When I say that this assignment fell into my lap, I mean it literally. I’ve been piling the more than 100 books in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series on top of my desk for the past few months while attempting to read the entire collection sequentially. At some point, the tower of criticism grew too architecturally unsound, and with a slow-motion lurch, more than half of the thin volumes fell on top of me, bouncing off my laptop, cascading onto the floor, spooking the dog, and making an even bigger mess of my already messy office. I carefully re-shelved the books in numerical order and got back to reading.
When the series started assigning one album to one author back in 2003—right around the time the album was rumored to be cooling on a slab in the pop culture morgue, ready to be opened up and autopsied—there was no template for this kind of publication, no prescribed notions to fill. The books could take the shape of an essay, or a work of fiction, or even some odd hybrid of both. But whatever the format, these paperbacks are aggressively accessible: short, pocketsize, easily consumed during a few commutes. Perhaps more crucially, potentially anyone can write a 33 1/3 book: critics, academics, journalists, musicians, poets, assorted armchair commentators.
After that precipitous collapse, while still making my way through the books in order, I noticed the authors grew younger and younger, while their theses became more offbeat and their choices in albums less canonical and more eccentric. Instead of more Beatles and Stones, we get Kanye West, J Dilla, and Ween. The range of the series, especially in its second 50 titles, is not just broader, but bolder, as the writers challenge the accepted Boomer notion of a “rock classic.” There’s something incredibly subversive and compelling about the notion of elevating They Might Be Giants and Dinosaur Jr to the same level as Pink Floyd and the Band. A new title on Koji Kondo’s music for Super Mario Bros. not only expands how we define the concept of an album but reconsiders the very notion of what constitutes pop music itself.
The 33 1/3 series has revealed a way that we can save the album: by dislocating it from history and letting a new generation develop their own canon. Recently announced titles suggest this trend will continue, but while we wait for new editions on Beat Happening, the Raincoats, and the Geto Boys, here are the 33 best 33 1/3 titles in alphabetical order by artist.
Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2
By Marc Weidenbaum
Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 was a puzzle when Aphex Twin released it 21 years ago: an anti-album that eschewed track names and introduced a spare sound that was in the process of either dissolving for forming. It was, in other words, an ideal release for the new forums of this thing called the Internet, whose members not only picked apart the music but helped define the album for subsequent generations. Marc Weidenbaum packs a lot into these 130 pages: a mini-biography of a ground-breaking artist, a capsule history of ambient music, and an example of how digital technology determines how we hear and interpret music.
Aretha Franklin: Amazing Grace
By Aaron Cohen
Daughter of a Baptist minister, Aretha Franklin was chastised when she left the gospel circuit to pursue a pop career. After establishing herself as one of the premiere R&B singers of the 1960s, she made a momentous return to the church on 1972’s double album Amazing Grace, which proved she could still testify mightily. In one of the most thoroughly researched books in the series, Chicago critic Aaron Cohen recounts the album’s creation and reception in great detail, noting that “the popular media rarely present her journey from a gospel perspective, so this album remains frequently overlooked.” His book is a much-needed corrective that restores Amazing Grace to its proper place in Franklin’s catalog.
Big Star: Radio City
By Bruce Eaton
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.
Black Sabbath: Master of Reality
By John Darnielle
There are several 33 1/3 titles that mix fiction and criticism, with varying degrees of success. Of them, John Darnielle’s novella about Master of Reality may be the best. Drawing on his experience as a psychiatric nurse before he found a steady day job with the Mountain Goats, Darnielle approaches the album through a fictional character—a patient who is keeping a journal of his therapy sessions. What could have been a gimmick instead proves both critically engaging and emotionally harrowing, as the lively, angry, intelligent narrator voices his rage and confusion through his love for Ozzy.
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Brian Eno: Another Green World
By Geeta Dayal
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.
Celine Dion: Let’s Talk About Love
By Carl Wilson
The most unlikely album made the best 33 1/3: Celine Dion isn’t usually afforded the same respect as a Bob Dylan or a Joni Mitchell, but Carl Wilson uses her populist art and personal history to ask questions about class, taste, and race in an effort to figure out how one of the most popular singers in the world could be loved and hated in equal measure. The answers he finds aren’t always comfortable, but that only makes them more important and crucial to criticism in the 21st century.
David Bowie: Low
By Hugo Wilcken
No record exists in a vacuum—especially not one of David Bowie’s from the 1970s. Low is the first in his famed Berlin Trilogy (followed by “Heroes” and Lodger), but the Australian novelist Hugo Wilcken links it to Station to Station and its world tour, to the film The Man Who Fell to Earth and its unreleased soundtrack, and to Bowie’s sometimes fawning obsession with Brian Eno and Kraftwerk. Wilcken doesn’t get around to discussing Low until nearly halfway through the book, and while such a lengthy prelude could easily descend into aimlessness or self-indulgence, here it shows the extent that Low works as both a comment on Bowie’s previous records and a guide for his subsequent ones.
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Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
By Michael Stewart Foley
In his book on Dead Kennedys' 1980 debut, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, historian Michael Stewart Foley traces the origins of the radicalized California punk band's political views by chronicling all the turmoil in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, as the hippie ideal curdled into the Me Generation. During this era, San Francisco turns out to be even more fucked up than famously fucked-up New York, roiled by demonstrations, riots, mass murders, serial killings, and even the assassinations of local politicians. "It was not merely that punks in San Francisco were political," Foley observes. "It was also that the city itself made them political, forced them into political contests with those in power, and that was a climate in which Dead Kennedys thrived." But what truly separated the Kennedys from their peers—and what transformed their angst into something powerful and useful—was the humor with which they tackled current events, as singer Jello Biafra in particular understood that a wicked sense of irony was the only weapon against a world that had grown so insane.
Dinosaur Jr.: You’re Living All Over Me
By Nick Attfield
Bug may have had the hit, and Where You Been may have sold more copies, but 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me is the album where Dinosaur became Dinosaur Jr. In addition to appending a diminutive to their band name, the trio refined their post-punk attack as well as their songwriting to become one of the most revered bands in the alternative-rock movement. Obviously drawing from Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life—which told the trio’s story in more condensed form—Nick Attfield uses the album as an entry point into Dinosaur Jr.’s biography, tracing their suburban punk origins through their bitter demise with writing that’s akin to a J Mascis solo: bold, inventive, and with all sorts of tangents and asides thrown in.
Elvis Costello: Armed Forces
By Franklin Bruno
I’m convinced that Franklin Bruno knows more about Armed Forcesthan even Elvis Costello does. His dense interrogation of the album traces its roots through punk back to Ray Charles and Burt Bacharach, examining the nuanced integration of so many different styles into something new, fierce, and idiosyncratic. Yet, this is not hero worship: Bruno closely examines what has become known in Costello lore as “the Columbus incident,” when the frontman described a few African-American musicians in the worst way possible and got decked by singer Bonnie Bramlett. As contradictory and as caustic as his subject can be, Bruno understands that Costello’s shortcomings only make him more fascinating as a human and more compelling as a guy trying to figure out how to rebel against the rock’n’roll establishment.
Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand
By Marc Woodworth
Much like the album it chronicles, Marc Woodworth’s book on Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand feels lo-fi, as though it was written in a suburban Ohio garage and cobbled together from spare parts: insightful analysis of themes and lyrics, thoughtful musings on the actual experience of listening, punchy riffs on Robert Pollard’s rock-hero stage presence, lengthy oral-history narratives by band members and unrelated listeners. This barely processed quality—raw, weird, rambling, direct—not only mirrors that of its subject, but also complements it by emphasizing the glorious spontaneity of the record.
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Guns N’ Roses: Use Your Illusion I and II
By Eric Weisbard
An astute scholar of the pop marketplace as well as of pop music, Eric Weisbard tackles Guns N’ Roses’ 1991 double album Use Your Illusion. In an impressive bit of stuntwork, he admits he didn’t listen to the album before starting the book, instead choosing to write first about how it exists in the pop cultural landscape—both as a conservative inversion of rock’s countercultural aims and as a colossal monument that closed out the 1980s and ushered in the alternative ‘90s. When he does finally spin the albums, Weisbard tries his best to dismiss Axl Rose’s “authoritarian populism that encourages us to put our faith in power chords,” but ultimately and begrudgingly respects the band’s ridiculously outsize ambitions.
Hole: Live Through This
By Anwen Crawford
This book made me care about an artist I had long ago written off. Yes, Courtney Love has pretty much retired from making meaningful music, but for Anwen Crawford, an Australian journalist and critic, that only makes Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This all the more compelling. As she chronicles the decisions that produced the band’s grunge-era breakthrough—which was released just days after Kurt Cobain’s suicide—Crawford writes movingly about the effect these songs had on herself and on other women around the world. These female voices enliven the book with personal, often devastating stories of sexual and social confusion, yet each one found a piece of herself in the violent guitars and howled vocals. In that regard, the album’s anger and ferocious self-determination haven’t diminished in two decades.
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J Dilla: Donuts
By Jordan Ferguson
That such a lively collection of beats and samples—as cerebral as they are physical—was created by a dying man ensures that Jordan Ferguson’s book will be poignant, but his clear storytelling and direct prose allows producer James Yancey to emerge as a complicated, contradictory character. The first half is the most extensive biography we have of the man, from his childhood in Detroit to his death in Los Angeles, just three days after the release of Donuts. The second half grapples with the album as a meditation on mortality, which only shows what an immense talent the world lost.
James Brown: Live at the Apollo
By Douglas Wolk
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.
Jeff Buckley: Grace
By Daphne A. Brooks
“I had been waiting and looking for this sound all of my own life,” writes Daphne Brooks in the introduction to her book on Jeff Buckley’s debut album. She writes about nursing an intense emotional connection to Grace, which she admits is “the most unlikely muse for my American black girl experience.” That is, however, not her conclusion, but a starting point for the book that tries to ascertain the nature of that bond. Partly it’s due to Buckley’s incredibly fluid voice, and Brooks writes especially perceptively about the singer’s debt to Qawwali vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Partly it’s due to Buckley’s integration of so many different styles, from the sophisticated jazz vocals of Billie Holiday to the emotive torch singing of Edith Piaf. She delves deep enough to find new perspectives on the music, but fortunately not so deep that she dissolves the strange power of this mystery white boy.
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Led Zeppelin: IV
By Erik Davis
Even when Erik Davis published his exegesis on Led Zeppelin’s IV in 2005, there seemed to be little left to say about either the band or its best-selling album. Yet the best 33⅓ titles can make you hear familiar albums with fresh ears. Davis has some fun unpacking the rumors of occultic messages hidden in the packaging and in the music (backmasking! mirrored images! Crowley references!), yet he acknowledges the power of the band’s particular mythology to cast a strong spell over even the most skeptical listener. The result, he writes, is “one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum.”
Love: Forever Changes
By Andrew Hultkrans
The first great title in the 33⅓ series paints a vivid picture of Los Angeles in the 1960s and Arthur Lee’s place in it—or, more accurately, just outside of it. While writing and recording Forever Changes, the Love frontman rented a house high in the hills above Los Angeles, where he could look down on the city and its music scene. His songs comprise an “ode to paranoia” that reveals the decay afflicting the hippie generation even before the fabled Summer of Love. Andrew Hultkrans paints Lee as an American prophet—not predicting the future but passing judgment on society. It’s perhaps the finest piece of writing on one of the finest psychedelic albums of that tumultuous decade.
My Bloody Valentine: Loveless
By Mike McGonigal
During the recording of My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 career-making/-destroying album Loveless, Kevin Shields would reportedly stay up for days on end, attempting to achieve a hypnagogic state without the use of narcotics. That sense of wooziness—as though the world is blurring away from you—is a hallmark of the band’s “clearly bent and disorientating” pop music. Former Pitchfork contributor Mike McGonigal recalls the long sessions that produced the unlikely hit, which lasted upwards of two years and took place in too many studios to count. McGonigal relates a bizarre and often hilarious story (the album, insists one band member, was delayed by heated chicken-eating contests), but never lets the bold personalities obscure the even bolder music.
Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
By Kim Cooper
By the time most people discovered In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel had already disbanded, and Jeff Mangum had disappeared. L.A.-based writer Kim Cooper dispels the mystery of the band without diminishing the power of the album as she retraces the NMH’s short history. At the time of its release in 2005, this title was the only book-length examination of Neutral Milk Hotel, and 10 years later it remains the best and most definitive biography of a band whose mystery only intensified its fans’ loyalty.
Oasis: Definitely Maybe
By Alex Niven
Sometimes it can be invigorating and even instructive to disagree with an author. Reading Alex Niven's spirited defense of Oasis' 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe, there were moments when I shook my head and devised mental rebuttals against, for instance, his comparison of the band's pop-history scavenging with hip-hop sampling. And yet, he makes his arguments with such insight that for a while I did come to think of Oasis as a bunch of leftist revolutionaries reconceiving pop music as a vehicle for working-class liberation. Perhaps the reason this book succeeds is that Niven's fire is churned by anger toward his subject: Oasis, he argues, traded their populist politics and dole hymns for posh townhouses and cheesy Beatles retreads. It's a tragic fate, but I'm now convinced it makes their debut sound brasher.
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Pavement: Wowee Zowee
By Bryan Charles
Pavement’s third album isn’t the most obvious choice for a 33 1/3 book. Predecessors Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain are considered to be the band’s best albums, and some fans (OK, me) would even pick Brighten the Corners as a close third. But the series is more concerned with telling new stories than in re-telling old ones, and Bryan Charles relishes the opportunity to argue for a personal favorite. Wowee Zoweemay have been a flop (he even admits a “lack of excitement” when he first heard it), but he shows how the album has gradually revealed a new cohesiveness governing its scattershot aesthetic over the last two decades and how it is now revered by the same listeners who initially shrugged their shoulders.
Prince: Sign o’ the Times
By Michaelangelo Matos
In a series heavy with autobiographical reminiscences and statements about the power of music on adolescents, few 33 1/3 books manage to wring so much meaning and critical weight from a life’s story. Michaelangelos Matos describes his upbringing in the Twin Cities during the 1980s and how his love of Prince’s double-album masterpiece was fueled by hometown pride. That is no mere prelude to his account of the album’s creation or his analysis of it as a new hybrid of jazz and funk. Instead, these early pages form the foundation on which his arguments rest, making this the rare book where you get to know both the author and the critic intimately.
Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
By Christopher R. Weingarten
Early in his book on Public Enemy’s career-making second album, Christopher R. Weingarten explains that the Bomb Squad would tap in their samples manually, a technique that heightened the chaos of the music. Each one, Weingarten explains, was picked not only for its sound and architecture, but for its pop-cultural significance as well; if Chuck D rapped about the tension between funk and rock’n’roll, or between black and white forms of popular music, then the Bomb Squad translated those tensions. The book is relentless in tracing these samples back to their sources and expounding on their new contexts, but it reads as something of a tragedy: “Thanks to the diligent work of copyright attorneys,” Weingarten writes with a barely suppressed sneer, Public Enemy’s “cavalier, frontiersman attitude toward samples will never be repeated.” Not even by the band themselves.
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Ramones: Ramones
By Nicholas Rombes
The Ramones’ 1976 debut is arguably the foundation of punk as we know it, a dud at the time but one of those albums that finds its audience over several generations. In 128 pages, Nicholas Rombes confronts some of our most closely held ideas about punk in general and the Ramones in particular: that they were poor kids from bad neighborhoods, that they rebelled against traditional notions of success in the rock industry, that they invented punk, that their use of swastikas and other questionable imagery can or should be easily explained. That he’s not susceptible to the band’s enduring myths makes his analysis that much more precise and allows him to describe the songs with the verve of a true fan.
R.E.M.: Murmur
By J. Niimi
Writing about an album like R.E.M.’s debut can be treacherous. More than 30 years after its release signaled the rise of alternative music, Murmur somehow retains its playful sense of evasion, as though purposefully obscuring its meaning in an attempt to make you listen more closely. Explaining each lyric and riff risks deflating its mystery, yet J. Niimi proceeds with caution. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is finding the right distance from his subject, so that he can explain how the music works without telling us what it’s about. That is, after all, the whole point: “Murmur is a record that needs to be completed by the listener.”
Sigur Rós: ( )
By Ethan Hayden
The Icelandic band Sigur Rós isn’t especially well known for their probing or poetic lyrics; the motivating idea behind the band’s third album, barely titled with a set of parentheses, is that all meaning can be conveyed with orchestral swells and fades, walloping drum fills, and patient crescendos of bowed guitar. Furthermore, frontman Jónsi Birgisson sings in a made-up language called Hopelandic, which makes the lyrics inscrutable beyond their texture as pure sound. Ethan Hayden painstakingly transcribes the eight untitled tracks on ( ) into a series of long vowel sounds and odd clusters of consonants in an attempt to diagram the syntax of this strange new tongue and figure out what the band might be saying (despite their best efforts not to say anything).
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Slayer: Reign in Blood
By D.X. Ferris
Per D.X. Ferris, Reign in Blood was a pivotal Slayer record even before they recorded it. The band had signed with Rick Rubin, then most famous as “the guy who put Aerosmith in that rap song,” and fans feared he would either dilute the abrasive thrash of Hell Awaits or saddle them with too many gimmicks. But when Ferris describes the album as “twenty-nine minutes of pure hell,” he means it as the utmost compliment. Occasionally he comes across as overly enthusiastic, taking the band’s greatness on faith, but in writing one of the few 33 1/3 books on a metal album, Ferris knows he must argue persuasively for their inclusion. Toward that end, he conducted a raft of original interviews for the book (everyone from Slayer frontman Tom Araya to Tori Amos) to tell their story as clearly and as vividly as possible.
Talking Heads: Fear of Music
By Jonathan Lethem
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.
Television: Marquee Moon
By Bryan Waterman
The New York punk scene of the 1970s doesn’t lack for documentation, some of it worthwhile (Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire) and some of it worthless (the 2013 film CBGB). That Bryan Waterman still finds something new to say is impressive enough, but he expertly expands the context for Television’s debut album and for the Bowery punk movement within New York’s larger arts scene. At more than 200 pages, it’s one of the longest titles in the series, but each page seems to contain some new idea or discovery. Plus, his meticulous song-for-song analysis locates new connections and implications in these riffs and lyrics, portraying a band that was always in the process of burning it down and starting again.
The Kinks: The Village Green Preservation Society
By Andy Miller
One of the hallmarks of the 33 1/3 series is the track-by-track runthrough, during which the author proceeds, often in painstaking detail, to describe each song on a given album in order. Occasionally this can be redundant or tedious, but one of the first great examples is in Andy Miller’s book on the Kinks’ finest hour. The album tells its own story: The first three tracks establish the band as tongue-in-cheek curators of England’s past, at a time when its future looked increasingly murky, while such tracks as “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains” and “All of My Friends Were There” pointedly complicate that idea.
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Throbbing Gristle: 20 Jazz Funk Greats
By Drew Daniel
The title of noise greats Throbbing Gristle’s most famous album always struck me as facetious, but Drew Daniel—one half of Matmos and a former Pitchfork contributor—takes the title more or less at face value and explores how jazz and punk were usefully perverted into something new and explicitly un-punk on the 1979 album. Daniel writes evocatively of his own experience with 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which he discovered as an adolescent looking for more extreme forms of music, but the best passages in the book are his Q&A’s with the band members, who remain as confrontational and confounding as ever.
Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle
By Richard Henderson
Before it was released as Song Cycle, Van Dyke Parks toyed with the idea of calling his 1968 debut Looney Tunes, both a reference to the famous Warner Brothers cartoons (Parks was signed by Warner Brother Records) and a fitting description of the manic, shapeshifting, world-devouring music he was making at the time. Song Cycle is an animated mash-up of parlor pop, calypso folk, movie scores, and anything else that struck Parks’s fancy, and Richard Henderson admits its manic nature makes the collection a hard sell for the uninitiated. But he makes a persuasive case, not only detailing Song Cycle’s creation (it was rumored to be the most expensive pop album of its time—which made it the biggest commercial failure of its time) but arguing for it as an unheralded artifact of the psychedelic era.