Worst Possible 33 1/3 Book Covers

Flickr user toddius has created a set of the worst possible 33 1/3 book covers, which piggybacks off an idea originally done by this user, jima.

My personal favorites include Prince’s Purple Rain, by Tipper Gore. Her book, Raising PG Kids In An X-Rated Society, spoke of Purple Rain thusly: “I couldn’t believe my ears! The vulgar lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned—then I got mad!”” Ah, classic. There’s also The Beatles (aka The White Album) by Charles Manson, and the Shins’ Oh, Inverted World by Zach Braff.

I’ll be honest—some of those titles require some serious trivial knowledge to be funny, like Slash’s real name or the whole brouhaha betwixt Tipper’s PMRC and, well, every bit of music that was interesting in the ’80s, and the rest of the fakeries come a little too close to being reality. A couple of the books in the 33 1/3 series get a little overly zealous in their documentation and / or fandom. If you want a book series that will take you deep, deep, deep into the albums you love, it’s definitely something you’d want to look into.

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats wrote a book for the series about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality that is one of the greatest books I own. He describes Master of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric center in southern California in 1985. It sounds simple, but it’s not. It is brilliantly voiced and weird and compelling and you probably won’t learn much about the album itself, but then again, you do.