On the first leg of my vacation flight – New Orleans to Houston – I finished Geeta Dayal’s Another Green World, her entry in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series. As is so often the case with the books in the series, it gives you a reason to return to an album you haven’t listened to in a while. I only had “Sky Saw” and “St. Elmo’s Fire” on my iPod before reading the book.

She focuses on the significance of Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards and the roll they played in his creation of the album. When the cards so instructed, he abandoned productive directions and went so far as to erase good work in accord with the cards’ instructions. As absurd as such behavior seems, it also reveals Eno as someone who believed in the process of art-making to such a degree that he was willing to put the final product at risk. That’s a serious commitment to art and a serious commitment to play – to activity that seems frivolous. The results, of course, are anything but frivolous, and a lot of pop and rock music would benefit from folding more genuine play into its DNA.

… and huge props to Dayal for paying only marginal attention to Eno’s words and not taking us on a track-by-track journey through the album. The former is so often a dead-end in music criticism, and the latter has almost become a cliche in the 33 1/3 series.