Book Review: 33 1/3 #63 XO

One of my pet peeves in the 33 1/3 series of books is when author's writing with interesting angles suddenly break off their discussions to offer a linear song-by-song explication of the album. Typically, these song-by-song sections are boring and uninspired. They convey information that isn't particularly new, or interesting, or even necessary (which we see when the song-by-song sections devolve, bafflingly, into awkward, clunky descriptions of how songs sound--the music book equivalent of stopping to write a forty page summary of a novel for a piece of literary criticism). But just because these song-by-song sections are usually lazy and unnecessary, that doesn't mean they can't have any place in a work of music criticism. Enter Matthew LeMay's mostly interesting and well-written counter-analysis of Elliott Smith's XO. LeMay starts his book with a fairly straight-forward and inspired mission--to re-examine Smith's work outside of the cultural fetishes of mental illness, drug abuse, and suicide. LeMay argues that Smith has been taken too literally, and his work done a disservice by critics and fans who elevate the "singer-songwriter's" work because of the narratives surrounding him, not because of the exceptional quality of that work. In order to achieve this, LeMay approaches Smith's work on the level of craft--by providing both literary readings of the song's lyrics, and illustrating how Smith's songs evolved over time, it becomes clear that much of what fans believe to be autobiographical is not, and those songs about a tortured soul always on the verge of suicide maybe shouldn't be read quite so literally.

This is why LeMay's use of the song-by-song analysis is so effective. It isn't filler or fluff--the song-by-song is the book. LeMay treats his analyses as archaeological, in a way. We see how, as lyrics change and bend, their meanings and narratives changing with them, in effect exonerating Smith's music from being sentenced to the songwriter's past. While LeMay is in this analytical mode, his reading of XO is phenomenal.

Where LeMay begins to falter, if only a little, is when he begins dealing more explicitly with other writers' treatments of Smith. In a way, LeMay takes these bits too personally, and fails to recognize the broader context of the most-main-of-mainstream popular culture from which many of these critics were writing. LeMay takes issue with USA Today and Yahoo! Launch articles that describe Smith's sudden rise from "obscurity" to performing at the Oscars. I understand why this seems troubling to LeMay. We've all felt this way, when a buddy says "Hey, I just got this album called Good News For People Who Love Bad News by this new band called Modest Mouse." Just because a band or artist is "new" to the listener/writer/reporter doesn't mean it's new to everyone. But LeMay seems to expect that the primary audiences of USA Today and Yahoo! Launch--the people for whom their writers are writing--would be at all interested in Elliott Smith's past. In a way, LeMay's one failure with this book is his inability to separate the mainstream press from indie culture, and taking that mainstream press to task for trying to present an artist who defied narrativization to a fickle, and largely uninterested mainstream audience. At one point, LeMay is critical of a critic for referring to a particular club in L.A. as small when, in fact, it's a nice-sized club for nice-sized touring acts. Here's the problem--the majority of the audience for which the initial article was written would probably list their most recent concert experience as U2 or Celine Dion or Garth Brooks at Big-Ass-Fucking-Arena-United in 1996.

To this end, some of LeMay's argument feels a bit disingenuous because he doesn't account for the the real mainstream popular culture in the late nineties and early aughts when Smith was getting press. This does not, however, take anything away from LeMay's exceptional work tracing the evolution of Smith's songs, and the argument that he makes in separating Smith's music from the tragic narrative of the artist, himself.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #70 Facing Future

I felt odd reading a book about an album I'd never really listened to. I checked out some of the songs through the magic of downloads and YouTube, but for the most part, I came to Dan Kois' volume on Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwo'Ole's Facing Future as an outsider. This is doubly fitting as, throughout my reading of Kois' volume, I felt like a cultural outsider--but in a good way. And that's what makes Kois' volume on Facing Future such a compelling read--the book is as much about Hawaii's culture, music industry, and values as it is about Iz's album. Truth be told, as a straight forward "album book," Facing Future is a bit pedestrian--Kois traces the history of the performer and the songs well enough, but where the book finds its stride is in its dealings with the specifics of Hawaiian popular culture. That is to say, before reading Kois' book, I never would have guessed or suspected how much of a local music industry Hawaii has, nor would I have supposed that this industry would mirror the mainstream (or mainland) record business, only in miniature. And I definitely wouldn't have dreamed of the existence of Jawaiian music (thank god). While this resulted in a bit of me "othering" a different culture as I read, that was through no fault of the author. In fact, every step of the way, Kois is sensitive to and respectful of the Hawaiian culture he is exploring.

In all honesty, Kois' empathy is the key to this volume. From the opening pages in which he tells the tale of Iz recording the famous "Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" medley in the middle of the night after a night of drinking and possibly drugging, to the treatment of Iz's desire for his family to be taken care of after his inevitable early death, Kois' prose is rich with a sincere pathos that brings Iz and the people surrounding him to life in ways rare for "album books." One of Kois' other strengths is his sincere even-handedness in dealing with local label "politics." For instance, Kois is willing to present Jon de Mello as both a hero in Iz's story, and a villain (or at least an unsavory opportunist) depending on who is talking. That Kois never really comes down on either side of the issue but merely presents the various attitudes toward de Mello is a nice change of pace from other rock books that are quick to label key players as heroes or villains and focus on those roles through the entirety of their involvement in the project.

So there it is--I don't have much to say about this book because I've never been terribly invested in Iz's music. That being said, Kois' volume was interesting thanks in large part to his ability to write well and bring Iz and the people around him to life while also painting a vivid picture of Hawaii and its culture. Sure, the book gets a bit tedious for a spell when Kois lapses into that oh-so-tired trope of the "song by song" analysis (stop it 33 1/3 writers, it's boring and lazy), but all in all, Dan Kois' exploration of Iz's Facing Future and Hawaii is well worth the read, whether your sick to death of "Over the Rainbow" or not.

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Next up, the volume on XO, in which I admit to liking the song-by-song structure for once.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #71 It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back

I had mixed feelings going into Christopher R. Weingarten's volume on Public Enemy's classic album, It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold us Back. On the one hand, I wanted to be blown away by the book because it is about one of my favorite hip hop albums ever. On the other, I was kind of dreading reading an entire book written by Weingarten, known around Twitter as a bit of a reactionary curmudgeon. While I am certainly entertained by Weingarten's antics on Twitter and the constant arguments he provokes through his, ahem, strong opinions (latest: complaining about the state of interviewing), I wasn't sure I wanted to read an entire book by the man. If you haven't read his tweets, you might have encountered the video of Weingarten's stunning rant about the state of music criticism in the age of the internet, given at a conference a few years back. Or maybe you've heard about his successful attempt to review 1,000 records via Twitter (which was later released as this odd artifact). But alright--so that's Chris R. Weingarten, and this review is about a book he wrote, not the man himself. Still, while I was excited to read about It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, I was also worried that Weingarten might fuck it up with his weird, angsty, reactionary music critic persona.

Well, Weingarten didn't fuck it up. In fact, It Takes a Nation of Millions... turned out to be one of the best entries in the 33 1/3 series. It gets off to a bit of a slow start as the author provides context that doesn't quite fit (yet, it makes sense soon), but once the book gets rolling, Weingarten's explorations of the various samples that make up Public Enemy's classic record are engaging--revelatory even. Perhaps the single most important factor in making Weingarten's book a success is his ability to combine narrative and analysis in conveying the history of the album's key samples. He doesn't simply identify a sample's source and move on, he recreates the historical moment of each sample and, in the process, shows us that It Takes a Nation of Millions... is a daring and political record through and through, not just because of Chuck D's lyrics and Public Enemy's persona, but also because many of the key samples were pulled from historically loaded cultural moments. In the process, we learn a little bit about James Brown, his bands, and his contributions to African American culture. We also learn about Funkadelic, Stax records, the Wattstax festival, early hip hop--the list goes on and on. What I find most surprising about Weingarten's discussion of this source material is, while I've always been aware of many of the sample's sources (though I was unaware of just as many), I've never considered their import so thoroughly until reading this book.

Eventually, Weingarten's volume runs out of steam a bit. The final chapter turns toward a discussion of how It Takes a Nation of Millions... has, itself been sampled and how it continues to remain a vital cultural artifact. Unfortunately, this last chapter feels more like an epilogue than chapter eight, or like the 80's movie that gives a brief summary of what happened to each character after the movie. After being immersed in Weingarten's fascinating historical narratives and analysis, I found the last chapter's rapid-fire rundown a bit unnecessary. Granted, the record's influence isn't really the book's focus, but why not put some time into telling more of the stories behind PE's influence on culture instead of just mentioning some times they were sampled.

Of course, that's just a quibble, and the lesser ending doesn't really detract much from the book as a whole. In writing this review, it occurs to me that Weingarten's volume can be a very useful book. In my comp/rhet studies, I've read a glut of material about "remix" culture, or the "rip, mix, burn" mindset. But in their discussions of sampling and digital culture, few of these scholars ever really address the potential for the intertextual methods they are describing. If I had a bit more money, I'd probably carry a dozen copies of Weingarten's book with me at all times so that, when someone uses sampling in the context of comp/rhet, I could give them a copy and tell them how much more exciting their ideas are than they even know.

So there--while I don't always agree with his reactionary woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed tweets, I have to admit that Christopher R. Weingarten has written one of the finest books in the 33 1/3 series.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #77 Tusk

Rob Trucks opens his volume on Fleetwood Mac's classic album "Tusk" with a warning of sorts: "There's a character named Rob in this book who functions in ways that may or may not clearly relate to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, and if you don't feel like you can handle that, then by all means put this book down." Trucks' "warning" does two things for me--first, it really kind of annoys me. Okay, so you wrote a not entirely conventional piece of music journalism. So what? So some boring readers don't like it when music journalism has things like "personality" and "style" and only want to read the same boring facts and anecdotes presented in the same boring way over and over again. By "warning" these people away from a book, you're essentially apologizing to them for not writing the book they would have written. Never apologize to those people. Odds are, what you've written is better than what they would have written. Odds are, what you've written is better than they're ideal of what should have been written. Second--the warning made me more excited about the volume than I had been. Tusk has always been my favorite Fleetwood Mac album, but then, I've never been a huge Fleetwood Mac fan, so that doesn't mean much. Trucks' "warning" sent a clear message to me that said, "hey, this book could be a little bit bold--I like bold, let's read."

And read I did.

And to be honest, Rob Trucks has some serious chops. He does a nice job of navigating dueling stories about the creation of Tusk with moments from his own life which, at times, hardly seem relevant to the album, but which ultimately add up to some sort of psychic and/or spiritual homage to the album's creation and themes. What makes this even more impressive is that Trucks never condescends to his audience, never feels the need to explicitly explain the connection between the bits of memoir and the bits of Fleetwood Mac history. He lets us intuit the relationship. Let's us feel our ways in, around, and through his experiences and how they play off of Tusk. The end result is not just a book that is engaging and smart with a clear emotional core, but a beautifully written, ecstatically felt study of subjectivity and art that might even deserve a second read.

Of course, not everything is perfect in Trucks' take on Tusk. A few of the "What We Talk About When We Talk About Tusk" sections--in which Trucks interviews musicians about the album's influence on their careers--feel a bit tacked on and completely unnecessary and/or uninteresting. Avey Tare's insight into Tusk is about as interesting and relevant as his latest solo album (burn!) and the Walter Egan section, though only a few pages, is pretty boring.

All in all, though, Rob Trucks has delivered a fine volume in a run of great volumes for the 33 1/3 series. His prose is crisp and fresh and I enjoyed learning about Rob Trucks' relationship to Tusk as much as I enjoyed learning about the album itself.


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Next up, Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #76 Kid A

For some reason, I've never really stopped to think about the relationship between music and time. Really, my failure to think about this relationship is a bit odd, surprising even. After all, as Marvin Lin points out in his well-researched, beautifully rendered exploration of Radiohead's Kid A, music is made of time, is time. Music notes themselves--not their placement on a staff, but their shapes and sizes--are nothing more than symbolic divisions of time. To be fair to myself, I know I'm not the only one who hasn't made this connection until now. Many people haven't. And why not? Perhaps because we take the relationship for granted? Or maybe thinking about the relationship between music and time seems like it might be kind of like thinking about the relationship between ice cream and milk--in other words, the connection seems so obvious on the surface that there shouldn't be much to talk about.

Of course, that's not the case or Marvin Lin wouldn't have written such a compelling analysis of Kid A, and I wouldn't be reviewing his book right now. To begin with, I should point out that Lin's entire book isn't about time. Lin does a nice job of balancing an exploration of the album's various contexts, including downloading culture, politics, band dynamics and, capitalism, to the point that, while his conversation of time is certainly the most compelling, Lin sells us on the notion that Kid A is a creature of its contexts. Such a bold assertion might be hard to swallow for some--in particular anyone who champions the notion that great art is timeless--but Lin convinces us so thoroughly of both the timeliness and timelessness of Kid A that the question becomes moot. And what...wait...what just happened there? Ah, of course--see, this entire book is about time but we don't always know it.

Even when Lin isn't explicitly writing about something like music's attempts to subvert linear time by complicating rhythms and challenging traditional song structures, he's writing about the album in its time, and how we have come to understand the album through time, and perhaps most importantly, how spending time on the album can be transcendent.

Lin's book is, without a doubt, a top-tier entry in the 33 1/3 series. Were it not for a few missteps--too much retreading of the talked-to-death Napster years, and an oddly misguided (but well-intentioned) paranoid rant about genetically modified foods--this book could have rivaled Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste for the "best in series" crown. As it stands, Lin's inventive approach to music and time is still one of the series' more compelling entries and one of the few that sent me to the library to track down some of the books and articles quoted within.

Although, a note for the future, Continuum--a works cited list would have been pretty helpful this time out. Why'd you leave us hanging?

Book Review: 33 1/3 #48 Rid of Me: A Story

Kate Schatz's Rid of Me: A Story is a tricky entry into the 33 1/3 series. Most volumes deal with albums in a fairly straightforward manner providing a direct set of criteria through which to evaluate them. These criteria generally look to a book's insight into the album, its clarity of purpose and vision, the quality of the prose, and the various strategies an author uses to explore said album. Schatz's entry on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, like the volumes on Meat is Murder and Music from Big Pink before it, is a little trickier in that its fictional. What makes Rid of Me: A Story more complicated, however, is that it never explicitly deals with PJ Harvey or her album. That's okay. I like the boldness of the approach. Whereas Joe Pernice and John Niven ground their fictions in the experience of listening to the album and a fictionalized telling of the creation of the album, respectively, Schatz's volume focuses instead on the themes and mood of Harvey's album as invoked through a dark and, at times, sexy narrative. Because I'm a fan of the idea of a book of fiction being about a rock album, I wanted to love this book and bury it with praise. And, while much of Schatz's volume pays off, I find myself distinguishing between the volume's two aims: its ability to capture the essence of PJ Harvey's album, and its ability to tell an engaging story.

As an exploration of Rid of Me, Schatz's work is a surprising success. The narrative's grim tone and damaged, but strong characters read as if they were ripped right out of Harvey's album. Schatz's desolate nature imagery and her protagonist's desperation, anger, and longing all bristle with the same energy that Harvey brings to her compositions. Through the protagonist's odd romance and flight from those who wronged them, Schatz is able to explore the raw, thrumming pathos that underlies every distorted guitar and pained howl on Rid of Me.

So what is holding the volume back? Well, it doesn't quite work as a story. At least to this reader. I'd like to qualify this, though. The prose in this book is mostly excellent, and the ideas seem pretty compelling, but neither of these are enough to carry the narrative beyond its simple lack of grounding. Ultimately, Rid of Me: A Story aims to be a non-conventional narrative told through points of view that shift between unreliable narrators, and which are so grounded in the sensation of the moment that I had trouble finding stable footing at times. While this ethereal approach to storytelling works wonderfully in capturing the mood of the album, I found myself struggling to stay invested in Mary and Kathleen, the story's protagonists. Even now, as I think back on the story, the details are a bit hazy--I know Kathleen and Mary escape from shitty patriarchal surroundings, find each other, and forge a darkly erotic relationship. Then, while little happens in the story's present, the women are besieged by paranoia, fear, and bad dreams as we learn bits and pieces of their pasts through hazy flashbacks. In the end, my connection to these characters is about as foggy as the ways their backstories unfold. I wonder if the story might have benefited from some stronger grounding in the present, and perhaps a bit more present-tense friction to help drive so much uncertain remembering.

Still, I feel as if my own fiction writing and workshop mentality (which is begrudgingly branded into my brain) is getting in the way of my fully enjoying Schatz's story. I want to love this book--its approach and attitude is everything I look for in fiction, but without enough footing to stand on, I ended up feeling lost and aloof.

Regardless, I'm thrilled that Continuum and Schatz took the risk with this book. Despite my problems with it, the volume is still interesting and worthwhile, I was just hoping for a little more.

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Next up, Marvin Lin's book on Kid A

Book Review: 33 1/3 #75 Spiderland

As I've been reading all of these 33 1/3 books, I've noticed certain approaches that work better or worse than others. One of the less successful approaches is the historical approach to an album. I'm not talking about the books that attempt to situate an album within a broader socio-political context--in fact, those books tend to be among the best. I'm talking about the books that just give us a straight-up history of a band and/or album. The problem with many of these books, it seems, is that most of these histories have already been told. This is why, I suspect, I've been getting particularly excited about several of the 33 1/3 books that deal with albums from the 90's. These albums haven't been discussed to death the way so many 60's and 70's classics have been. We are left with plenty of room to explore and learn new things that we haven't already pieced together from dozens of biographies, decade lists, and reviews of reissues. This is why, despite being an almost entirely historical account of Slint's formation, recording, and dissolution, Scott Tennent's 33 1/3 volume on Spiderland is an entirely engaging and entertaining read. Not only is Tennent writing a pretty great and interesting book about a seminal album, he's documenting the foundational history of that album in a way that I'm not sure has ever been done before.

To be sure, the first three-quarters of Tennent's Spiderland are easy to love, and easier to get lost in. Tennent gives us a fairly plain play-by-play of Pajo's, Walford's, McMahan's and Brashear's pre-Slint days, explains how they came together, then discusses the band's early history leading up to and including the recording of Spiderland. To say it like this almost makes the book sound a bit underwhelming. It's not. By staying out of the way of these stories, and simply reporting the twists and turns that brought the Slint boys together, Tennent allows their stories to come to life in ways that will be fun and exciting for anyone who has ever been an active participant (or spectator) in any kind-of-sort-of punk scene. The early history is full of drama and excitement. We get the excitement surrounding Squirrel Bait, but also the lesser-known, but equally important (to Slint) weirdness surrounding Maurice. Tennent's treatment of Slint's prehistory is so effective because it speaks to what it means to be youthful and optimistic. In describing Slint's history, Tennent is tapping in to something electric and fun--the feeling of being young and either in or surrounded by good bands. There isn't a feeling quite like it, and here Tennent does a nice job of bringing that excitement to the forefront in his book.

Tennent's prose shines the most when dealing with the history of Slint. The only place where this volume stumbles is in the thirty page section dedicated to analyzing Spiderland the album. Tennent makes attempts to give the song-by-song analysis a through-thread by arguing that, though Slint were primarily known for their dynamics, those dynamics are only interesting because of the music's overall complexity. Unfortunately, Tennent isn't quite able to pull this argument off, and we're left with an occasionally interesting, but largely descriptive chapter. Tennent brings us back to the riveting tale of Slint, however, by closing the book with a description of the band's oddly abrupt and frustrating dissolution. I won't spoil the plot for anyone who doesn't know how it ends.

All in all, this is one of the more exciting and fun volumes in the 33 1/3 series. Tennent does some very difficult things very well in this book--he manages to portray the 1980's Louisville punk scene in vivid detail, and put his characters--Slint--in the middle of it all. At the same time, we get brief glimpses of adjacent places (Cincinnati and Chicago are both mentioned at times, the later more frequently) and supporting players (Will Oldham, to name one). The result is a history of Slint, and ultimately Spiderland, that feels like a living, breathing thing. And of course, it doesn't hurt if you knew enough guys like this that you kind of, sort of feel like you could've been there, even if you weren't.

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This week we'll be rolling out our Albums of the Year list for 2010, so stay tuned. After that, I'll be looking at Kate Schatz's volume of short stories based on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #73 Highway to Hell

Let me begin by disclosing two pieces of information: first, I don't really like AC/DC and second, I won a signed copy of this book from a contest on the 33 1/3 blog. Ideally, these two bits of information will cancel each other out so that this review comes off as fair and even-handed. That being said, I don't mind reading about bands I don't like, and in order to win this book I spent a good forty-five minutes writing and revising a paragraph on why I kind of hate AC/DC, so it's not like I got the book for nothing. So maybe I didn't need to disclose anything at all. I have to admit, though, that I feel a bit funny about sitting down to review this book with the author's signature looking back at me from the cover page. He even wrote my name in the inscription!: "Hey, James--" it says. And now, here I am sitting down to write about his book that has a little more aura than all of the other 33 1/3 books I've previously reviewed. A such, I wish I could say that Joe Bonomo's Highway to Hell is a smashing success. The book certainly has its fair share of successes, but it also falls into some common 33 1/3 series traps, and misses a couple of brilliant opportunities in the process. But let's start by talking about what Bonomo does right.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Bonomo's Highway to Hell is the author's consistently tight and easy prose. Outside of the occasional clunker like, "...Angus reaches deep into his love of blue-styled playing and offers affecting, evocative playing," Bonomo manages to capture the raw excitement of AC/DC and what it meant to be a fan of the band. Bonomo is also particularly successful at providing a reasonably thorough survey of AC/DC's early days, up to Bon Scott's death, and manages to provide a brief overview of what came next (and really, isn't that all we really need?). I'll admit, my lack of familiarity with AC/DC made the book's historical elements particularly interesting and rewarding. Bonomo's passion for the band and the excitement with which he tells their story convinced me to go back and check out some of those early albums, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh and exciting some of the songs sound. Along with providing a brief history of AC/DC, Bonomo also discusses the problem of classifying the band (including some early classifications as punk!), the occasional guilt resulting from listening to some of Scott's more misogynistic or violent lyrics, the disconnect between rock critics and AC/DC fans, the raw enthusiasm of AC/DC fans, the album's cover art, youthful bad behavior and AC/DC, growing old as an AC/DC fan, a selection of photos of AC/DC, production history of the album, sales figures, etc... etc...

And there in lies the biggest flaw in Bonomo's Highway to Hell--while each section of his book is interesting, as a whole it is unfocused. Early in the book, Bonomo takes to a track-by-track discussion of Highway to Hell using each track as a point of entry into discussions surrounding the band--"Shot Down in Flames" leads to a discussion of the band's self-satirizing and machismo, "If You Want Blood (You Got It)" to a discussion of social issues in Scott's lyrics, and "Night Prowler" to a discussion of the serial killer of the same name, and the uncomfortable violence that sometimes crept into the band's songs. The book's movement from one song to the next, and the brief exploration of each tangent, makes the book feel more like a series of blog entries as opposed to a clearly focused book. This isn't uncommon in the 33 1/3 series and it can end up being frustrating at times.

Bonomo's Highway to Hell is a little extra frustrating as, in the book's last quarter, the author hits on particularly fertile grounds for exploration--the passion of AC/DC fans, and how the fans grew up with the band's songs. In these sections, Bonomo discusses Heavy Metal Parking Lot, contacts old school friends for their reflections on Highway to Hell, and talks about contemporary AC/DC fans. Bonomo's exploration of AC/DC fandom through the decades is where his book finds its strongest voice, and its heart. Even the volume's jacket copy highlights this angle in its first sentence: "Joe Bonomo strikes a three-chord essay on the power of adolescence, the durability of rock & Roll fandom, and the transformative properties of memory." Once the book turns to these topics, it is essential 33 1/3. Until then, despite Bonomo's solid prose, the book struggles to find its focus, trying to move in too many directions at once and too often settling to be a report about AC/DC's past instead of getting at something new.
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Next up, Scott Tennent's take on Spiderland. I've been dying to read this one. Look for my review in a few weeks (the end of the semester is crazy, and we'll be posting our AOTY lists soon).

Book Review: 33 1/3 #64 Illmatic

As most of you know by now, one of my biggest consistent critiques of Continuum's 33 1/3 series rests in many of the books' piecemeal approach to their subject matter. Instead of providing a focused, unified analysis of an album through a particular lens, many books in the series work like buckshot. These books work from a mess of scattered ideas in the form of half-formed mini-analyses, histories, and interviews. Thankfully, these weaker books are the exceptions rather than the rule, and with Matthew Gasteier's book on Nas's Illmatic, we get another fine example of the rule. Rather than trying to tell his readers a little bit about everything related to Illmatic, Gasteier focuses his effort on a searching analysis of hip hop's various narratives.

In a series of chapters named after the album's various tensions ("Youth/Experience," "Death/Survival," "Fantasy/Reality," "Tradition/Revolution" etc...), Gasteier expertly blends historical accounts of New York hip hop and details of Nas's life and rise to hip hop fame in service of his literary reading of Illmatic as a sort of hip hop coming of age story, or in Gasteier's own words, "a portrait of the artist as a young black man" (29). Gasteier's reading of Illmatic relies heavily on the idea of narrative. In particular, the author focuses on identifying ways that Nas buys into that coming-of-age narrative while at the same time subverting the dominant narrative of 90's urban culture: "Hip hop, because of its obsession with the 'before' picture of its stars, depends almost entirely on the origin story" (30). Gasteier's discussion of origin stories in hip hop sheds light on the way the hip hop narrative works, and why so many people find it so appealing--the narrative is about authenticity and escape to a better life. Gasteier's discussion of inner-city violence--he points out that, in the late 90's "15-year-old black males in Washington D.C. had a staggering 1 in 12 chance of being murdered by the time they were 45" (36)--furthers his treatment of this theme through the assertion that "While there is certainly a great deal of violent and masculine posturing in hip hop, it is balanced with a deep reverence for the dead, the constant presence of those who have passed, and a strong if commercially muted commitment to ending the cycle of violence" (36). Although Gasteier's reading of Illmatic and hip hop in general sometimes feels like the thoughts of an outsider looking in, his characterization of the many tensions running through the album and genre help provide the art form with an often times overlooked gravity. Maybe that gravity is overlooked because it's taken for granted, or because we're desensitized to it, or because of sheer ignorance.

Following through on the promise of the context he provides, Gasteier ultimately makes some extremely optimistic claims about hip hop's ability to transform socio-economic realities through its decades of consciousness-raising:

Once [the contradiction that we are individuals with dreams, stifled by social, historical, and political bindings] is recognized, it does not seem so hard to understand where Nas's persona comes from, and how easily it can shift and bend at will. Nor does it seem unlikely to imagine that all of those kids who do understand that contradiction, no matter where they come from and how easily they personally can achieve the American dream, would have a perspective on their country that is far different from their parents'. This is the true revolution of hip hop, the one that has yet to play itself out. (80)

While I appreciate Gasteier's optimism, I find this assertion a bit difficult to completely buy into, especially considering, as Gasteier also points out, that much of mainstream hip hop has shifted away from realism to escapism. To these ends, Gasteier's Illmatic almost functions as the naively optimistic companion to Nas's Illmatic in that they both pull at the threads of hard-lived lives in a celebration of survival, only Nas comes off sounding world-weary and a bit desperate, while Gasteier sounds starry-eyed and hopeful. There's nothing wrong with hope or optimism, but Gasteier's reading, here, almost seems to undercut Illmatic's intensity and realism. That is to say, while Gasteier's analysis is expert, the conclusion ultimately draws from it feels a little too pat, too easy--the feel-good answer to Nas's (and hip hop's) perplexing questions.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #72 Pavement - Wowee Zowee

Bryan Charles' author blurb on the back of his book about Pavement's Wowee Zowee is short and direct: "Bryan Charles is the author of the novel Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way." That's all the ethos we get going into this book. We don't see any affiliation with Pitchfork, or The Village Voice, no ties to the actual music business. All that the blurb tells us is that Bryan Charles is a novelist, a writer. As such, fans of hardcore music journalism might be a bit hesitant in approaching Charles' take on Wowee Zowee. Let's hope they aren't, though, because Wowee Zowee is a fun, compelling read, and is easily one of the best books in Continuum's 33 1/3 series. This is a bold claim to make, I know. What, with a writer penning the book instead of a rock critic, not to mention the fact that this is the seventy-second entry in the series, usually a sign that the good albums and ideas are all-dried up. Rather, Bryan Charles' Wowee Zowee is a perfect example of why the 33 1/3 series is so successful and has had such long legs--with every volume there is the chance at greatness. Not every volume is great, and a few are downright boring, but Charles' sharp writing, self-referential framework, and measured earnestness make his book one of the series' biggest successes, and a great piece of rock journalism.

On the surface, Charles' Wowee Zowee might sound like any other 33 1/3 book; the volume combines personal fandom, band interviews, analysis, and a brief track-by-track walk-through in its attempt to get at some sense of truth or understanding about the album. What sets the volume apart from its peers, though, is Charles' engaging prose, and his ability to wind the book's disparate parts into compelling narrative threads. What are these narrative threads? First, we get the author's story, how he came to Pavement, how he, more reluctantly, came to Wowee Zowee, and then how the album unfolded throughout his life. Not always gripping subject matter, but in the hands of a sharp writer with an unique eye for detail and a fiction writer's narrative chops, the memoir elements of the book pop. Second, we get a research narrative, of sorts, complete with a thesis that Charles sets out to either prove or disprove: "Underdog rock record greeted with head-wags and confusion stands the test of time to become fan favorite and indie rock classic" (22). With this thesis in mind, the author digs up old reviews and articles, then sets out to interview band members, label heads, and studio technicians. Rather than delving into straight rock journalism, however, a funny thing starts to happen--Charles' Pavement fandom, the importance of the record to the man, begins to bleed into the research narrative. We read as he stalls on his project due to nerves, chuckle at his frustrations dealing with Matador Records' curmudgeonly Gerard Cosloy, and feel awkward for him when he trips up Stephen Malkmus with a question about lyrics.

Charles' volume on Wowee Zowee is so successful because he strikes the perfect balance between fan enthusiasm and rock journalist curiosity. Nothing is too giddy, or too factual--both of these narrative threads bleed together as one man's attempt to get at the heart of an album he loves. Even the song-by-song, a pet peeve of mine in many 33 1/3 volumes, is handled admirably. The section closes the book, not with section headings and dry explication, but with a stream of conscious rant that ties each song to moments and ideas from the author's life--moments and ideas that tie back to early moments from the book, heightening the ethos that the jacket blurb only hints at. The book is at turns touching and funny (try to read the side-by-side comparison of Billy Corgan and Stephen Malkmus without losing it), and encompasses the best qualities of 33 1/3's finest moments.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #67 Brian Eno - Another Green World

Brian Eno's Another Green World is probably not the easiest album to write about, especially for 100 pages. There's a certain quality to the record--a dense mystique, an obtuse indirectness--that keeps the album from easily succumbing to words. At least words as music critics and scholars like to use them. One of the more interesting bits of trivia Geeta Dayal unearths in her 33 1/3 book on the classic Eno album concerns Eno's use of song titles and often times lyrics not as coded transfers of ideas, but as evocative tonal cues--in other words, Eno didn't have much to say, but he had plenty that he wanted his audience to intuit, perceive or feel. This bit of insight into Eno's creative process is particularly emblematic of both Dayal's successes and missed opportunities in her Another Green World volume--on the one hand, Dayal provides buckets full of insight into Eno's creative process while situating the album within the context of Eno's career; on the other hand, despite Dayal's explorations of Eno's unconventional and surprising-for-anyone-but-Eno methods, there's a certain air of boredom pervading the book's second half, as if the author was ecstatic to write the book but ran out of ideas too quickly.

To be fair, approximately the first half of Dayal's book ranks among the finest writing in the 33 1/3 series. Dayal deftly navigates readers through Eno's early career while introducing us to Eno's creativity flash cards, and relating a number of awe-inspiring anecdotes from the musician's art school days. This first half of Dayal's book is vital and engaging because of the way it approaches Another Green World through the lens of Eno's creative process. Up until somewhere around chapter seven, Dayal has a clear thesis and purpose in her exploration of Eno's work. Then, as happens with many 33 1/3 books, the analysis veers into an unnecessary and somewhat tedious track-by-track walk-through of the featured album. The problem with such sections in otherwise wonderful and interesting books, is that they stop reading like explorations of great albums, and begin looking like slightly glorified liner notes--I don't care that "'Sky Saw' incorporates Jones' fretless bass and Phil Collins' drumming, a searing viola solo by John Cale, additional bass guitar by Paul Rudolph, and various effects by Eno" (Dayal 60). If I wanted to know these things, I could look them up. This kind of information dumping comes across as, at best, filler and, at worst, a stall tactic trying to fill up the white space until the end of the book. This section is also laced with, for the most part, overly vague, uninteresting quotes about the recording process from people who were there. Here's one of Dayal's quotes from Jones:

He's taken that rhythm track and put all this stuff on top of it, and made it into a really strong piece of music. It was really interesting how he initiated the tune; he could have gone a million different ways with an introduction like that. (Dayal 60)

In other words, Eno produced the track...the way that producers generally produce tracks, by putting "stuff" on top of a rhythm track and, as long as the producer is pretty good, making a "strong piece of music." Somehow, the song-by-song analysis section, while brief, kills the momentum of the book's second half by making the album's creation, that had previously been described by the author as fun and daring, sound like an utter bore. The book closes with some more interesting context, tracing a line out through Discreet Music, but it never matches the intrigue of the books first fifty pages.

Now, to be clear, I really hate to rag on Dayal's book more than I've critiqued other 33 1/3 books in other reviews, because the flaws in her approach are quite common to the series, and the first half of her book ranks among the best writing I've encountered in the entire series. Perhaps the series wasn't designed to be read how I'm reading it (one after another, out of a mix of intellectual curiosity and fandom rather than one or the other), or maybe I've just read too many and I'm getting better at picking up on patterns that others don't notice. Whichever it is, the convention of walking through an album track-by-track rarely works unless its being done with a very specific goal in mind. Too often, interesting titles in the series devolve from focused explorations of an album's historical or social context into a hodge-podge of trivia and minutiae that is barely interesting. I love this series of books--shit, I've read 32 of them, and keep a pile of 2-3 new ones stocked and ready at all times--but let's hope that, as they continue to grow into this new decade, the conventions shift a little and we get more books as wonderfully engaging, unique and interesting as "Bee Thousand," "69 Love Songs," and "Live at the Apollo," and a bit less of the books that just sort of go through the motions.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #68 The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka

As I begin this review of Mark Richardson's 33 1/3 book on Zaireeka, I feel like I should be up front about a few circumstances and biases that make me particularly susceptible to coming off as a fanboy:


1. I really love The Flaming Lips, and have for quite some time.

2. My wife and I moved to Oklahoma about 2 years ago, heightening my previous enjoyment of The Flaming Lips and their music.

3. Mark Richardson has been my favorite Pitchfork writer ever since his essay discussing LCD Soundsystem's and John Cale's versions of "All My Friends." Since that time, he's one of only a couple of writers across the internet whose music writing I actively seek out.

With that out of the way, then, Richardson's contextual overview and analysis of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka is one of the better entries in the 33 1/3 series. The reasons for the book's success are simple--Richardson sets out to teach readers about Zaireeka, and his information is shared with an easy prose style. In providing a survey of Zaireeka's creation and reception, Richardson begins with a brief history of The Flaming Lips, up to the point where they began experimenting with sound through the Parking Lot Experiments. Through this context, Richardson deftly weaves the band's personal histories with the development of The Flaming Lips as a musical entity and idea as they hit their stride over a decade into their career. At the same time, Richardson does a fantastic job of exploring the significance of Zaireeka as a musical text, and a work of art. In particular, Richardson's discussion the album's explicit challenge to the ever increasing importance of portability and convenience in music are particularly enlightening, and help position the album, not just in the context of the Lips's career, but in the history of recorded music.

The book loses a bit of momentum in its last quarter, as Richardson attempts to address the album from every uncovered angle in a brief span of time, but thankfully, through the use of personal narrative--a story of his own relationship with the music of The Flaming Lips, 90's culture, and Zaireeka--ends on a compelling note.

On a side note, I've noticed that the 33 1/3 books written on 90's albums tend to be feature some of the series' strongest writing. The books for Bee Thousand, 69 Love Songs, If You're Feeling Sinister, and Zaireeka are all outstanding. Part of me wonders if this is because the authors are writing more out of their own era and experiences, or if its simply a case of fresh ideas growing out of albums that haven't been over-talked by decades of rock criticism.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #47 A Tribe Called Quest - People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

One of the reasons I love the 33 1/3 series so much is because of the diverse points of view that the series embraces. Books in the series have ranged from cultural studies, to historiography, to journalistic reporting, to criticism, to fiction, to the extremely personal. With this in mind, perhaps one of the more consistent ways to judge each 33 1/3 book is to look at how fully it commits to its premise. That is to say, most of the series's strongest books are those which work one specific angle from start to finish. Or, alternately, work from such a broad stance that we're getting a survey of the conversations and themes surrounding an album. Those that either stay broad, or stick to a single approach are, almost unanimously, the strongest books in the series. When books don't commit, what we end up with is a hodge podge of thoughts and ideas: here's thirty pages of band history, forty pages on recording the album, a ten page song-by-song analysis, three pages on the cover art, fifteen pages on critical reception, ten pages on cultural criticism etc... etc... And while good ideas and interesting material can arise from such a layout, the end result often times ends up feeling like the author didn't have as much to say as he or she initially thought, and so is scrambling to fill pages with any old bit of information.

Now, after that lengthy introduction, I need to be direct in saying that Shawn Taylor's entry into the 33 1/3 series, covering A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm does not stick to a single approach, and is a thoroughly unfocused entry in the 33 1/3 series. That being said, despite these apparent flaws, Taylor's volume is one of the more enjoyable entries into the 33 1/3 series because the warmth of his prose and his obvious passion for ATCQ and their work burns on every single page.

Taylor's book opens in strong fashion, throwing readers into a deftly handled mixture of cultural studies and memoir. In the book's opening chapters, Taylor weaves together elements of his childhood and teen years--including his mother's abusive relationship, his Oscar Wao like nerddom, his run in with a bully, his punk phase, and his introduction to hip hop--with hip hop history lessons, cultural geography lessons, and urban theory. Through these open sections, Taylor's prose is full of sharp ideas and lyrical execution: "Aside from giving us a new version of what a city could be, [Tribe] also gave us a means of locomotion: the rhythm--the engine that ran the psychosomatic megapolis--was our train, bike, cab and bus ride through the body metroplex." The first third, or so, of Taylor's book is driven by the marriage of memoir with these types of insights, and makes for a wholly engaging read.

Then something peculiar happens--Taylor gives the book's lengthy middle section over to walking through his personal 3 step test that he developed for albums when he was a teen. The "Three Trials" as Taylor calls them, involve listening to an album three times, focusing on a different facet of his own reaction with each listen, laid out as such: 1. Body, 2. Mind, 3. Spirit and Emotion. What follows, then, first, Taylor's own teenage writings as he subjected People's Instinctive Travels... to these tests, followed by an updated turn through the trials. Surprisingly, the teen version of the trials is a surprising and fun read. It reminds us that, even though many of us choose to study and write about pop music deep into life, there is something urgent in pop music that speaks to the young in ways that we don't always remember. Taylor's teenage self responds to Tribe's music with an immediacy and rawness that was refreshing, if at times a bit cumbersome to read. What is even more surprising, then, is that the the book finally starts to falter when grown up Shawn Taylor steps in to record an updated version of the trials.

It is here, in Taylor's redux of the trials that his volume gets a bit tired and dull. His insights get bogged down in the banal, and he begins making brief references to remixes that seem unnecessary. By the end of grown up Taylor's second trial, we're exhausted, having run through the album five times already, making pit stops at, often times, the same songs, over, and over again. But then something a little bit magical happens with grown-up Taylor's third trial--he gets on a train and rides into San Francisco, meets up with some young street toughs and introduces them to Tribe's music. While the scene should, realistically, read like an overly sentimental cross between Dangerous Minds and Boyz n the Hood, Taylor's self-deprecating sense of humor, self-critique, and raw enthusiasm give the scene a freshness that the book needs as it draws to a close.

Oh, and then there's a wholly unnecessary interview with Bob Powers--an engineer who worked on People's...--which is surprisingly uninformative and feels utterly tacked on. It would have been a short book, but Taylor would have been better off to let this book end where it wanted to end, with Taylor on his way home after his encounter with the urban teens:

I look at the city as it speeds by below, slowly rocking and swaying to the music, thinking about the first time that I ever heard Tip tell the tales of the city, not any particular city, but the one that the listener finds him or herself in at any given moment. Those stories were a social fact of my life . . . those boys that I hung out with [had] their description for the fools in their neighborhood. Hell, any one of them could be that fool, and thinking about this is like mainlining melancholy. My story is their story, theirs is mine and we are all on a quest.
Nostalgia sucks.

Apparently, books about pop music are a lot like albums--if you know when to end them, they're better off. Still, even with a slow bit in the middle, and a tacked on ending, Taylor's People's Instinctive Travels... is, while not one of the strongest, a very enjoyable entry into the 33 1/3 series.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #28 - "Music From Big Pink: A Novella"

I should have read John Niven's 33 1/3 book on Music From Big Pink a long time ago. I'm a fiction writer. I'm writing a collection of stories about music. I love the 33 1/3 series--so, why did it take me so long to get to this, the 28th entry in the series? Fuck if I know.

It might have something to do with the fact that I haven't listened to The Band in quite a while. Or maybe it's because the other fictional entry into the series that I've read, Joe Pernice's volume on Meat is Murder, wasn't as dazzling as I'd hoped. Or maybe it's just because other books in the series have caught my eye first. Regardless, it's a shame I just now got to this book because it quickly became one of my favorites.


From almost the very fourth (more on this later) page of the novella, John Niven effortlessly portrays a time and place that, according to his author bio, he was barely even alive for. By drawing on fictional characters like the drug dealer protagonist Greg, his love interest Skye, and a handful of other burnouts and drug addicts, Niven breathes fresh breath into the task of rock criticism.

Okay, so maybe this novella isn't criticism in it's strictest sense, but it functions as criticism in a number of ways. Niven's novella celebrates Music From Big Pink, while simultaneously positioning the record within its cultural, historical and social contexts. This isn't just a story about a stoner/dealer who happens to know The Band--it's a story about car crashes and assassinations, being afraid of Albert Grossman and hating Lou Reed, sneaking a peak at Dylan's bible and sticking an ice cube up a dude's ass because he's just OD'd on heroin. Somewhere, within all of this, Music From Big Pink is birthed and becomes a soundtrack of sorts for the protagonists. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Niven's novella is that he never pauses to make us read about the album. Rather, he weaves the album's feel into the fabric of the narrative so that by the novella's end we've experienced the album, and The Band, in a new way. That is exactly what 33 1/3 books should do.

Niven's prose, for the most part, makes the book almost aggressively readable. He nails Greg's voice and doesn't worry too much about dazzling us, relying instead on tight, solid sentences that are unexceptional on their own, but add up to a truly engaging story.

The only real quibble I have with the novella is its tacked-on-feeling frame and the overly abrupt end to the Woodstock section. While these elements were less than satisfying, they weren't disappointing enough to ruin the rest of the narrative. Perhaps that speaks to the strength of the characters that an unsatisfying ending doesn't feel like such a big deal?

By my count, I've only got one more of 33 1/3's fictional entries left, Kate Schatz's entry on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. I might pick a copy up the next time I see it. Anyway, I'll try to review 33 1/3 books as I finish them. Even the older ones because, well, I really like the series. Even the lesser entries offer something. So, until next time...