Series: 33 1/3

In this wickedly entertaining and thoroughly informed homage to one of rock music's towering pinnacles, Erik Davis investigates the magic—black or otherwise—that surrounds this album. Carefully peeling the layers from each song, Davis reveals their dark and often mystical roots—and leaves the reader to decide whether Four Symbols is some form of occult induction or just an inspired, brilliantly played...

Conceived as the last testament of a charismatic recluse who believed he was about to die, Forever Changes is one of the defining albums of an era. Here, Andrew Hultkrans explores the myriad depths of Love's bizarre and brilliant record. Charting bohemian Los Angeles' descent into chaos at the end of the ‘60s, he teases out the literary and mystical...

What is the world that Nine Inch Nails made, and what was the world that made Nine Inch Nails? These are the questions at the heart of this study of the band's 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine. The album began as after-hours demos by mercenary new wave keyboardist Trent Reznor and was disciplined into sparse industrial dance by a handful...

Though Nevermind was Nirvana's most commercially successful album, and the record that broke them—and the grunge phenomenon—internationally, In Utero has increasingly become regarded as the band's best album, both by the critics and the band members themselves. Instead of sticking to the "grunge pop" formula that made Nevermind so palatable to the mainstream, Nirvana chose instead to challenge their audience,...

One of the greatest double albums of the vinyl era, Sign 'O' the Times shows Prince at his peak. Here, Michaelangelo Matos tells the story of how it emerged from an extraordinary period of creativity to become one of the landmark recordings of the 1980s. He also illustrates beautifully how—if a record is great enough and lucky enough to hit...

Seemingly granted classic album status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World – a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas...

R.E.M.'s debut album, released in 1983, was so far removed from the prevailing trends of American popular music that it still sounds miraculous and out of time today. J. Niimi tells the story of the album's genesis with fascinating input from Don Dixon and Mitch Easter. He also investigates Michael Stipe's hypnotic, mysterious lyrics, and makes the case for Murmur...

Having designed Roxy Music as an haute couture suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower—reaching back to sadly beautiful chivalric romances. Dadaist (punk) noise exited; a kind of ambient soft soul entered. Ferry parted ways with Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, and drummer Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding...

Words like inspiring, expansive, and moving are regularly used to describe Sigur Rós's ( ), and yet the only words heard on the record itself are a handful of meaningless nonsense syllables. The album has no title—or rather, its title is no title: just an empty pair of parentheses. The intention is that listeners will fill in the parentheses with...

In 1978, Siouxsie and the Banshees declared ‘We don’t see ourselves in the same context as other rock'n'roll bands.’ A decade later, and in the stark aftermath of a devastating storm, the band retreated to a 17th-century mansion house in the deracinated Sussex countryside to write their ninth studio album, Peepshow. Here, the band absorbed the bygone, rural atmosphere and...

Sleater-Kinney’s 1997 album Dig Me Out is built on Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s competing guitars, Janet Weiss’s muscular rhythms, and layered vocals that teeter between an urgent, banshee-like vibrato and a lower accompaniment. Dig Me Out was the band’s third studio album, but the first one written and recorded with Weiss. It inaugurated Sleater-Kinney into a lineup that would...

Aja was the album that made Steely Dan a commercial force on the order of contemporaries like Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and Chicago. A double-platinum, Grammy-winning bestseller, it lingered on the Billboard charts for more than a year and spawned three hit singles. Odd, then, that its creators saw it as an "ambitious, extended" work, the apotheosis of their anti-rock,...

New York City in the 1970s was an urban nightmare: destitute, dirty, and dangerous. As the country collectively turned its back on the Big Apple, two musical vigilantes rose out of the miasma. Armed only with amplified AC current, Suicide's Alan Vega and Marty Rev set out to save America's soul. Their weaponised noise terrorised unsuspecting audiences. Suicide could start...

It's the summer of 1979. A 15-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs, "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music"—and everything spins outward from that one moment. Jonathan Lethem treats Fear of Music (the third album...

Derided as one-hit wonders, estranged from their original producer and record label, and in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles, the Beastie Boys were written off by most observers before even beginning to record their second album - an embarrassing commercial flop that should have ruined the group's career. But not only did Paul's Boutique eventually transform the Beasties from a...

Ignored by virtually everyone upon its release in November 1968, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is now seen as one of the best British albums ever recorded. Here, Andy Miller traces the perilous circumstances surrounding its creation and celebrates the timeless, perfectly crafted songs pieced together by a band who were on the verge of disintegration and...

The story of the Minutemen has been told before (Our Band Could Be Your Life, We Jam Econo), but this book focuses purely on their music—the punk ethic and the remarkable, enduring songs that comprise this, their greatest achievement. Including extensive interviews with Mike Watt and many others close to and inspired by the band, this is a great tribute...

From the "War on Hippies" to the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, the story of Modern Lovers is a high-octane tale of Brutalist architecture, rock 'n' roll ambition, and the struggle for identity in a changing world. One of punk rock’s foundational documents, the archetype for indie obsession and all but disowned by its author, The Modern Lovers was an...

“Pinkard’s account... brings to light the ambition and artistry, the stress and frustration, and ultimately the joy of making this very special album." —Peter Katis, The National’s engineer, and mixer on Boxer “I am spooked by how well [Pinkard] has captured these characters and this madcap project. I am not sure how he did it.” —Carin Besser, co-lyricist on Boxer...

In 1979, from the basement of a London squat, The Raincoats reinvented what punk could be. They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists. In this short book...

What could be more punk rock than a band that never changed, a band that for decades punched out three-minute powerhouses in the style that made them famous? The Ramones' repetition and attitude inspired a genre, and Ramones set its tone. Nicholas Rombes examines punk history, with the recording of Ramones at its core, in this inspiring and thoroughly researched...

A Catholic high school near Boston in 1985. A time of suicides, gymnasium humiliations, smoking for beginners, asthma attacks, and incendiary teenage infatuations. Infatuations with a girl (Allison), with a band (The Smiths), and with an album, Meat is Murder, that was so raw, so vivid, and so melodic that you could cling to it like a lifeboat in a...

In 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Drew Daniel (of the experimental band Matmos) creates—through both his own insights and exclusive interviews with the band—an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas. The book consists of a series of close readings of each song, interspersed with thematic entries on key concepts, strategies, and contexts such as noise, leisure, process, the abject, information,...

By 1985, Tom Petty had already obtained legendary status. He had fame and money, but he was restless, hoping to stretch his artistry beyond the confining format of songs like “The Waiting” and “Refugee.” Petty's response to his restlessness was Southern Accents. Initially conceived as a concept album about the American South, Southern Accents's marathon recording sessions were marred by...

So much, both popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the Cold War, and Carlos's gender to this critically important innovation. Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies,...

In contrast with many of their punk peers, Wire were enigmatic and cerebral, always keeping a distance from the crowd. Although Pink Flag appeared before the end of 1977, it was already a meta-commentary on the punk scene and was far more revolutionary musically than the rest of the competition. Few punk bands moved beyond pared-down rock 'n' roll and...

Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980 and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album’s cover, disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into the margins of rock 'n' roll history—relegated to cult status among post-punk and indie rock fans. Their lasting appeal owes itself...

33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives—often through...

This is a fascinating and thoroughly researched exploration of the best-selling gospel album of all time. For two days in January 1972, Aretha Franklin sang at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles while tape recorders and film cameras rolled. Everyone there knew the event had the potential to be historic: five years after ascending to soul royalty...

In recent years, Björk’s artistry has become ever more ambitious and ever more respected. With the release of her conceptual app-album Biophilia in 2011, and a huge retrospective exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art coinciding with her most recent album, Vulnicura, in 2015, her status as art-pop auteur has been secured. The album that made all this possible,...

Carole King’s Tapestry is both an anthemic embodiment of second-wave feminism and an apotheosis of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound and scene. These two elements of the album’s historic significance are closely related, insofar as the professional autonomy of the singer-songwriter is an expression of the freedom and independence women of King’s generation sought as the turbulent sixties came to...

This book marks the tenth anniversary of The Grey Album. The online release and circulation of what Danger Mouse called his ‘art project' was an unexpected watershed in the turn-of-the-century brawls over digital creative practice. The album's suppression inspired widespread digital civil disobedience and brought a series of contests and conflicts over creative autonomy in the online world to mainstream...

In 1968, the Flying Burrito Brothers released The Gilded Palace of Sin on A&M Records, selling a disappointing 400,000 copies. Almost forty years later, front man Gram Parsons is still spoken of with almost messianic reverence. Patron saint of alt-country, emblazoned with a shining cross, dead at 26. Overshadowed by Parsons, this album remains an anomaly in the country rock...

At the outset of summer in 1990, a Houston gangsta rap group called the Geto Boys was poised to debut its self-titled third album under the guidance of hip-hop guru Rick Rubin. What might have been a low-profile remix release from a little-known corner of the rap universe began to make headlines when the album's distributor refused to work with...

It was the season of the blockbuster. Between 12 August and 26 November 1991, a whole slew of acts released albums that were supposed to sell millions of copies in the run-up to Christmas. Metallica, Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Garth Brooks, MC Hammer, and U2—all were competing for the attention of the record-buying public at the same time. But...

At the dawn of the 21st century, the New York City indie rock scene emerged as a beacon of artistic innovation, capturing widespread attention. Within this vibrant milieu, Interpol’s second album, Antics, stands out as a landmark release. Released in 2004, Antics initially received a spectrum of responses—acclaimed by fans yet somewhat dismissed by critics. Nevertheless, time has favoured Antics,...

This book charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording artist and a visionary music producer. Track-by-track commentaries focus on the experience of the album from the listener’s point of view, drawing attention to the art and craft of Bush’s songwriting, production and sound design. It considers the vast impact and...

When LCD Soundsystem broke up in 2011, they left behind a small but remarkable catalogue of music. On top of the genius singles and a longform composition for Nike, there was a trilogy of full-length albums. During that initial run, LCD Soundsystem—and the project's mastermind, James Murphy—were at the centre of several 21st century developments in pop culture: indie music's...

From male bisexuality to religion in pop, Little Richard spent the 1950s pioneering ideas that are still too challenging for the mainstream. As a Black multimillionaire rock star, he was the most exciting person on the planet between 1955 and 1957, the years in which his seismic debut album was created. Featuring new interviews with famous fans including Sir Elton...

One Step Beyond isn't the best album in the world - it's not even the best album by Madness. It is, however, a great record and an exceptional debut album — fully formed despite half the band still being in their teens — and it remains as exhilarating, inspiring and as much fun as when people first heard it nearly...

In August 1994, Manic Street Preachers released The Holy Bible, a dark, fiercely intelligent album that explored such themes as mental illness, murder, and war. Richey Edwards, the band’s lyricist and motive force, vanished five months later; he was never found. In his absence, The Holy Bible entered the rock canon alongside Joy Division’s Closer and Nirvana’s In Utero, the...

When the Motor City 5 stormed the stage, the band combined the kinetic flash of James Brown on acid with the raw musical dynamics of the Who gone berserk. It's a unique band that can land itself on the cover of Rolling Stone a month before the release of its debut album and then be booted from its record contract...

Dangerous is Michael Jackson's coming of age album. Granted, that’s a bold claim to make given that many think his best work lay behind him by the time this record was made. It offers Jackson on a threshold, at long last embracing adulthood—politically questioning, sexually charged—yet unable to convince a sceptical public who had, by this time, been wholly indoctrinated...

In a bar called The Bucket of Blood, a man shoots the bartender four times in the head. In the small town of Millhaven, a teenage girl secretly and gleefully murders her neighbours. A serial killer travels from home to home, quoting John Milton in his victims’ blood. Murder Ballads, the ninth studio album from Nick Cave and the Bad...

When 20-year-old Odetta Holmes—classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson”—veered away from both opera and musical theatre in favour of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s coffee houses, she was making one of the most portentous decisions in the history of both American...

Vs. is the sound of a band on fire. The same confluence of talent, passion, timing, and fate that made grunge the world’s soundtrack also lit a short fuse beneath Pearl Jam. The band combusted between late 1992 and mid-1994, the span during which they planned, recorded, and supported their sophomore record. The spotlight, the pressure, the pace—it all nearly...

“Essential reading, plain and simple.” - Cult Following“Savidge knows the album backwards.” – UNCUT This Is Hardcore is Pulp’s cry for help. A giant, sprawling, flawed masterpiece of a record, the 1998 album manages to tackle some of the most inappropriate grown-up issues of the day – fame, ageing, mortality, drugs, and pornography – and still come out crying and...

To wander the streets of a bankrupt, often lawless, New York City in the early 1970s wearing a T-shirt with "PLEASE KILL ME" written on it was an act of determined nihilism, and one often recounted in the first reports of Richard Hell filtering into the pre-punk UK. Pete Astor, an archly nihilistic teenager himself at the time, was most...

Shelved for over 20 years, Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 stands alongside Otis Redding’s Live in Europe and James Brown’s Live at the Apollo as one of the finest live soul albums ever made. It also reveals a musical, spiritual, emotional, and social journey played out over one night on the stage of a sweaty Miami...

Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991—the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others—none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint. Few single albums can lay claim to sparking an entire genre, but Spiderland—all six songs of it—laid the foundation for post rock in...

The story behind the making of the album that signalled the descent of Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart into a haze of drug addiction and delirium is captivating enough for the cinema. In the spacious attic of a Beverly Hills mansion belonging to John and Michelle Phillips (of the Mamas and the Papas) during the fall of 1970, Sly Stone began...

Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs an awning with the new name for his venue. The place will be called CBGB & OMFUG which, he tells them, stands for “Country Bluegrass and Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.” That’s exactly the sort of...

"In the absence of love, there is loneliness, sorrow and desperation. And that's where I come in." — Greg Dulli, introducing "When We Two Parted" onstage in San Francisco Like no record before or since, Gentlemen is fraught with psychological warfare, bedroom drama, Catholic guilt, reprehensible deception and uncleansable shame that coincide with relationships gone seriously wrong. This story explores...

The B-52s were always queer, though not overtly, and this book dissects the coded queer messaging in their music, using 1989’s Cosmic Thing as a focal point. Alongside the author’s own queer awakening, Crighton investigates the band’s history and recorded work to date, providing cultural context along the way, and proves what was obvious all along – the B-52s aren’t...

Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy. This well-written first novel captures not just some of the dreams of that bygone era, but the way those dreams died. - Greg Kamiya, The New York...

The Go-Go’s debut album Beauty and the Beat was released on 8 July 1981. The album spent six weeks in the number one spot on the Billboard charts, produced two hit singles, and sold more than two million copies, making it one of the most successful debut albums of all time. Beauty and the Beat made the Go-Go’s the first,...

A fully illustrated oral history of the Magnetic Fields' 1999 triple album, 69 Love Songs – an album that was afforded "classic" status by many almost as soon as it was released. LD Beghtol's book is chatty, incestuous, funny, dark, digressive, sexy, maddening, and delightful in equal measures. It documents a vital and influential scene from the inside, involving ukuleles...

Tracing the creation of Exile on Main Street from the original songwriting done while touring America through the final editing in Los Angeles, Bill Janovitz explains how an album recorded by a British band in a villa on the French Riviera is pure American rock & roll. Looking at each song individually, Janovitz unveils the innovative recording techniques, personal struggles,...

It’s October 1977, and the Rolling Stones are in a Paris recording studio. They’re under siege. Keith Richards’s legal troubles after his arrest for heroin possession threaten the band’s future, and the broad consensus among rock aficionados is that the band will never again reach the heights of Exile on Main Street. But Mick Jagger is writing lyrics inspired by...

For a few decades now, They Might Be Giants’ album Flood has been a beacon (or at least a nightlight) for people who might rather read than rock out, who care more about science fiction than Slayer, who are more often called clever than cool. Neither the band’s hip origins in the Lower East Side scene nor Flood’s platinum certification...

Two entwined narratives run through the creation of Swordfishtrombones and form the backbone of this book. As the 1970s ended, Waits felt increasingly constrained and trapped by his persona and career. Bitter and desperately unhappy, he moved to New York in 1979 to change his life. It wasn't working. But at his low point, he got the phone call that...

It’s hard to think of a solo female recording artist who has been as revered or as reviled over the course of her career as Tori Amos. Amy Gentry argues that these violent aesthetic responses to Amos’s performance, both positive and negative, are organised around disgust—the disgust that women are taught to feel, not only for their own bodies, but...

When I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen hit stores in 1991, Leonard Cohen's career had plummeted from its revered 1960s high. Cohen's record label had refused to release his 1984 album Various Positions—including the song "Hallelujah"—in the United States. Luckily, Velvet Underground founder John Cale was one of the few who did hear "Hallelujah," and he covered it...

Ween now seems like a permanent fixture on the pop-cultural landscape, but when the band first hit MTV in the early '90s, their longevity wasn't so secure. Nearly two decades on, though, Aaron "Gene Ween" Freeman and Mickey "Dean Ween" Melchiondo preside over one of the most devoted cult fan bases in American music. So how exactly did Ween manage...

In this remarkable book, Douglas Wolk brings to life an October evening in 1962, at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem – an evening at the height of Cold War tensions. In great detail, Wolk pieces together what took place (and what was recorded) that night, and illustrates beautifully the enduring power of one of James Brown’s – and popular music’s...

On the night of Sunday, April 23, 1961, Judy Garland made history. That’s no hyperbole. Surrounded by a throng of ecstatic fans (3,165 to be exact), the legendary performer delivered a concert in Carnegie Hall, the live recording of which became, upon release, an unlikely pop cultural phenomenon. Judy at Carnegie Hall, the two-disc set that captured all 25 numbers...

Although Exile in Guyville was celebrated as one of the year's top records by Spin and the New York Times, it was also, to some, an abomination: a mockery of the Rolling Stones' most revered record and a rare glimpse into the psyche of a shrewd, independent, strong young woman. For these crimes, Liz Phair was run out of her...

More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, “La Divina Assoluta,” remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliché of tormented talent –...

In the autumn of 1980, Richard and Linda Thompson (of Fairport Convention fame) had recently been dropped by their record label and were on the verge of divorce. Somehow, they overcame these miserable circumstances and managed to create an album considered by many to be a masterpiece. Shoot Out the Lights puts the album—in the context of personal history driving...

Outside his native France, the view of Serge Gainsbourg was once of a one-hit wonder lothario. This has been slowly replaced by an awareness of how talented and innovative a songwriter he was. Gainsbourg was an eclectic, protean figure; a Dadaist, poète maudit, Pop-Artist, libertine and anti-hero. An icon and iconoclast. His masterpiece is arguably Histoire de Melody Nelson, an...

Released in the U.S. in January 1968, The Who Sell Out was, according to critic Dave Marsh, a complete backfire—the album sold well, but not spectacularly and was ultimately a nostalgic in-joke: Who but a pop intellectual could appreciate such a thing? Further rarifying its in-joke status was its unapologetic Englishness; thirteen tracks stitched together in a mock pirate radio...

The Wild Tchoupitoulas is a definitive expression of the modern New Orleans sound. From "Hey Pocky A-Way" to "Big Chief Got a Golden Crown," the album draws on carnival traditions stretching back a century, adapting songs from the Mardi Gras Indians. Music chanted in the streets with tambourines and makeshift percussion is transformed throughout the album into electric rhythm and...

Stephen Catanzarite takes a close look at what many consider to be U2's Achtung Baby, examining it through the prisms of religion, politics, spirituality, and culture. He illuminates its previously unexplored depths, arguing that it's a concept album about love and the fall of man.

Posing more riddles than the average sphinx, with its decipherable answers pointing somewhere dark, Song Cycle was anything but passive. I had already witnessed hippie bands playing with their backs to the hall, so the thought of late ‘60s musicians being interested in their audience struck me as a concept bordering on revolutionary. The debut album from songwriter and pianist...

July, 1967: It seems the entire country stopped to listen to a husky voice steeped in the simmering secrets of the South tell a tragic tale of teenage suicide. So much for the Summer of Love. Ode to Billie Joe knocked the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” off the top of the charts, and Bobbie Gentry became an international...

Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba are Camp Lo. These two emcees from the Bronx, NY entered the American hip hop scene with an insider slang that bewildered listeners as they radiated the look of a bygone era of black culture. In 1996, they collaborated with producer Ski and a host of other contributors to create Uptown Saturday Night, featuring the...

In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape. Yet even if the album did cast its radical vision over the future of music, much of the record's artistic strength is actually drawn...

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years," David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy...

Thirty-Three and a Third is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. Over 50,000 copies have been sold! Passionate, obsessive, and smart. —Nylon ...an inspired new series of short books about beloved works of vinyl. —Details Franklin Bruno's writing about music has appeared in the Village Voice, Salon, LA Weekly, and...

Marc Woodworth's book covers the album’s long and unorthodox period of writing, recording, sequencing, and editing. It includes interviews with members of the band, manager Pete Jamison, web-master and GBV historian Rich Turiel, and Robert Griffin of Scat Records. At least sixty-five songs were recorded and considered for the album, and five distinct concepts were rejected before the band hit...