The end of the album song package concept?
Image by Bird Eye
One of the posts that really caught my eye recently was by Jay Cruz of Tape Noise Diary. In wrote an interesting post called The Death of the Album, Jay quotes music critic Chuck Klosterman in Chuck Klosterman Reviews Chinese Democracy:
… Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context—it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.
Jay takes Klosterman’s comment and expands on it further:
That’s another reason why there is a perceived notion that music criticism is no longer necessary. And it isn’t that there are no longer artists and bands that are making “albums” in that context, I’m sure artists like Radiohead are going to record maybe two more “albums”, but people simply don’t care for “albums.” Not that definition. Today’s music listeners probably don’t even know what it meant to make an album. That things like track order “meant” something and it was not a random choice. The only thing they may care about is if the songs are “playlistable”.
This is fascinating stuff. People have been making mix tapes for years (if not decades), but there were always albums, compilations, soundtracks, etc. that were the source material.
In a similar vein, there have been a number of calls promoting the atomization of news content (I want to attribute this to Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, but I may be mistaken) so that content can be unbundled, selectively consumed, and sequenced as desired. The medium is different, but the concept is similar:
- Music of all kinds has been packaged in albums for years.
- News articles have been packaged in newspapers and magazines.
- Short stories collected in books and magazines.
- TV and radio news stories packaged together in programs.
On the other hand, comic books are increasingly being packaged as “trade paperbacks” or anthologies with many individual issues being bundled together.
This increasing atomization of content, whereby the consumer gets access to increasingly smaller, separate chunks, is a topic worth discussing. For example:
- Does the “concept album” (aka The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia; Pink Floyd’s The Wall, etc.) ever stand a chance of resurfacing?
- Will more artists move to “unit marketing” where they push the smallest possible pieces of content into a marketplace that mixes, matches, and rearranges (even more so that today)?
- Will we see more “mash-ups” of content?
- What’s the impact on both the creator and the consumer if these trends continue?
These are some of the things that I’m thinking about.
matt Searles:
Well I kind of disagree.. I don't think we are going to see the end of the album or concept album.. It may very well be that the the prominence of the album or concept album.. as we know it.. will grow less and less.. but I don't think that spells the and of it..
I mean to the extent to which an album.. or a concept album.. a sorta longer form sonic experience.. has value to us.. as a unique experience.. that my friend.. is a market force.. that creates a demand for such things.. if it gets subordinated to mash up, lets make our own play list sorta thing.. that doesn't quite spell its doom, I don't think… It just means we get less of it.
If you spend much time working on music.. wrestling with music making.. you realize that what you're doing is kinda a dialog with a sonic ecology.. the way that you could classify experience into statistics and see a norm develop… and see that for something to exist, cognitively speaking.. it's going to be how it deviates from that norm, that its that deviation that we become aware of, as a pose to the thing its self.
So when you create an album.. and you sequence your tracks into a particular order.. you're playing with that contrasts of norms.. of the ecological norms of different tracks, and how they evolve over time.
When we do a custom play order.. we are thinking about those contrasts.. and in some sense creating something new.. If I follow Frank Zappa's Hungry Freaks with Public Enemy's Fight the Power.. and somewhere further down the line is Bob Dylan's Hard Rain.. and maybe somewhere before the Zappa is Allan Ginsberg reading something or other.. well now I have a new thematic continuity… but things that are more about musical DNA.. strange habits of an artist.. modal, hormonic, whatever.. there relationships are now largely the product of chance / indeterminacy..
But like right now.. i'm in the studio.. for a particular period of time.. so that all the music I'm creating is somehow representative of my state of consciousness.. There are certain set patterns.. along multiple axis's…
So for instance there are certain patterns regarding chord changes that are like.. harmonic minor modalism with microtonal abstraction.. but in each specific track.. this gets explored and stretched in a different direction.. over here it's dark, a little scary, bordering on the atonal.. over there it's stretching out into a feeling of falling in love while in a kind of vertigo… and then over there we are wrestling with the mysteries of existence… or.. over here we have Marilyn Manson like timbers.. over there we got some.. crazy Jazz timbers.. and then over there it's Brain Eno esk sounds..
So it becomes like a sonic adventure that we travel deeper and deeper into.. It maybe that I'm old school.. but generally.. I listen to music as albums… though it depends. A lot of albums are like.. a few good singles with a lot of filler.. and in those cases I'm not generally interested in hearing it as an album.. or sometimes it's like.. I'm not feeling like going into that album experience.. and I just want to hear that one song I really like.. or something like that.. so it all depends.
But I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it depends on what it is you want.. how you're feeling.. that there are values to each thing.. and that that value is connected to a market force in one way or another.. and even if the markets are in a state of rapid flux… the underlying dynamics driving it all is really just you and me.. it's a bit like we're just getting rid of the insulation and friction between the want and the content.. I'm thinking anyway
So that atomization of content makes it the fluid, and we are the containers who's shape it takes.. and that shape.. can include the un-atomized album.. if that makes sense.
24 November 2008, 7:25 amJayCruz:
Music wise, I think that's the trend that you will keep on seeing. I don't know how good or bad it is, but the web has influenced different media to be more immersive. More participatory. If I'm not mistaken, Beck released some singles for people to mix and then he put the best mix on the album. That's the good part I guess. The bad part is that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
24 November 2008, 7:35 amMark Dykeman:
Interesting about how both Matt and Jay come at this from different perspectives… I'd like to see them both respond to each other's comments. What do you say?
24 November 2008, 8:00 amryanbrymer:
I think that there is definitely a market for concept (or complete thought) albums, but in many cases it's hard to know what is and what isn't.
24 November 2008, 8:38 amLook at Green Day's American Idiot. It was a concept album that got them probably their biggest numbers of their career and (aside from a live album) they haven't released anything since.
The difficulty is knowing what's an album and what's just a bunch of songs. I often wonder about people who have been songwriters or coffee house singers for years who finally release an album. I'm sure it's not so much an album as it is that they finally wrote enough songs that they thought were good enough to record. Or the idea that a band has to put out an album every year and they go into the studio and write half of it on the spot. Sure some creativity can arise out of that, but it's not likely that it will be very uniform.
Great albums tell a story. Sometimes they do so lyrically, sometimes it's just a musical story that exists beneath disconnected lyrics (like what Matt says here about planning out track listing by chord changes).
Here's what I want: Music that is art, not music that is commerce.
Mark Dykeman:
I think you're thinking that an album is (or should be) a series of songs that are related somehow by common music styles, themes, motifs, or situations/characters. I think you're also saying that's an example of music as art, as opposed to a bunch of unrelated songs (commerce).
I guess that rules out the sampler or greatest hits album, then.
24 November 2008, 9:24 amryanbrymer:
Greatest Hits albums blow. They are completely commerce (made all the more evident when a greatest hits album contains A BRAND *NEW* SONG!!! – or 3). I do own a few, though, I'll admit. It just seems that they make light of the art that exists deeper on the album (For example, my favorite songs from the seminal album Ten by Pearl Jam will never appear on a greatest hits record.)
24 November 2008, 9:31 amSampling is different. It is using someone else's art to create new art. The same could be said of a cover song. It is re-invention – typically for the purpose of creation, not commerce (although I'm getting sick of Target lifting “Hello, Goodbye” for every single advertisement – Jonas Brothers or not).
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