Every month, 33 1/3 editorial assistant Kaitlin Fontana will compile the best, weirdest, most interesting music and sound news from the past 30 days and serve it up to you in one handy, easy to digest list. May we present 33 Things that happened in October?
Drumroll please…
1. “There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.” RIP Lou Reed.
2. Our once and future subject in the topic of taste, Celine Dion, wants to collaborate with the Arcade Fire. For their part, AF feels…what’s the French word for ambivalent?
3. The CBGB movie and soundtrack both came out this month. And that’s all we’re going to say about that.
4. Queens of the Stone Age frontman (and our crush) Josh Homme was on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast this month, and their wide-ranging conversation was chock full of choice quotes. For example, here’s Homme regarding the music that effects him and why: “Sometimes you need something to emotionally light two smokes and hand you one.” Sigh.
5. The New York Times made the case for the link between music training in adolescence and success in adulthood, citing luminaries like Allen Greenspan and Google’s Larry Page. More importantly, now we all know that Woody Allen practices his clarinet for at least a half an hour a day and still sucks at it: “In comedy, I’ve got a good instinct for rhythm. In music, I don’t, really.”
6. You can buy Justin Bieber’s skull. Yes, you read that right.
7. If you work at NPR, sometimes Paul McCartney and Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt meet in your hallway, thus aligning the universe.
8. Pearl Jam’s tenth studio album, Lightning Bolt, debuted this month at #1, ahead of Miley Cyrus (#2) and Paul McCartney’s New (#3). So, good luck in the Rapture everyone, because surely the end times are nigh.
9. Speaking of Macca and portents of the apocalypse, the ex-Beatle this month told Rolling Stone that he and Yoko Ono have reconciled. He went so far as to call her “bad ass.” So now I feel like we should be able to do peace in the Middle East, right?
10. And speaking of Pearl Jam, you can watch this full documentary about the new album, featuring interviewers like Carrie Brownstein, Judd Apatow, a football player, and a surfer, who surely all walked into a bar afterwards because comedy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxHE1A_C9QQ&w=420&h=315]
11. Morrissey wrote a ridiculous memoir, and NY Mag’s Vulture blog was nice enough to compile the best quotes. Our favorite, on being disliked: “Whenever I’d overhear how people found me to be ‘a bit much’ (which is the gentle way of saying the word ‘unbearable’), I understood why. To myself I would say: Well, yes of course I’m a bit much — if I weren’t, I would not be lit up by so many lights.”
12. The well-lit one also shared his desert island discs with the BBC.
13. Comedian and musician Fred Armisen interviewed the Clash’s Mick Jones and Paul Simonon as his SNL-fomented punk character, Ian Rubbish.
14. Both Nirvana and NWA are nominees for the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame this year, which is the hall of fame equivalent of them meeting in an NPR hallway.
15. Thanks, internet! Now we can all watch 50 Cent auditioning for 2007’s Denzel Washington-helmed film American Gangster.
16. Thanks again, internet! Now we can all watch an animated rarely-heard audio interview with Kurt Cobain from 1993.
17. Internet, if you keep being so delightful, we might propose—because you brought us this video of drunk Rob Pattinson and Katy Perry singing karaoke together.
18. It’s only mid-life wasteland: For their 50th anniversary in 2015, The Who are going on tour.
19. Beck is releasing a new album in February. Meanwhile, it’s the 20th anniversary of the song “Loser,” so insert your own joke about feeling old here.
20. Here are 10 great lesser known Lou Reed songs, according to Vulture.
21. This gentleman, who most certainly loves Lou Reed more–and more charmingly–than you, has heard all ten of those songs, and he probably followed Lou Reed around trying to ask him about them.
22. The Jonas Brothers have split up, citing “irreconcilable irrelevance.”
23. While Banksy tags in New York, Kanye rants in LA.
24. We’re not huge country fans around these parts, but we know a good music profile when we read one. Yessirree.
25. An Oxford music historian thinks he knows what ancient Greek music sounded like, and now, so do you.
26. Our very own taste analyst, Let’s Talk About Love author Carl Wilson reviewed the ladies of Lorde and Haim, and it was good.
27. And our very own Talking Heads analyst, Jonathan Lethem, spoke to Slate about his 33 1/3 and album obsession. It too was good, as are his glasses.
28. Attention aspiring band marketers: You can build your own swag bomb (we promise this is not NSA link bait).
29. Oasis’s Noel Gallagher told British GQ that reading fiction is “a fucking waste of time.” In reply, fiction said “Dude, have you read the lyrics to ‘Champagne Supernova’ lately? One of us needs to read more, and it’s certainly not me.”
30. On the day after his death, Spotify reported that streams of both Lou Reed’s solo work and Velvet Underground songs jumped more than 3000 percent.
31. Jack White’s Third Man Records has helped assemble a literal box set (or “wonder cabinet”) of the work of early American music pioneers Paramount Records, which includes over 800 mp3s of rare songs spanning 1917-1932. It can be yours for $400.
32. It’s never too late to create a one-hit wonder Halloween costume.
33. Lou Reed once said, “I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” Here is Andy Warhol’s 1966 film Symphony in Sound, a rare bit of film footage of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground in performance. Settle in, and wax away.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtbKTFjbaOI&w=420&h=315]
I like what you guys are up too. This sort of
clever work and coverage! Keep up the fantastic works
guys I’ve added you guys to my own blogroll.