33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 1: v. 1

Product Information

By far the biggest name in the 33 1/3 roster of writers, Jonathan Lethem is no music critic, but an award-winning fiction writer whose novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude indulge long passages about pop music. His take on Talking Heads’ 1979 album forgoes fiction for first-person criticism, in which Lethem’s teenage self acts as a sympathetic protagonist. Even as he plumbs each song on Fear of Music for meaning and significance, he uses the album as a point against which he can measure his own growth as a listener, becoming older and wiser and hungrier for connection with each year and with each listen. One thing that I hope the editors clarify is whether or not the series is still considering non-academic proposals. I have always liked that the 33 1/3 series welcomes a variety of approaches. There are ‘Making Of’ books like “69 Love Songs” and “Chocolate and Cheese.” There are literary approaches like “Master of Reality,” “Meat is Murder,” and Let it Be.” And, of course, there are the academic/analytical titles like “Let’s Talk About Love” and “Dangerous.” Thirty-Three and a Third) is a series of books, each about a single music album. [1] The series title refers to the rotation speed of a vinyl LP, 33 + 1⁄ 3 RPM. [2] History [ edit ] In 2010, Continuum was bought out by Bloomsbury Publishing, which continues to publish the series. [3] Following a leave, Barker was replaced by Grossan in January 2013. [2] Leah Babb-Rosenfeld has been the editor of the series since 2016. [4]

Have you read any of the titles? Will you? What are your thoughts on either the individual titles so far, or what great New Zealand album would you most like to read about? You can expect these books to begin publishing in early 2024. We hope that this list includes both some well-loved and new albums for you to explore. a b https://web.archive.org/web/20151106232635/https://333sound.com/2015/11/04/open-call-2015-results-the-16-new-books-in-the-33-13-series/

Many writers manage to wrangle interviews with their subjects for these books, but few make as much of the opportunity as Bruce Eaton, who got unprecedented access to the “individuals who were actually ‘in the room’ and had a direct and tangible input into the sound and development” of Big Star’s sophomore album. This direct insight from the band members and engineer John Fry steer the book away from the cult mythology that still clings to the Memphis group and creates something much more even-handed and humane. Eaton conducted the interviews in 2007 and 2008, and his book was published in 2009, just a year before frontman Alex Chilton and bassist Andy Hummel both died unexpectedly. Those immense losses, combined with Fry’s passing in 2014, adds poignancy to a powerful story of thwarted dreams. Have an album in mind that you think we should cover? Let us know what you’d like to see in the series in the comments below.

As U.S. planes deployed with nukes flew around the world and John F. Kennedy assessed the Bay of Pigs, James Brown was playing a week of shows at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. According to Pitchfork contributor Douglas Wolk’s careful reconstruction of the making of Live at the Apollo, nuclear annihilation may have been averted by sheer force of Brown’s will. Of course, the hardest-working man in show business had nothing to do with foreign relations, but Wolk shows how those fears of mass obliteration stoked Brown’s showcase, pushing him to give even more to his crowd and prodding his audience to scream and shout as though their lives depended on it. Fortunately, humanity not only survived a nuclear standoff, but we got one of the greatest live albums ever.A: This time around we’re asking that you do not re-submit proposals. However, feel free to submit one on a different album. In its initial decade, I was obsessed. Reading them like monthly music magazines. I bought every single title for a while there – I had most of the first 100 and I read them all too (at one crazy point in my obsessive-collector-gene life I briefly envisioned having the matching album on vinyl – even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of the work). Instead, I opted for one of my “spiritual cleansing” rituals and promptly sold the whole set, moved them on and out of the house – and didn’t really regret it at all. Garth Brooks in...the Life of Chris Gaines by Stephen Deusner on the album by Chris Gaines (1999) [21] I mostly really liked this. I like Matthew Bannister as a writer. I think his original memoir Positively George Street is absolutely one of the best NZ music books; it’s written with a delightful honesty – so much so that some of the Flying Nun stalwarts took offence. And now we have all these gushy Flying Nun books clogging the shelves, trying to tell “the real story” as a result. Bannister, a musician (Sneaky Feelings, The Changing Same, Dribbling Darts of Love, solo) was also briefly connected to The Mutton Birds, playing with them in their final iteration before the band imploded. So, he’s very close to the subject. But not too close. He compiles fresh interviews with Don McGlashan, Harry Sinclair and Jennifer Ward-Lealand and gives a great cultural context for The Front Lawn’s multimedia weirdness popping up like a pimple on the unexpectant face of late-80s New Zealand. He walks us through the album song by song, as you’d hope in this case (and often expect across the series) and he doesn’t drip too heavy in academia. Though there’s also not a whole lot to learn here, it’s more a survey. That said, it's pretty enjoyable. And I love this album so much that I wanted to cling to anything written about it. I wish he’d gone slightly deeper into his own love of the album, his own discovery.

Geeta Dayal opens her book on Another Green World by admitting that she had trouble writing it. She penned and discarded multiple chapter drafts, then found her momentum flagging. Finally, she decided to let Brian Eno’s set of Oblique Strategies cards direct and inspire her work. It’s an apt move, as Eno often foregrounds the creative process himself, and it results in a probing and thoughtful book that never falls into formula. Instead, Dayal portrays her subject as a deft artist embracing studio technology and balancing his past accomplishments with all the endless possibilities of the future. Q: There is already a book in the series by the same artist as the one I’m proposing, will you consider two albums by the same artist? And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out by Elliott Simpson on the album by Yo La Tengo (2000) [21] Today’s the day! We are thrilled to announce the next batch of 12 books for the 33 1/3 series. From Little Richard to Dolly Parton to Cardi B, we have a variety of new artists and albums to add to the series lineup. We look forward to seeing what our brilliant authors have to say about their music. Over the years, the scope has widened, albums that would have never made it into the canon, or been considered part of any canon in fact, are now celebrated – and that’s awesome. Amazing, actually.We are so excited to finally be able to announce our selections from the 2022 33 1/3 open call. We know that it feels like a long time since the submission window closed, but we’ve been hard at work reading through proposals, sending them on to external advisors*, discussing internally, getting in touch with authors, and making the projects official. So without further delay, here is the list of new titles: Chapman is also an academic from Dunedin. But I’m more aware of his publishing, and have enjoyed some of his books a great deal. Sometimes there’s a mere surface skim, but always there’s the combination of academia and fan with Chapman, and I think that might be the perfect vibe for 33 1/3. It’s palpable that he had his world changed by seeing Alistair Riddell drip from the TV, sartorial and slightly gender-bender-y (for the time at least, in little old New Zealand). If we know anything about Dr Chapman, it’s that he’s a glam fanatic. And in the right way, this is also a book about himself. The best of the 33 1/3 books always situate the writer within the subject, it’s correct for the authors to put themselves right there in the text. You are reading as much for how the person writing discovered the album as you are for nuts-and-bolts stories around the making. Chapman gives you it all, or as much as he can give. A mix of digging through what’s already written, and fresh interviews with all the principals. It’s also a story of implosion – one album and then done. Band members heading off for success in other directions (Eddie Rayner of course with Split Enz, and drummer Brent Eccles first with Australian act, The Angles and then as artist manager and tour promoter with both Brett Eccles Entertainment and Frontier Touring). Riddell remaining a mercurial presence, written off in various ways by various people as a Bowie pastiche and a one-hit-wonder to boot. Chapman points out with a fan’s love that Riddell did Bowie better than almost anyone else, and also grabbed from a bunch of places New Zealanders in the mid-70s weren’t really looking (Van der Graaf Generator). And if there was really only one radio hit on the album there was certainly more substance than just that. I found this book charming and compelling. Which is exactly the space I want to end up in when reading a 33 1/3.