Limitless albums

In the previous post I confessed to preferring being able to listen to songs rather than full albums, and that got me thinking...

People lament the death of the album, but is that glorifying what the album was?

Music existed for millennia before it was recorded, and even after it reached the point of being set into the grooves of circular pieces of wax it remained a song-based artistic medium; the notion of an "album" as more than merely collecting the singles and being an artistic form unto itself, where there was some thematic unity from beginning to end, was something of a latecomer to the party.

Long Playing records could hold a certain amount of material per side, and so that imposed an artificial restriction on the art; one could not produce a track longer than would fit on a single LP side. (To have something longer required breaking it into a "part 1" and "part 2" scenario, but that's not a single track in my book.) Then cassettes had their limits, and then CDs that their limit (which grew as technology grew); the definition of an "album" as a collection of tracks packaged under a single title, marketed and toured in support of, has varied as the media on which they were manufactured changed. Now, with the tracks existing as digital files that are downloaded and then stored on a computer's hard drive or mp3 player's memory, the amount of time for the tracks on a single collection that is called an album is not really limited by the physical media; an artist could produce a single track that went on four literally hours, or a single "album" could contain thousands of tracks; the completely electronic medium would allow for that.

Obviously, the accompanying infrastructure may not be set for that; even with broadband internet speeds such a lengthy album could take a tremendous amount of time to complete, and then further it would take a lot of hard drive space (although that's becoming less of a concern). So, the limitation changes from the space on the physical media to the patience of the consumer; it's a matter of what we're willing to wait to finish downloading.

I doubt the three-minute pop song will ever disappear, because it holds a certain perfection for what a wide audience is interested in hearing (consciously or not), and with the proliferation of media that seek our attention it's less likely that immensely long pieces would catch on, regardless of how fast files can be transferred or how large the capacity of hard drives grow.

Wagner's Ring Cycle is technically longer than an audience could sit through, and in its entirety takes days to perform, and that didn't stop him from writing it. However, it's not as though that became the norm for symphonies or operas. (And if it had, one can only imagine how that would have progressed over the intervening century. When I get the program of events for the L.A. Philharmonic each year, it's not as though there's a single work that's so long that to perform it in its entirety takes an entire month. I'm not suggesting there's not such a work out there—I don't pretend to be an expert in experimental music, but I don't hear about that sort of thing as common.)

So, ultimately, the way we think about albums remains entrenched in the way that the delivery media has been over the past decades, but some day may merely be what serves as the cover art that's associated with a track when it's playing on our iPods (which, with advances in technology, may allow for holding tacks in a lossless format so there's no more lamenting how much better the music sounded on the LP).

Album-med out

I've noticed something about my music listening habits: I don't tend to be inclined to sit through an entire album except in rare cases. It's not necessarily that I don't like all the songs enough to listen to them; it's merely that I don't want to hear them one after the other after the other.

Now, it seems like the culprit here would be the download paradigm, and the method of the music playing the music being the mp3 player, but if I'm completely frank with myself I suspect it's more that technology has finally caught up with the way I preferred.

In days of yore (which for purposes of this entry is as recent as the early portion of the last decade) I got music by purchasing the album as a physical object, be that a vinyl LP, a cassette, or a compact disc; to hear the songs I put the record on the turntable, or placed the cassette in the tape deck, or inserted the CD in the disc player. The last of those allowed for more easily accessing a particular track than the previous two had, but still the format limited what I had available to merely the tracks on that disc.

What I wanted was to hear a variety of songs. I think the paradigm I grew up with—listening to the radio, with a song by one artist followed by a song by a different artist—was the one I always liked better, but for years (from the mid '80s when I started buying CDs until really only a few years ago) I was limited by the medium. The best the CD player could do was perhaps play the tracks in a random order, but that was still the same tracks.

It's not that I won't listen to complete albums, but that's the exception; I need to really be in the mood for that, and while technology allows for that, it doesn't force me to do so.

It is a grand and glorious time for music listening (that will be covered further in the next post).

What's that song? (the challenge of instrumentals)

Rock instrumentals have lovely melodies and/or catchy hooks and/or something to make them interesting without there being any vocals, but that also makes it less likely that people will learn their titles without making a concerted effort.

Even songs where the title of the song is not in the lyrics, such as Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" or The Who's "Baba O'Riley," there's at least some words one can associate with a title; eventually one may be trying to find that "everybody must get stoned" song or the "teenage wasteland" track and discover that, although the refrain might seem like what the song would be called, that ain't the case. With the myriad websites devoted to song lyrics one can type the phrase one knows in to a search engine and get some results that should point one in the right direction.

With instrumentals the only hope one has is if the song gets used in a commercial or TV show or movie one could search on that aspect, but the internet doesn't yet allow for humming a bit of a melody and have some algorithm be able to match that up (although it is claimed that some cell phones can now identify music this way... but how well can they do so without lyrics is another story).

I suspect more people could identify, from listening only, the title to the theme from "Hawaii Five-0" because it's what played during the opening of that show, but other popular surf instrumentals like "Pipeline" or "Walk, Don't Run" might not get the same level of name recognition. Sure, people would recall having heard them, but not necessarily to the point of being able to say what they were called. Yes, aficionados would know the distinctions, but that's not the level of appreciation we're talking about here. Even amongst those in the know might have some pause if the situation were reversed and they were given the titles of some instrumental songs and asked to hum a bit of each.

Another old surf track that experienced a renewed popularity was the one used in the opening credits of Pulp Fiction. I'm sure you can probably recall it now, seeing the names against that black background as the song plays. However, could a significant number of people who've seen that film since 1994 identify the title of that track off the top of their heads? I can't say I'd put money on it. However, the Neil Diamond song covered by Urge Overkill later likely would be no problem for most people who saw the movie (even once). The reason: The latter opens with Nash Kato's husky vocal, "Girl, you'll be a woman soon…" and the former has merely a piercing guitar riff but a distinct absence of anyone in Dick Dale and the Del Tones singing out "Misirlou."

Of course, nowadays that song Quentin Tarantino chose for his opening credits may be better known as the sample used in the Black Eyed Peas' "Pump It"—a song, by the way, where mostly I recall the title because of its recurrence in the chorus.

Either way, the inclusion in the film or sample the BEP track provide some text-based method of asking about that song. Google may not accept humming but one can type "song in opening of pulp fiction" or "song sampled in black eyed peas pump it" and get quick results.

So the key to having people know what your instrumental is called may not be limited to getting it associated with the soundtrack for a film or TV show or even commercial. Having someone else put part of it in a song that has lyrics also can suffice.

Of course, there's no need to actually learn this stuff unless one is inclined to want to discuss it at some point. There's nothing wrong with simply hearing the melody (on the radio, in a movie, wherever), enjoying it, and leaving it at that.

In the past one had to make the effort to associate the audio portion of a song with its title in order to find it, but these days it's unrealistic to expect people to do that. This is not an era of people knowing; it's a time when the key skill is deftly looking things up on the world wide web.

And that's enough words about that.

Not a part of Tweet-ory

The Library of Congress is going to archive tweets (the posts on Twitter) for future generations.

I knew it was prudent that I never jumped on that bandwagon.

~

I can barely get people to pay attention to my blahg posts (judging from the site metering I do); I see no need to commence a Twitter feed and see explicitly how few followers I get.

Well, the bigger problem is that I don't tend to think in terms of 140-character chunks, so to participate in "tweeting" would require way more effort to be pithy than I imagine Twitter is supposed to be.

~

I'm avoiding contemplating what historians in the future will make of the combined content of thousands (millions?) of individuals who (I would guess) were not composing their missives with regard to posterity.

Of course, I'm not sure there will be historians in the future. The trend seems to be heading toward less reflection and more immediacy (as evidenced by the aforementioned Twitter) and what one is doing right that moment. University history departments will get few applicants and will cease to be funded. The only purpose the past will serve is for pop culture nostalgia specials on VH1. These archived tweets seem unlikely to become the subject of academic investigation.

If nothing else, given the millions and millions of tweets included, it would turn in to a full-time job to review and analyze them all (or even a significant portion thereof). Who's going to have that kind of time on their hands when everyone will be too busy tweeting about what they're doing?

Thank goodness this post won't be archived in a library.

Doubled over for the Double Down

I'm pretty sure the new Double Down from KFC is proof that we are squarely in a post-post-ironic era. Marketing the "sandwich" where two chicken breasts serve as the "bun" around cheese and bacon seems intentionally designed to elicit incredulity. That's its genius.

I'm hard-pressed to believe that those who came up with the idea for it were oblivious to the cultural environment in 21st century America; if anything, I suspect they expect the Double Down to play to that zeitgeist. In the era of glib reactions, of viral videos and Twitter and "reality stars," it takes some doing to really smash through the din of pop culture. I imagine this came up in a meeting as a silly idea and was deftly identified as something that was just crazy enough to work. The notion of it cannot help but elicit a certain level of I-can't-believe-they're-selling-that, is tailor-made to be lampooned on show like The Colbert Report (follow the link to see the video), but it still registers in the mind of an audience; it's not something easily dismissed like, say, the new whatever the heck Taco Bell is pushing nowadays. The mockery heaped upon it still operates on a certain level as free advertising. It's allowing the writers for the late night guys (like Jimmy Fallon) to compose easy jokes about the crap Americans will eat, but still it's getting the product mentioned. And let's not even get started about how obvious it is that the food blogs and online media would (figuratively) eat this up as a topic.

Now, that does no good if no one actually goes to KFC to buy it, but the flip side of the so-crazy-it-works coin is there's a group of people who (predictably) will transfer the ironic appreciation in to an interest in actually trying it. KFC is essentially throwing down the gauntlet, daring the fast food consumer to consume one. And apparently there were sufficient numbers of those intrepid eaters in the test markets for the Double Down that it was worth seeing how many there were nationwide. (Heck, perhaps the idea is not so much to make people like the Double Down but to get them thinking of having one, going to KFC, and then reconsidering the idea and ordering a more conventional bucket of Original Recipe. It could be a roundabout bait-and-switch ploy for all I know.)

In any case, it seems to demonstrate not only awareness of how society is, knowing that the glib dismissal about how Americans eat atrociously requires an ostensibly risible one-upmanship to have an impact on a jaded audience. And that seems far likelier to be insidiously clever than mere happenstance.


And the smartest aspect of it: The Double Down is a limited time event. Some day there'll be a nostalgic clamoring to bring it back.

That's good pop culture eatin' even if the sandwich tastes awful.

~

Oh, and I should also admit I don't think "post-post-ironic" really means anything; it merely seemed like the sort of term that would play well in this era.