With the exception of academics, and a few serious writers such as New York Times’ David Carr or the ever loved/hated Sasha Frere Jones (“lack of miscenegation in indie music” seriously, Sasha?) plenty of music criticism comes off as hipster tripe or “rockist” rambling. 33 1/3, the series from Continuum offers a legitimate venue for serious music writers to scribe their research and thoughts about everything from the musicality of great records to the meaning of lyrics to the techniques in the recording. Each book is a densely packed wealth of knowledge about one particular record. Thus far I bought Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In an Aeroplane over the Sea” as well as My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” and David Bowie’s “Low.”
I can’t express this enough, this series is awesome. Whenever I’m going to do a book review, I like to make sure we have it in stock, and if we don’t, take the steps needed to get it in stock. This series I was so excited about I was crossing my fingers when I checked Betterworld.com (which makes it much harder to type, incidentally) but we have many of them!
Anyway, the series in question is called “33 1/3” (after the RPM of a record player for an LP). You can find their blog here, or the wikipedia entry here.
