ontinuum’s 33 1/3 series began publication in 2004 with the intention of analyzing specific albums in a small book format. A unique array of authors have contributed to the growing number of releases with varying levels of success. Over the course of the next few months Stylus writer Matt Kivel will break down the entire series, book-by-book, in order to inform our readers of the virtues and pitfalls of each 33 1/3 entry.


Dusty In Memphis, Warren Zanes

Dusty Springfield lurks among the pages of Warren Zanes’ Dusty In Memphis like a shadowy siren. In the book, her personal life and involvement in the making of Dusty in Memphis are vaguely alluded to, but Zanes continuously eschews biography in favor of a detailed analysis of the American South.

As an accomplished PhD student and founding member of ’90s garage-rockers, the Del Fuegos, Warren Zanes exhibits a writing style that marries personal anecdotes with sociological minutiae to form a wonderfully rich dichotomy. He convincingly argues that the South’s romantic appeal is based on the supposed ‘authenticity’ of its people and environment. To Zanes, a southerner lives a purer life, free of the anxiety and petty neuroses of the common city dweller.

The intellectual strength of Dusty in Memphis is unquestionable, but Zanes often loses sight of the record itself, spinning off into superfluous tangents and academic diatribes that distract from the virtue of the music. The choice to make Dusty a looming figure, rather than a central focus of the book, is symbolic of Zanes’ view that she was merely a transmitter of songs and that the South was the real ‘artist’ behind Dusty in Memphis. This interpretation of the album leaves a hazy picture of what she actually brought to the music and her non-presence is a disappointing facet of the analysis. As readers, we learn what the South means to Zanes, but we never really find out what it meant to Dusty.


Forever Changes, Andrew Hultkrans

Upon its release, Love’s Forever Changes stood apart as a startlingly downcast and paranoid statement. It rejected flower power clichés and examined a world that was about to descend into post-coital chaos at the hands of Charles Manson, Altamont, and the Vietnam War. Andrew Hultkrans’ Forever Changes does a wonderful job of evoking the disillusion and fear of the later 1960’s by tapping into Arthur Lee’s psyche and boldly analyzing his cryptic lyrics.

Prophecy is the central theme of the book and Hulktrans weaves together bits of literature, astrology, and philosophy in support of his claims. He likens Lee to a modern day Marquis De Sade—living high above Los Angeles, scoffing at the street protestors and junkies below.

Throughout Forever Changes, Joan Didion’s writing is employed as an intermittent guide to the brooding volatility of LA. Her words paint the scene and firmly plant the reader in Arthur Lee’s world. The sheer breadth of texts and authors that Hultkrans calls upon—Kierkegard, Greil Marcus, Virginia Woolf, Peter Weiss—could easily distract from the book’s central message, but there is a deep sense of purpose in each quotation. Woolf and Kierkegard help to illuminate Lee’s depressive state of mind, while texts from the Gnostic religion tenuously map out a philosophy of the human soul. This book impresses with its audacity, without overwhelming the music that it claims to analyze.


Harvest, Sam Inglis

The search for a definitive Neil Young album is a perilous quest—no single record can accurately sum up his many personas and songwriting styles. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach, and After the Goldrush are the oft-cited critical darlings, but Harvest remains his best-known LP due to its overwhelming commercial success.

In Sam Inglis’ Harvest, the author approaches the album with honesty—shrewdly deconstructing its flaws and virtues without indulging in masturbatory analysis. He has written a simple book conceived in two parts: the first tells Harvest’s history and the events surrounding its production, while the second part breaks down the album in a song-by-song fashion. Inglis is intimately familiar with the music and he points out what makes it simultaneously great (Nashville production; excellent session musicians; songs 1, 2, 4, and 6) and detestable (absurd orchestrations; inconsistent track selection; songs 3, 5, and 7).

Though much of the writing is accurate and well argued, the book itself is rather dry and the entire second part, in which the songs are analyzed, is completely unnecessary. By page 73, the reader has learned everything he needs to know about Harvest, but Inglis cruelly stretches out the final thirty pages with a tiresome rehash of previously explored themes. It is a tedious ending that distracts from the first half of the book’s refreshingly succinct analysis.


The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Andy Miller

In The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Andy Miller takes Sam Inglis’s archetype and makes it far more comprehensive and interesting. Part of his success has to do with the subject matter—The Village Green Preservation Society is a far better album than Harvest and Ray Davies turns out to be a more fascinating and forthcoming centerpiece than Neil Young.

Miller evokes the richness and depth of Village Green’s brilliant character sketches through band interviews and a general reconstruction of the British music scene in the late ’60s. The Kinks are portrayed as a dying nostalgia act falling further into obscurity at the hands of a domineering songwriter. Davies’ obsession with memory and everyday British life binds Village Green’s 15 compositions and serves as the constant theme of Miller’s book. The layers of music and memories are delicately peeled back and illuminated by sensitive analysis that never encroaches upon Ray Davies’ intended meanings.

In a similar fashion to Inglis, Miller devotes nearly half of the book to an evaluation of the individual compositions, but he goes one step further in breaking down all of the songs written during the Village Green era. Attention is given to lost treasures like “Days,” “When I Turn Off the Living Room Light,” and “Rosemary Rose”—songs that are unjustly neglected in the Kinks back catalogue and rarely mentioned in critique. Miller’s book is a more ambitious reworking of Inglis’s format, with comprehensive historical detail and none of the latter’s tediousness.


Meat Is Murder, Joe Pernice

Joe Pernice (The Scud Mountain Boys, the Pernice Brothers) crafts a semi-autobiographical fiction in “Meat Is Murder,” using the Smiths’ third album as the morbid backdrop. Every sentence and character throbs with Morrissey’s brooding misery and Marr’s spiraling reverb. The story chronicles the life of a Massachusetts adolescent who is struggling with all of the after-school special clichés and turmoil that teenagers go through: depression, suicide, unrequited romance, and guilty masturbation.

The protagonist has a crush on a classmate named Allison and his ensuing fantasies distract him from the troubling suicide of a friend and the utter boredom of suburban life. The plot itself sounds rather trite when summarized, but Pernice crafts his tale with emotion and depth that does more than simply restate well-worn accounts of teenage angst. He assesses those difficult years for what they were—awkward, monotonous, and heartbreaking—without sounding condescending or insincere. The Smiths are the one constant in the protagonist’s life and they provide companionship when there seems to be no one else who understands his solipsistic plight.

At the core of Pernice’s message is a genuine belief in music’s ability to provide comfort in times of despair. It is significant that he chose the lesser-acclaimed Meat Is Murder over The Queen Is Dead or The Smiths: fans don’t base their favorite albums on critical assessment—favorite albums spawn from personal experience and the ways in which a particular band can embody a shared state of mind. Pernice understands this and his book breaks from the normally pretentious tone of 33 1/3 writers and reaches out to the common fan.