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Column: Lit Snippet
Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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The Neutral Milk Hotel Aeroplane Takes Off
Up on stage, the players tapped into a trancelike—but hardly calm—state where the unexpected was the norm. Performances turned frighteningly physical, bodies and instruments flying, blood being drawn without anyone realizing they’d been hurt. Ben Crum says, “They are easily the best live band I ever saw. There was a powerful energy to their show that I really haven’t seen anywhere else. It was definitely dangerous. There often seemed to be a very real chance that someone, probably Julian, would get hurt. Jeff was always doing things like picking him up and throwing him into the drums.”
Elvis Costello: Armed Forces
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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Unlike Sam Cooke and, later, Aretha Franklin and Al Green, Ray Charles did not cross over to secular stardom from a significant gospel career. But in combining a spiritual melody (“My Jesus Is All the World to Me”) with a worldly R&B lyric—and a vocal style that split the difference—his 1954 recording of “I Got a Woman” became the template for modern soul. His 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was no less innovative. Dressing a genre often viewed as crude in lush string arrangements and vocal choruses would have been bold for a white performer of the time; for a black singer to wring a #1 pop hit (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”) from this synthesis was revolutionary. read more
Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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A Broader Sensibility
Sly and the Family Stone: There’s a Riot Goin’ On
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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The Believer Whose Faith Was Shattered
Pixies: Doolittle
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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April 2005. On a brisk spring morning in downtown Eugene, Oregon, the canary-yellow steel hulk of a 1986 Cadillac glides up to the entrance of my hotel like some combination of gondola and cargo ship. The motor purrs unhurriedly as I approach the window and see the driver sitting stiffly upright, his right arm extended over the passenger seat and a look of blank pride on his moon-shaped face. He does not gesture or speak, but the message is clear. The big man is here in the big car. Get in and come along on a journey.
Dusty Springfield: Dusty in Memphis
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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The only trouble with talking to Jerry Wexler is that, again, he is a conversationalist of the old school. Which is to say, if as a professor I’m well versed in digression, Jerry is fully capable of following me wherever I so digress. The topic of Dusty in Memphis could have taken us anywhere, and it did. But we’d return to the subject when my own sense of responsibility, sometimes dormant, was awakened—or when Jerry helped me to remember why I’d called in the first place. He did, after all, have other things to do.
The Smiths: Meat Is Murder
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
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A note from the author: “If you think of the 33 1/3 series of books as a kind of extended family (please, go with me for a second on this one), then my book is the black sheep: It’s fiction.” – Joe Pernice
Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
“We didn’t start out trying to get anything new, it just entirely happened. We originally started as an R&B group,” Roger Waters told a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), around the turn of the year 1966–67. Syd Barrett continued, “Sometimes we just let loose a bit and started hitting the guitar a bit harder and not worrying quite so much about the chords…” Roger: “It stopped being sort of third rate academic rock and started being intuitive groove.” Syd: “It’s free-form.”
Sunset Boulevard: The Metal Years
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
Welcome to the season of the blockbuster. On August 12, 1991, Metallica released Metallica, their Bob Rock–produced sell-in, with “Enter Sandman” detonating the MTV Video Music Awards. On November 26, Michael Jackson bought number one for Dangerous with the soon circumcised final section of the “Black or White” video. In between, a scad of once and future giants of pop music released albums in time for Christmas. Pearl Jam’s Ten (August 27) and Nirvana’s Nevermind (September 24) portended grunge. Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind (September 10) proved, thanks to the newly installed SoundScan, which measured actual sales rather than the rock-weighted guesses of store clerks, that country music was its own behemoth. MC Hammer’s pop-rap Too Legit to Quit (October 21), successor to the 10 million–selling Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, sold a quick three million and then not a copy more after people actually heard it. Mariah Carey’s Emotions (September 17) was indifferent for her (three million at first, five in all), huge for anyone else. And U2 cemented their status as the most enduringly beloved band of rock’s second generation with an album whose title seemed like a media stunt: Achtung Baby.
But the weirdest blockbuster of them all that fall was Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, released on September 17, a pair of 75-minute CDs with virtually the same cover sold separately in an act of almost colossal arrogance. GN’R had a right, though. Their first album, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction, had been certified eight times platinum in 1991, on its way to an eventual fifteen. Rock was still the biggest musical genre, hard rock was still the biggest kind of rock, and GN’R were the biggest hard rock band of their day. The first single from Use, “You Could Be Mine”, appeared first on the Terminator 2 soundtrack, and the video featured the movie’s unstoppable machine men. Consumers were supposed to be equally unable to avoid Use Your Illusion, which like all post-Thriller blockbusters of that time was planned to play out over several years, relived in multiple single releases and videos, tours, spinoff products, and press provocations. And on one level, it worked: The albums instantly claimed the top two chart positions, ultimately sold seven million copies apiece in the US alone, and spawned videos as leviathan as “November Rain.”
OK Computer in the Future
by: Dai Griffiths
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
Dai Griffiths is Head of the Department of Music at Oxford Brookes University.
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by: Dai Griffiths
published: April 7, 2009
in column: Lit Snippet
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