Songs in the Key of Life

Another of the newly published books in the series is Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy. Here's an extract from Part IV of the book, "Death".

***

Wonder saw it all before it happened: his premature death, incomplete and inconclusive, as inexplicable as it was imminent. He began receiving fatal premonitions in early 1973; they drove him to write and record faster, his own legacy lingering at the mercy of some undefined mortal terror. "He sees the earth zigging towards a destructive end," Ben Fong-Torres wrote in his introduction to a 1973 Rolling Stone interview with Wonder. "He can see himself dying soon."

Songs had become urgent messages of intuition and forewarning: "Higher Ground," for example, was foisted on him in a blink, some kind of spiritual transmission he received without warning. It's a lightning bolt of apocalyptic rock and roll, its consecrated ideology ensconced in its cocksure rhythm, glimpses of the hereafter and reincarnation prancing in its clavinet-saturated head. This is how pop music becomes prophecy, how something designed to compel your ass into motion is, in fact, a psychological conspiracy. That arguably the greatest single song of the 70s offers up gooey mortality in the center of its compositional confection is a triumph of a futurist mind.

His edgy intuition reached a critical mass on Songs, which augments the burning personal crises to those of the world-at-large. On the first LP alone, four songs - "Love's in Need of Love Today," "Have a Talk With God," "Village Ghetto Land" and "Pastime Paradise" - are fueled by a looming sense of ruin that must be avoided at any cost, visions of destructive futures that require immediate attention to remedy. They're nowhere near as urgent-sounding as "Higher Ground," because they are a few years removed from that initial onset of existential panic; when addressing the fragile mortality of an anxious public, it's best not to make sudden, shrieking movements toward the few available exits.

Even as the 70s towered over the premature corpse of idealism, rock and roll and R&B thought of death from a distance. There was the occasional gutsy confrontation - the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" or Gaye's "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" - but bands and artists were trafficking in the sound of death (see Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On) more than speaking freely of its undeniable presence. Mayfield's "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go" was a frighteningly funky tune that sat in the driver's seat of the bus on the road to the end of the world. Wonder's "Higher Ground" acknowledged Mayfield's resigned terror, but also looked for the way to make something optimistic out of a horrible situation. It was juiced with the potential of a redemptive consciousness - an afterlife, a parallel universe, an alternate reality, anything that strung a silver lining on death's cloud.

***

Meloy on Fresh Air

Colin Meloy, a man famous mostly for having written a 33 1/3 book based loosely upon the Replacements' Let It Be album, will be appearing today on NPR's Fresh Air show. Tune in, and see if the book gets a mention!

Pink Industry

Good to see Greatest Hits Vol 1 on a pink-themed table at Bailey Coy Books in Seattle. (Thanks to Emma for the photo!)

I read somewhere recently that more people are colour-coordinating their bookshelves at home. I'm still all about the alphabet myself, but colour-themed display tables seem like a smart move for cool booksellers.

3 weeks to go...

Just a quick reminder for anyone who missed it first time around, we are currently accepting new proposals for the series, and the deadline is Wednesday Feb 14th. Below is the original announcement:

***

We're now accepting proposals for future 33 1/3 books, to be published in 2008 and 2009. Here are some rules, guidelines and ramblings:

* Proposals on artists already covered in the series (or under contract to be covered) will not be accepted. In other words, these people:

The Smiths
The Kinks
Neutral Milk Hotel
Pink Floyd
Joy Division
Velvet Underground
Rolling Stones
The Beatles
Radiohead
Love
Neil Young
Beach Boys
Dusty Springfield
DJ Shadow
Jimi Hendrix
Led Zeppelin
The Replacements
David Bowie
The Band
Beastie Boys
Jeff Buckley
Prince
Pixies
The Ramones
R.E.M.
Bruce Springsteen
Bob Dylan
Elvis Costello
James Brown
Abba
Jethro Tull
Nirvana
Sly and the Family Stone
The Who
The MC5
The Stone Roses
Guided By Voices
Magnetic Fields
Joni Mitchell
Guns N Roses
My Bloody Valentine
The Byrds
Stevie Wonder
A Tribe Called Quest
Sonic Youth
Captain Beefheart
Steely Dan
The Clash
The Minutemen
PJ Harvey
Celine Dion
Nine Inch Nails
Richard and Linda Thompson
Tom Waits
Belle & Sebastian
Throbbing Gristle
Nick Drake
U2
Brian Eno
Lucinda Williams
Patti Smith
Kate Bush
Television

* The deadline for submission of proposals is Wednesday February 14th - how very romantic.

* Only one proposal per person. Seriously!

* If you've submitted before, you're perfectly welcome to do so again.

* All proposals must be submitted via email - the address is pitches33@yahoo.com Please don't send any proposals to my regular work email. I'm trying to concentrate on Biblical Studies for the next few weeks.

* Choice of album is important - we're here to sell some books, after all. We're more likely to accept a proposal on Odessey & Oracle than on Angels With Dirty Faces, as much as I love them both.

* Your proposal should take the form of a Word document attachment. Do not include your proposal in the body of your email.

* Your proposal needs to include these simple things: your name; a brief outline (up to 1000 words) of how you would approach your album of choice; a brief bio of yourself (up to 500 words), outlining why you're awesome, and why you're the best person to write about that album; a couple of sentences on which 33 1/3 book you've enjoyed the most so far, and why; that's pretty much it.

***

Last time around (towards the end of 2005), we received about 170 proposals, and ended up offering contracts to 21 of them. I've no idea how many we'll get this time, or how many we'll end up signing, but we do promise to read them all and to give them all equal consideration. Once we've narrowed it down to a shortlist (by the middle of March), we'll contact those authors to finalise manuscript deadlines, etc. I hope this covers everything! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section to this post, and I'll do my best to answer them.

MBV Competition

If you're yearning for a free copy of Mike McGonigal's Loveless book, here's your chance. Or actually, here's your chance, thanks to the good people at To Here Knows Web.

Which reminds me, we haven't had a competition on here in a while. I'll see if we can think of something good.

Be Good or Be Really, Really Awful

Very nice to see this Fionn Regan video doing the rounds - I'm not sure which backdrop I like the most. There's something about the swimming pool that appeals, but those cows are awful cute too.

All of which reminds me, you might want to check out our brand new history of the music video, Money for Nothing, by Saul Austerlitz. Here's a clip from a chapter called "This Video's for You":

***

Much like "Jump" and "Panama," "Hot for Teacher" depends on Roth to provide his class-clown antics; the only difference is that here, he could do so in an actual classroom. We begin with Waldo, a prototypical grade-school nerd with a bowtie and a cowlick. As his mother tries in vain to fix his hair, Waldo (with a completely disjointed adult voice) expresses his concern that he can never live up to the effortless cool of his savvier classmates. Later events prove him prescient. The schoolbus arrives, with Roth as the driver, and Waldo stumbles into his own personal hell. To the sound of the song's opening guitar lick, the camera pans across an array of kid-sized rockers, pausing before arriving at the inevitable sore thumb. One student wonders what this year's teacher will look like, and "Hot for Teacher" shifts from black-and-white to color stock for her arrival. A catwalk appears in the middle of the room, and the new teacher, clad in a swimsuit, struts her way down the classroom runway.

There is something profoundly disquieting about the sight of the preadolescent scuzzballs checking out grown women with a seemingly discerning eye, but "Hot for Teacher" quickly papers over the discomfort with the arrival of Roth and the band, who proceed to dance on the school desks. The classroom becomes a jail cell, with the student-prisoners waiting for the bell's reprieve; when it finally does, they are greeted by Roth, now a limousine driver waiting to escort them wherever the day may take them. "Hot for Teacher" was as shameless as the later Alicia Silverstone - Aerosmith videos in its lowest-common-denominator appeals to the male psyche, but where the latter looked like trailers for the next Hollywood blockbuster, Van Halen depended on Roth's comic skill to sell its versions of the good life.

***

The Human Hearts

Franklin Bruno, author of our Elvis Costello book in the series, has a new blog and a new band. There are a couple of free songs to download on that page, too - they're both good, but "Professionals in Cancun" is a cracker.

Two reasons to love Amazon.com

These are the first two reviews on Amazon of Mike McGonigal's Loveless book (which is now IN STOCK!!) - both written long before the book was actually written. I love that 12 out of 61 people found the one-star review helpful.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

Um..., October 30, 2004Reviewer: Trevor "sansmerci43" (Coventry, RI USA) - See all my reviews
Um, why did somebody review this book already? The guy writing it hasn't even finished it yet. Already he knows it's "pointless"?

Oh, I know! The reviewer tried to post in the future, but his post got sent through a time warp to be posted years earlier.


12 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

pointless, April 6, 2004Reviewer: A reader
What kind of book is this? Nobody will ever be able to comprehend what Kevin Shields was thinking and why MBV took the route that they did until Kevin comes clean. He does not want to. My Bloody Valentine's purpose was solely to create soundscapes to enjoy in altered states of the mind and this book completly misses on all parts. You want info on MBV, read old articles from Melody Maker.

Radio Radio

Sean Nelson, author of our Court and Spark book and all-round superstar, can be heard discussing his book on 94.7 KUOW FM in Seattle, tomorrow (Friday) at 2pm Pacific Time.

Here's an extract from Sean's book.

***

"The Same Situation" is a continuation of "People's Parties" on many levels; the fact that the two songs connect like Siamese twins joined at the D chord is practically the least of reasons. If you listen to the song alone on a CD or as a digital file, the beginning contains an abrupt remnant of the "laughing it all away" chorus from "Parties," like when you answer the phone and hear the person on the other end talking to someone else for a moment before saying hello to you. Even the opening line feels in medias res - "...Again and again, the same situation, for so many years..." - lending the feeling that the song has been going on for some time already. I like to imagine that it's not only the same narrator as "People's Parties," but the same evening, an extension of the same thought process, addressed to the same absent lover. Having fully immersed herself in brutal introspection, the narrator turns her attention to a troubled romantic relationship and continues to delve. A robust chorus of voices, acoustic guitar, and percussion gives way to a single piano and a lone lead vocal, like a single thought emerging out of a scattered mind (though hardly a weak and a lazy one), forming a moment of clarity that invites the insight of the opening line. And though "The Same Situation" makes more sense with its antecedent in place, the effect of the song is devastating no matter how you play it.

That opening line is the sound of a woman catching herself in a pattern; from wishing she had more sense of humor and fumbling deaf, dumb, and blind...she then looks up to find herself in the same situation: "tethered to a ringing telephone in a roomful of mirrors" and to a man whose affection she neither trusts nor fully even believes ("I asked myself when you said you loved me, 'do you think this can be real?'"), and reduced to the status of "a pretty girl in your bathroom, checking out her sex appeal." In this regard, she's no different, really, from the photo beauty she just saw laughing and crying by turns. They're both lost in their desire to be who they're supposed to be. And anyway, extroversion and introversion, you know, it's the same release.

***

Movie from Big Pink?

In exciting movie news, the film rights for John Niven's Music From Big Pink novella have been optioned by producer/writer/director team Stephen and Jez Butterworth, who together made Birthday Girl in 2001, starring Nicole Kidman as a mail-order bride. (Happens to me every day.)

Jez Butterworth is a highly regarded playwright and screenwriter whose credits include the play Mojo (which won the Olivier award at the Royal Court and was later made into a feature film which Jez directed). He has just completed the screenplay for Paramount Pictures forthcoming James Brown biopic, to be directed by Spike Lee later this year.

So, who knows if/when this will actually get made, but we're pretty thrilled here at Continuum HQ.

Audiobooks?

I was contacted recently by someone who's interested in helping us turn some 33 1/3s into audiobooks. Either they'd be straight readings by the authors (or an actor, I guess), or we'd mix it up with actual interviews with band members, etc. Any interest, if these were downloadable for $5 or $10?

Regan's America

Probably only of interest to about two of you, but what the heck - it looks like the adorable Fionn Regan is sneaking over to NYC to play a couple of low-key warm-up shows for his headlining UK tour kicking off in late January. He'll be at the Mercury Lounge on Wednesday 17th (he's on early), and at Union Hall in Brooklyn the following night.

Wolk vs. Pynchon!

One of the more entertaining reviews we've had since the series started in 2003, courtesy of Tom Nissley in The Stranger.

Present and Future

We've just received copies of the brand new books on Songs in the Key of Life and Notorious Byrd Brothers, and they both look wonderful.

In other news, we've had proposals so far for books about albums by Philip Glass, the Wu-Tang Clan, Jefferson Airplane, the Modern Lovers, Hole, the Mountain Goats, Slayer, the Flaming Lips, Miles Davis, and Young Marble Giants. Remember, you still have until Valentine's Day to send in your own proposal.

Time of the Season!

We're now accepting proposals for future 33 1/3 books, to be published in 2008 and 2009. Here are some rules, guidelines and ramblings:

* Proposals on artists already covered in the series (or under contract to be covered) will not be accepted. In other words, these people:

The Smiths
The Kinks
Neutral Milk Hotel
Pink Floyd
Joy Division
Velvet Underground
Rolling Stones
The Beatles
Radiohead
Love
Neil Young
Beach Boys
Dusty Springfield
DJ Shadow
Jimi Hendrix
Led Zeppelin
The Replacements
David Bowie
The Band
Beastie Boys
Jeff Buckley
Prince
Pixies
The Ramones
R.E.M.
Bruce Springsteen
Bob Dylan
Elvis Costello
James Brown
Abba
Jethro Tull
Nirvana
Sly and the Family Stone
The Who
The MC5
The Stone Roses
Guided By Voices
Magnetic Fields
Joni Mitchell
Guns N Roses
My Bloody Valentine
The Byrds
Stevie Wonder
A Tribe Called Quest
Sonic Youth
Captain Beefheart
Steely Dan
The Clash
The Minutemen
PJ Harvey
Celine Dion
Nine Inch Nails
Richard and Linda Thompson
Tom Waits
Belle & Sebastian
Throbbing Gristle
Nick Drake
U2
Brian Eno
Lucinda Williams
Patti Smith
Kate Bush
Television

* The deadline for submission of proposals is Wednesday February 14th - how very romantic.

* Only one proposal per person. Seriously!

* If you've submitted before, you're perfectly welcome to do so again.

* All proposals must be submitted via email - the address is pitches33@yahoo.com Please don't send any proposals to my regular work email. I'm trying to concentrate on Biblical Studies for the next few weeks.

* Choice of album is important - we're here to sell some books, after all. We're more likely to accept a proposal on Odessey & Oracle than on Angels With Dirty Faces, as much as I love them both.

* Your proposal should take the form of a Word document attachment. Do not include your proposal in the body of your email.

* Your proposal needs to include these simple things: your name; a brief outline (up to 1000 words) of how you would approach your album of choice; a brief bio of yourself (up to 500 words), outlining why you're awesome, and why you're the best person to write about that album; a couple of sentences on which 33 1/3 book you've enjoyed the most so far, and why; that's pretty much it.

***

Last time around (towards the end of 2005), we received about 170 proposals, and ended up offering contracts to 21 of them. I've no idea how many we'll get this time, or how many we'll end up signing, but we do promise to read them all and to give them all equal consideration. Once we've narrowed it down to a shortlist (by the middle of March), we'll contact those authors to finalise manuscript deadlines, etc.

I hope this covers everything! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section to this post, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Douglas Wolk on WNYC

Douglas Wolk was on WNYC's Soundcheck yesterday talking about James Brown's Live at the Apollo. His blog also has some great youtube clips of the man in action.

James Brown, RIP

A few days late, I know, but it's still hard to believe that James Brown is now the "Gone Father of Soul", as one British tabloid so charmingly put it on Boxing Day.

If you haven't read it yet, I can heartily recommend Douglas Wolk's Live at the Apollo book (from which there's a brief extract below), and if you want to immerse yourself in even more JB, why not listen to the fabulous 6-hour show Douglas recorded for WFMU back in 2001?

***

"Brown has perhaps a dozen 'gold' records to his credit," the little unbylined puff piece in that week's New York Amsterdam News announced. That was pushing it - he'd only had fifteen chart singles by that point. James Brown didn't have a certified gold single until 1972's "Get on the Good Foot," although King evidently didn't bother with RIAA gold and platinum certification. Still, for an Apollo audience, Gonder had a lot of familiar song titles to mention.

There are an awful lot of citations of chart numbers and dates in this book. Live with them. They are an essential part of James Brown's art. His genius is the genius of rolls of tickets torn off one by one, of money handed over for records, of the hit. The great James Brown songs are popular, the popular James Brown songs are great. As George W.S. Trow wrote in another, darker context, "It's a hit! Love it! It's a Hit. It loves you because you love it because it's a Hit!" "You come to see my show," Brown sang. "That's why James Brown loves you so." "This is a hit!" he declared as the tape rolled for "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag;" he cut it out of the released record, but persuaded some of the other artists whose records he produced around that time to yell the same thing, so it might work its magic for them too.

Look at his singles discography,and ignore the instrumentals, the duets, the reissues, the throwaways on King's subsidiary label Bethlehem, the Christmas and novelty records - just concentrate on the songs he threw his weight behind. A pattern emerges, or rather an unbroken block: between "Money Won't Change You" in July 1966 and "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" nine years later, James Brown had over sixty consecutive chart hits. On his own terms, he was an unstoppable champion, and those terms were people paying to hear him sing, and being reassured that what they were paying for was popular.

That's why he wanted to make Live at the Apollo so badly: he could demonstrate that being James Brown was itself a hit. All he had to do was get it on tape.

***

69 Love Songs on Gawker

Wow, a nice mention in of LD Beghtol's 33 1/3 on The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" on Gawker this afternoon.

We speak not of the canonical 1999 three-disc set here, since there's absolutely no reason you shouldn't have it already, but the recent addition to Continuum's superlative 33 1/3 series (wherein single, seminal albums are given full-length book treatment)...If you're not a fan of the album, we're pretty sure that we don't want to know you anyway. For the rest of you, we're pretty sure you're going to love it.

Not bad! Click here for the whole thing... and LD has a very pretty website with plenty of extracts and outtakes that's well worth checking out here.

This is your bloody valentine...finally!

The My Bloody Valentine "Loveless" 33 1/3 arrived in the office today, and as Mat pointed out "it's got words in it."
Just flipping through it quickly I came across a sentence about "Soon" that describes it as "the obvious hit single, and the song that weathered a remix by Andrew Weatherall." A long time ago someone made me a tape with this remix that I pretty much wore out, despite the intro that features a "Here we go... uhhhhh-huh" break worthy of Color Me Badd. Amazingly, the remix still sounds about like this.

It is available for pre-order on Amazon now, and should be shipping in a couple weeks at most, so keep an eye out.

Happy New Year

Thanks so much for all the comments on the "one book per artist" debate. I think I've made up my mind now.

We'll be releasing a few new books in the series in the next couple of weeks:

Songs in the Key of Life

Use Your Illusion

Court and Spark

Loveless (ahem)

Notorious Byrd Brothers

So keep an eye out for extracts from those, in the next few days.

Also, since you asked, these were my favourite records of last year, in no particular order:

Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Pernice Brothers - Live a Little
The Ballet - Mattachine
Various - Blue Skies Up: Welcome to the New Pop Revolution
Various - CD86: 48 Tracks from the Birth of Indie Pop
Alela Diane - The Pirate's Gospel
Fionn Regan - The End of History
Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther
Bowerbirds
A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Sunniest Day Ever EP

As for 2007, I'm most excited about This Is England, the new film by Shane Meadows.