June 19 2006
33 1/3 Series
Great concept for a series: pocket-sized books about awesome albums. The 33 1/3 volumes feature a slew of writers sharing their musical obsessions, and the lineup is quite varied. I picked up four for records I’ve long been smitten with: The Pixies’ Doolittle, The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, DJ Shadow’s Entroducing, and Ramones’ Ramones. All give valuable insight into each act’s creative processes and happy accidents in and out of the studio. The writers also place the works in context of the social and pop climates of the time, and interview people from behind the scenes. Each edition has enough meat to satisfy the minutiae-obsessed fan in me, but a lot of my gauzy attachments were shaken as well. It’s unavoidable for audiences to project their own emotions and interpretations on songs and bands, especially when the art and artists are intentionally oblique. Such is the case with The Pixies’ cryptic lyrics and public face. I knew the band had problems getting along, but the interviews with lead Pixie Black Francis make him out to be a royal jerk who had to suffer a bunch of brats. Francis also makes no bones about his lyrics being mostly nonsense. The Beastie Boys are famous for having been shameless hooligans early in their career, and their story is one of astonishing excess. On the other hand, I always thought DJ Shadow came off as conceited in the press, but he seems to be a genuinely modest and genial hip-hop scholar from what I read. In place of any deep analysis of the four Ramones, we get a dry treatise on the politics of punk that clashes with the pure mindless fun of their classic album. All the books made me eager to pull out the discs for a fresh listen, but my feelings for them were definitely altered, at least temporarily. Should art be taken on its own merits, or does the behavior and beliefs of the artist necessarily affect your experience? (Note that no radio stations seem to have stopped playing Michael Jackson songs.) A line from the Ramones book sums the series up best, I think: “There is something to be said about learning as little as possible about that which you deeply love.” My generalized rating for the series based on just four books:
