The Sad Death of the Album
Thursday, October 12, 2006
The debate about the randomness (or otherwise) of iPod’s shuffle has got me thinking about how the evolving technology of music has changed the way we appreciate the art.
I’m a child of the early seventies, so my music collection spans several media - first cassette tape (now almost all gone, thank goodness), then vinyl (which I still have, with a new turntable to play them and rip them to MP3), then CD and now digital download.
Two sides to every story
So my first appreciation of albums was as objects that had songs in order, spread across two sides. Often I’d listen to one side several times, waiting until I really got the songs, before flipping the record over and trying the second side.
And artists knew there were sides - some overtly flagged this (Joe Jackson’s ‘Night and Day’ has a day side and a night side) but everyone had to make sure the songs flowed well, and that there was a killer track to start side 2. It wasn’t just a random bunch of songs they happened to put out at the same time, an album was a single piece of work in itself.
When the CD came along, there were grumblings that the perfection of it would somehow neuter the music (and there are plenty of audiophiles who still think that), but for me, it was the loss of sides that hurt.
Ten songs or more, all in a line? It was too much to get your ears or head around in one go.
But I got used to it, and CDs preserved the same crucial quality that all media had to that point - a narrative. Albums have a linear quality - a beginning, middle and end (mostly in that order).
Of course CDs made it much easier to jump straight to the track you wanted, but by and large you still listened in sequence. When one track finished, you’d start hearing the opening bars of the next track in your head, even before they started for real.
The inhuman shuffle
Now I’ve got almost all my albums on my iPod and on my computer, and a lot of the time, I shuffle them (either across the whole collection, or within a genre or playlist). It’s like having a radio station that only plays songs I like, and the anticipation of the next track is beguiling.
But too often I skip a track after the first minute or so, thinking the next one will be better, and I’ve now come to see that’s while the shuffling is cool, it’s missing something.
There’s no context for the songs - a human element that created the narrative in which they were arranged on the album. Of course, I can choose to play just the whole ex-CD at a time, but the questions over whether shuffling really is random points to the problem - we actually want there to be some order to the tracks.
There’s a good side to this, of course. If you carefully plan a playlist that has a story to it and tracks chosen with thought, then you can create something new and unique to you.
But if the idea of the album is on the way out, all we’re left with is a pool of invividual tracks, then we’ve lost something important about how music works and how we relate to it.