3 posts tagged “review”
33 1/3
. Again. Yeah, I know. I'll have something else to write about soon.
One of the most interesting things about the 33 1/3 series is the complete freedom, or at least the appearance of such, the authors are given on how to approach the album in question. Some of the volumes, like Bill Janovitz's exhaustive examination of Exile on Main St., focus quite a bit on the songs themselves or the recording techniques. Others, like Franklin Bruno's dictionary-style look at Armed Forces, focus more on the mis-en-scene, giving us a picture of the world in which the album was created and its subsequent effect on that world. Some are arguments in defense of the album, some explorations of the album's place within or embodiment of a particular culture, and some, like the book I most recently discussed, are simply personal reflections. This makes the series diverse, and frankly, more interesting.
The downside to this, though, is that often the books are unfocused. The volumes that work best are the ones that have a specific purpose. J. Niimi delves into Southern Gothic culture and looks at REM's Murmur in that context, and it works. It works even in the problematic final third of the book, mostly because it is consistent in theme. Niimi looks at REM's history, their song structures, recording techniques for the album, and lyrical reflection, but he does all of that through the Souther Gothic lense. The result is a cohesive, satisfying read. Unfortunately, many of the books fall victim to a lack of purpose. In place of a historical document or a critical examination or an in-depth personal response, we get a sort of shapeless mix of information, and that with no theme to tie it all together. These entries in the series simply don't work as well as the others, even when the writing itself is well crafted.
Such is the case with Chris Ott's book on Joy Division's debut album, Unknown Pleasures. The book seeks to dispel some of the mythology surrounding the legendary band's early days, and in that purpose it succeeds. We're treated to a concise and informative history of the band up to and including the recording and release of Unknown Pleasures. Mixed into that is some exploration of Hannet's production of the album and of how he helped transform the band's sound. This part is most intriguing, but it's a fairly small segment of the whole. I would have liked more on this topic. Where this book fails, though, is that it settles into the inevitable retelling of Ian Curtis's downward spiral and eventual death. This topic is pretty much unavoidable when discussing Joy Division, but the world really doesn't need another recapitulation of this story. With this divergence, the book ceases to be about Unknown Pleasures and becomes just another Joy Division book. While it's well-written and informative, Unknown Pleasures just doesn't deliver enough of a focus on the album itself.
That's it for the 33 1/3 books at least until after Christmas. I am hoping beyong hope that Wilson's book on Celine Dion will be under the tree, but if not, it will be my first post-holiday purchase.
current music: Miles Davis "Sketches of Spain" || current mood: belly hurts
33 1/3. Let me just get this out of the way quickly, because I'll rehash it every time I respond to one of these books. I love this series, even if many of the books are flawed. I really cannot get enough. I gush every time they come up in conversation. Sometimes they are brilliant, and sometimes they're a mess, but any lover of music should at least check them out.
I don't know if my Google-fu skills are lacking tonight or what, but I can't seem to find much information on Shawn Taylor, the author of the 33 1/3 book on A Tribe Called Quest's debut, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. I've found a blog to which he contributes, but little else. I had hoped to learn a little bit more about him, because where this book fails at examining the album in any satisfying way, it succeeds in generating a small amount of interest about the autho himself. How did he transform from the hyperliterate, straightedge punk trouble maker growing up in New York into the author and social worker currently living in Oakland? That would certainly make for a more interesting read than this tepid, unfocused book that reads like a rough draft.
Taylor starts well enough, giving us some of his background, setting the stage for when he first heard Tribe, and then giving us some general history on Native Tongues. It's not particularly engaging, the writing style being more akin to an informal blog than a normal book, but it gets us headed in the right direction for the next part of the book. Taylor approaches the bulk of the book with the premise that he'll compare how the music affected him in his youth to how it affects him now. To do this, he employs a method he devised when he was a teen, which he calls the three trials.
The three trials is actually a nice concept and is a more defined approach to examining music than anything I've come up with so far. In the first trial, Taylor listens to the album as a whole and discusses it from that broad perspective. In the second, he listens again, exploring each song on its own. Finally, the third trial, a little more out of left field, involves listening to the album in public and seeing how it affects his moods and reactions. The concept is good enough, but the execution here leaves much to be desired.
The first and biggest problem is that Taylor reprints his journal entries from when he conducted the trials on this album when he was seventeen. Like one would imagine, it reads like a seventeen-year-old's journal, it's meandering punctuated by moments of grandiosity. The book would have been much better served by the author using this source material to give us a picture of his reactions at the time, rather than just letting us read it directly. It's curious that the editor didn't see a problem with this. Taylor follows the three teenage trials with three trials from the current day. This would probably be the most interesting part of the book, but the author makes the poor choice to discuss remixes of this album nearly as much as he discusses the songs themselve. The examination of how his feelings on this music have evolved over the years is unsatisfactory, and by the end of this part of the book, I really felt like I had simply read an early draft.
There's certainly potential here, but it is not realized. The unfinished feeling is reinforced by the short, 20 question interview with engineer Bob Power that wraps the book up. Power is a fine interviewee, especially considering the producer and artists refused to speak with the author for the book, but the interview is completely out of place. The book had already established that the point was to discuss Taylor's relationship with this music, which is fine; not every 33 1/3 book needs to be super-technical or historically informative. Though I did learn some things, the bottom line is that it does not deliver on an information level, and it certainly does not deliver on a cathartic level. Luckily, it was a short, quick read.
Next up: Joy Division "Unknown Pleasures"
Current music: Danzig "II" // Current mood: back in the day when I was a teenager...
As of my last post, I was unsure of how I felt about the book I was reading, Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. At issue was not the quality of the writing, per se, but whether or not the author could make me care about these two characters whose lives had been so consumed by their bitter, contentious divorce that their only remaining raison d'etre seemed to lay in how much they could hurt the other party. The final half of the book took me quite by surprise, however, rendering moot my concerns about having no redeeming qualities in any of the characters. With the the section I started after my last post, the author begins making a series of increasingly baffling choices that by story's end left me more than a little nonplussed.
The warning that the book is quickly going off the rails comes with two chapters written from the point of view of the young daughter, breaking the established pattern of perspective alternating between the two warring adults. The unheralded change in POV pulled me completely out of the narrative. I can believe that a writer's self-indulgence could make this seem like a good idea, but I have to wonder that the editor did not see a problem with the execution at least, much less the idea itself. Oddly enough, once the story was broken, I realized just how invested I actually was. Its flaws aside, the first part of the book had hooked me, and if the story had continued in that fashion, I may have ended up liking it a great deal, despite the despicable characters. When the point of view switched back to the original pattern, I was relieved. The feeling was a fleeting one.
What follows is a series of scenes that range from poorly-conceived to simply bizarre. First, Marshall, the husband decides to build a suicide bomb, but is unable to successfully detonate it. That's bad enough, but the wife then jumps in, working through the wiring to find the problem. Meanwhile, the children gather in the kitchen and watch silently. Of course, they never get it to go off, but what exactly was the author going for? The scene is completely ridiculous, most importantly because character seems to have gone out the window. I understand the book is supposed to be a black comedy and that each of the scenes is some sort of metaphor about our nation and its war on terror, but whatever Kalfus was trying to communicate in this scene, he failed miserably. The only thing killed in this attempted suicide bombing is all of the character development from the first half of the book.
Things only get worse when Marshall goes to a party where in a feeble attempt to reference Abu Ghraib, a young male prostitute is humiliated, bag over head, arms outstretched, cameras flashing. This scene is, like the suicide bomb attempt before it and the shift in POV before that, completely incongruous with the first half of the book. It makes no sense within the story and has little success as a metaphor.
The rest of the book is an equally off-kilter alternate history fantasy wherein the Iraqi people find and execute Saddam, Libya kicks the terrorist groups out, and the people of Iran take to the streets. Back in America, the streets of New York are flooded in a giant celebration of the ultimate victory of American ideals over Muslim lunacy, and the final scene has the whole family sharing a wonderful moment together before it all gets destroyed. I'm paraphrasing, but that's pretty much the last sentence. I don't know if some sort of attack was supposed to be implied or if it's a bigger metaphor about the futility of finding peace through war or what the author intended. After the party scene, I thought nothing would surprise me, but I guess Kalfus had one more bad decision up his sleeve.
What an incredible waste of time. At least it was a quick read. After that series of disappointments, I needed to go with a sure thing. So I just picked up Michael Chabon's first novel and the second book in McCarthy's border trilogy. I'm starting with Chabon.
