The 33 1/3 Series of Pocket Books on Key Albums

Cafe Society
1

Have you seen this series?

I have read the books on Exile on Main Street and Ramones - although I didn’t find the Exile book all that well written, I appreciated how it made me think about the record. As for Ramones - it was incredibly well written - although it had an academic bent, it really captured the context and the inexpicable raw punch of punk and the Ramones in particular (if you haven’t seen the Ramones’ documentary End of the Century it is essential.

I would recommend exploring the books if you haven’t - anyone read other ones they’d recommend/

2

Post-holiday bump

and please mentally change that last bit of punctuation in the OP to a “?”

Thank you.

3

Hey, thanks for the link! Looks like a neat series.

4

I’ve read the one on Aqualung and thought it was quite good.

5

The series seems to be split almost 50/50 - brilliant to abhorrent. The Love - Forever Changes book is definitely the latter. It’s basically a guy’s PhD thesis that he just decided to shit out and have printed up as a 33 1/3 book - it’s a whole bunch of pointless, aimless blather about gnosticism, prophecy, and alchemy that has NOTHING to do with the album, but that he tries to tie in like, “uhh…and Arhur Lee was like a prophet, man…like, he thought he was one and stuff…” Absolutely retarded.

6

I read and liked the one on The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society. I haven’t seen any others that are about albums I’m interested enough in to read a whole book on.