Author: 333sound

Join us today in celebrating the 20th anniversary of Zaireeka by the Flaming Lips with Mark Richardson, author of The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka, who explains the distinct listening experience that The Flaming Lips brought with this unique four-part album. Twenty years ago, the Flaming Lips album Zaireeka was released into a different world. We were rushing to a new age of speed and convenience, but many aspects of life still moved at a crawl. News came through newspapers and television broadcasts, and the 28.8 modem was standard (for people with internet,…

There is a huge sea of Björk interviews, TV appearances and live shows out there on the internet to get wonderfully lost in. Whole days can go that way, easily. There’s also many a rare gem to be found, if you dig deep – and in the course of writing my 33 1/3, I definitely dug deep. Months on, YouTube is still going “Hey! Maybe you’d like to watch this other Björk video!” And do you know what, I still would. Here are some of the best little video oddities…

This week, Michael Washburn, author of Tom Petty’s Southern Accents (coming Fall 2018!), reflects on Tom Petty’s impact on American culture, what Tom Petty’s Southern heritage meant to him, and how Petty approached the representations of Southern heritage in Southern Accents. Tom Petty’s death last week provoked a torrent of deserved, heartfelt tributes. The 66 year-old rock star bridged late-70s rock radio to the video generation, and he continued writing solid songs well into the 21st century. Petty’s death revealed him as an institution that we’d long taken for granted. It’s only…

To celebrate this week’s release of Bjork’s Homogenic, we’re pleased to bring you the fifth and final installment of Björk Week by author Emily Mackay! Six connections between Homogenic and Utopia. One of the main reasons I can’t stop obsessing over Homogenic so much is that I can always find paths from Björk’s more recent work leading back to it. Medulla’s concern with national and global identity, Volta’s feminist politics, Biophilia’s unification of nature and technology… there’s always a thread back to the album that for me, really defined what…

To celebrate today’s release of Björk’s Homogenic, we’re pleased to share with you the fourth installment of Björk Week by author Emily Mackay! A whistle-stop tour of Iceland. Björk presents her music and personality as so much founded on her home country that soon enough, all smitten Björk fans will find themselves longing to take a trip to Iceland. If you’re lucky enough to make it out there, here are a few Björk-related places you might want to check out (and a whole load of nerd-facts to boot). Reykjavík harbour Before she…

To celebrate this week’s release of Björk’s Homogenic, we’re pleased to bring you the third installment of Björk Week by author Emily Mackay! The pleasure is all mine: Björk and remixing. Björk’s love of collaboration is not, to her, a sideshow to the main ego feature; it’s a core part of her work. “That’s my biggest turn-on,” she said in the book that accompanied the release of her second album Post. “To meet someone who comes from a completely different place than I do. I’ll show them everything; I’ll give them everything I’ve…

To celebrate this week’s release of Björk’s Homogenic, we’re pleased to bring you the second installment of Björk Week by author Emily Mackay! Bjork’s musical past lives. Björk presented herself as fresh-faced ingenue on 1993’s Debut – for its 2015 reissue, she chose the words ‘beginner’, ‘shy’, ‘humility’ and ‘virgin’ to describe its character. In reality, although she was a new face to much of the global audience that album captured, the 27-year-old had been queen of the Icelandic scene for many years. Most music fans, especially we of advancing age, know…

This week we welcome guest blogger Barbara Browning – author of 33 1/3 Brazil’s first entry, Caetano Veloso’s A Foreign Sound – to talk about Caetano Veloso’s cover of “Love for Sale”. “Love for Sale” was written by Cole Porter for the 1930 Broadway musical The New Yorkers, and in the first staged version it was sung by Kathryn Crawford, a white actress, with a trio of friends in front of Reuben’s Restaurant. But the public, it seems, wasn’t quite ready to hear white womanhood besmirched in the jaded self-accounting of a sex worker. Critics and audiences…

This week, Steely Dan’s Aja author Don Breithaupt joins us to speak more about Aja, Steely Dan, and the legacy Walter Becker left behind, just weeks before the seminal album’s 40th anniversary. By Don Breithaupt Walter Becker, the younger, more enigmatic half of Steely Dan, died September 3rd, 2017 of an undisclosed illness. That left him just three weeks shy of making the scene for the recent 40th anniversary of Aja, the most popular, most acclaimed, and, let’s just say it, best of the Dan’s nine meticulously crafted studio albums. Becker might…

In this 33 1/3 Origin Stories, read about how authors Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton met, collaborated, and came to literally write the book on Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night. We each have a variety of musical experiences outside of reifying the energy of music into words, but we’ll save our middle school recitals for another time. Our research and writing collaboration began at a 2011 academic conference in Cincinnati. We were each in the midst of our doctoral studies at the same institution but had not met each other. Circumstantially, during…