A blog about Bloomsbury Academic's 33 1/3 series, our other books about music, and the world of sound in general.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Under 21 Writing Contest: The Winner!

Many congratulations to Dan Connelly - his essay on Phil Ochs' album I Ain't Marching Any More is the winner of our competition. Dan's prize is a quarter of Continuum's annual profits (to be precise, $250), and his essay will be published as Chapter 21 of our upcoming book 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1, which has extracts from the first twenty books in the series.

It was not easy picking a winner from the entries we received - and honorable mentions in particular should go to Justin Wolfe for his essay about the Strokes, and to Phil Rudich for his essay on Radiohead.

Here's a short taste of Dan Connelly's winning entry:

***

The Christers, radicals, reactionaries, teetotalers, janissaries, communists and the straight-edgers and I have all found a high in common. We are juiced on indignation. We have an agenda, a movement, a plan (maybe just an angle) for a major paradigm shift. We have wet dreams about marches and protests and strikes and living through Sergei Eisenstein's October but we do nothing. We read pamplets and books and listen to folk music and punk rock and we fantasize and do nothing. We become "political" to get our indignation fix. Our pretensions of "political consciousness" amount to so much masturbation.

That being said, Phil Ochs is my favorite way to masturbate.

***

And here's a great clip of Phil Ochs performing the title track of the album.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What is mom going to say when she reads this!!!??? We know Bob doesn't give a ****. I guess Mom doesn't either...

Stay up bregh and congratulations on your major award!

--- Pat