33 1/3 Series of books

did you get a reply from them? I heard nothing after I submitted a proposal in 2020.

Red Hot + Blue is such an amazing choice. I thought only I liked it! Discovered recently that Ed Lachman got the Songs For Drella gig because of the RH+B video he made for Annie Lennox.

Here’s the full Red Hot And Blue film btw..
https://vimeo.com/46642017

I like that it's Nu Amerykah pt 2, which quietly became my favorite Badu album.

I'm definitely gonna read the Land of Rape and Honey one (the author is a friend), and I'm intrigued by the idea of books on Café Tacvba and the Isley Brothers.

Do they ever just take a regular ass person or does everyone with an accepted entry have some kind of journalistic experience?

Aside from having a blog, I was a regular ass person. My 33 1/3 book was the one and only time I ever got paid to write about music.

xp didn't hear anything. i assume they get a lot of proposals, and looking back i could have made mine more focused and less academic.

i am a regular ass person, though, so it's good to hear that they've taken from others who aren't music critics. i have written professionally about art and architecture but not music.

Just finished the Achtung Baby book, and...yeesh. Nothing wrong with having your own take on what songs mean, and obviously religion does inform a lot of Bono's lyrics, but this was basically a stealth religious tract! I would have said the writer had a very strained interpretation of the lyrics to fit his beliefs, but in honesty, from about the halfway point he barely even bothers to refer to the actual songs in any way, and instead goes on and on about this hypothetical man and woman that the entire album is supposedly about.

I bought the 33.33s of 69 Love Songs, Another Green World and Aeroplane Over the Sea on the same shopping trip, and hope they're better (how could they not be?...)

I remember enjoying the latter two a whole lot

Just discovered that there is a Brazilian equivalent, in Portuguese of course.

treeship. at 5:13 29 Jan 23

xp didn't hear anything. i assume they get a lot of proposals, and looking back i could have made mine more focused and less academic.

i am a regular ass person, though, so it's good to hear that they've taken from others who aren't music critics. i have written professionally about art and architecture but not music.

Please, someone pitch sellout jazz-funk

or microhouse

Damn, I always think about pitching one for New Orleans brass band, and the genre format would be much better than a single album (at least for wider appeal). But I'm sure it would take over my life, and pinning down all the musicians for interviews would be an exhausting process.

The one about Depeche Mode 101 looks promising..

Table of Contents
1. Live or Memorex?
2. Is “Music” Electric?
3. It's Hip, it's Totally Hip, It's the Only Thing Happening
4. Dreamboats and Market Shares
5. Uneasy Listening
6. America, Man
7. “KROQ's Woodstock”
8. No Mode, No Nirvana: 101 and its Legacy

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/depeche-modes-101-9781501390326/

Missed a trick by not having it as #101 in the series.

That wouldn't bode well for a book about Yes' 90125

I started to put together a genre pitch back in the initial round but then realized I’d much rather just write about one album.

other than an ilxor writing about dolly parton i don't recognize the names of anyone writing new books. (not that i ever read them. i never see them anywhere anymore! i think i would have to live in a city to see them...or be an internet shopper...)

RC, you should do a wolf eyes book. has anyone done one? or a noise book!

Who knows, man? Who knows…

I would read Jordan on New Orleans brass !

Pulp’s This is Hardcore coming next year by Jane Savidge.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/pulps-this-is-hardcore-9798765106952/

Nice.

The Dead C’s Clyma est mort

wow!

ooh nice

!

Just a warning--the Dead C's one is in 33 1/3 Oceania which I learned, on buying two of the books in that series yesterday, is a completely different size to the rest of the books. This is aesthetically maddening.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0K_qQoaIAEfvmw?format=jpg&name=large

This one just came in at the library. Looks interesting:

https://333sound.com/vopli-vidopliassovas-tantsi-excerpt/

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

Have to say the upcoming Erotica book sounds fascinating

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

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

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

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

I would love to read that.

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

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

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

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