself, who released the album at the same time as her actually pornographic coffee-book table simply titled Sex, knew sex sells. But Erotica is more sentimental than sexual. At a time when sex was deadly, this sentimentality was not kitsch, but a way of sustaining a sexual culture. In this book, Michael Dango shows how Erotica marks an inflection point in multiple narratives. It is the album in which Madonna began more directly addressing her gay audience, at the same time that gay politics was transitioning from a sexual liberation framework to a rights-based framework that would ultimately culminate in same-sex marriage. To tell this story, Dango draws on his own experiences positioned between two generations of gay people―between a generation decimated by AIDS and a generation that grew up assuming they would be able to get married―as well as works of queer theory, which emerged in the academy at the same time as Madonna emerged on the music scene.

https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/michael-dango/madonnas-erotica-33-13

I expect nothing less than one of this series’ finest moments from that entry

I sometimes daydream about which album I would write about were I to ever send in a proposal.
And I think I've worked out that it would have to be Confield by Autechre.
Partly because I've already written a good 3 or 4 articles about them in the past and I'm a big nerd; but specifically this album because while it is likely their most well-recognised album, it's also the one I've had most trouble getting to grips with. And it's precisely this "thorniness", with 22 years' hindsight, that I'd like to make peace with. Whereas I could probably wax lyrical about LP5 or Sign or Oversteps, it's Confield that I think would yield the most interesting writing

I would love to read that.

I daydream about writing one on You and Your Sister by the Vulgar Boatmen.

It looks like two really great ones are out this month and next month; Erotica and Ingenue, good timing too considering they’re both from the same year.

Open call for Proposals for 2024, deadline is March 29th.

https://333sound.com/33-1-3-open-call-for-proposals-2024/