A long time ago, son Nate and I were iChatting about the future of music (a topic that bears a somewhat greater pertinence to him than to many of the rest of us, as he expects to make a living at it when he graduates). We were talking about great albums we have known, about file-sharing and the iTunes music store, and especially about those musicians who refused to permit their recordings to be sold online except as complete albums. Nate observed that this was absurd, since all the bands concerned had been happy enough to allow their music to be played on the radio in less-than-album segments, and to be sold as singles and EPs; what artistic principle militates against selling music by selection online, but endorses broadcasting the same selections individually (and in contexts about which the performer has no say) over radio and selling singles on physical media?
I pointed out that the whole notion of “an album” only becomes relevant with the development of the long-playing records through the forties and fifties. So long as recordings were limited to ten or twelve-minute sides, “an album” was always going to differ markedly from the possibly-integrated whole that the music industry cultivated once LPs were the flourishing norm of music reproduction. Imagine what a record company executive would have said to Beethoven about the variations in duration of his symphonies.
So the “loss” of the album (a loss which could always be addressed by selling online recordings that interwove their constituent selections, or that simply comprised a long suite (as it were) of selections as a single large MP3/MPEG-4 file) represent no new crisis in the organization of music, but just another transition, and a transition that determined musicians could easily resist.
I was pretty satisfied with my learned refutation of the importance of the album, but this morning I was listening to Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! — a terrific recording, but very far from my favorite Costello — and the satisfaction of anticipating the sequence of tracks deeply enhanced my pleasure at listening to the album. So the smarty-pants deconstructor of musical genres nostalgically rethinks his casual dismissal of a gradually-vanishing medium.
But, on the extended-version CD of Get Happy!! (yes, it was a CD, not a pure vinyl version, so sue me) includes “Hoover Factory,” a lovely, ephemeral song about the remarkable Art Deco factory built just west of London in Perivale, which factory our coach drove past this summer on our choir tour’s way from Rochester to Oxford: “Nine miles out of London on the Western Avenue, Must have been a wonder when it was brand new; Talking ’bout the splendor of the Hoover Factory, Know that you’d agree if you had seen it, too.” I did; I do.
Posted by AKMA at September 10, 2003 11:26 AM | TrackBack"Get Happy" was one of my earliest music purchases. You are right both times, the digital medium actually re-establishes the open formats that are previous to recording technology, and the nostalgia for the old formats. A friend's dad has hundreds of 78s, we have one in the family of my mother and three friends singing when she was in college. I remember but never bought 45 singles, and have a large collection of LPs I can't play on anything. The art of filling the spaces on two sides of an LP is inseperable from the experience of listening and the technology of the time.
Digital gives you the option of hearing the original order (should it make you push a button to turn the record over?), or in any programmed or randomized order. More power to the user, the artist can only suggest the best listening conditions. In the digital medium, all limitations are self imposed, and so you can call into question the existance of tracks and albums, but the listener will also be able to impose arbitrary boundaries and ordering through the magic of programable playback.
All that remains is a matter for contract law, you are right to point to radio usage track by track, but you should be aware that the seller of a digital audio "product" will be able define what the "product" is and whether it can be devided when it is resold. The recording industry itself is very keen to protect their right to control how and for how much music is resold digitally. They don't really care what the artists or listeners think about it.
Posted by: Gerry at September 10, 2003 01:35 PMFor me, one of the enduring joys of listening to music on albums is that same anticipatory satisfaction you describe. I'd have a hard time paring down a list of favorite songs, but favorite albums is much easier; because there's something synergistic about a well-put-together album, where the songs in sequence tell a larger story. The concept of the album may be linked with physical media, but I hope it's an art form that doesn't go away when the media do.
Posted by: ARJ at September 10, 2003 07:42 PMPerhaps an album can be like a series of sermons; each work is able to stand on its own, yet the meaning is enhanced when the consituent pieces are taken together. The whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.
Posted by: NeoTheologue at September 11, 2003 09:13 AMIt's a real building? Damn! I always liked that song, and now I know why.
Posted by: adamsj at September 11, 2003 06:26 PM