The death of the album

In response to my post on Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On, Tom wrote:

"[I]f everyone buys music on iTunes (etc), will the equivalent of a Sgt Pepper or a Tommy be possible? The album- (or double-album-) length work that shakes up how people think about the connections between songs, as well as songs as individual items?"

My immediate answer is no; the album as we (baby-boomers) knew it--an experience different from just listening to a bunch of songs in one sitting-- is dying and will probably be dead in a few years. But the album as a collection will probably survive in one form or another.

For most of the 20th century, the individual song was the primary format through which music was consumed, first through sheet music, then through singles (78 rpm, then 45 rpm). The album form that we know was introduced in the late 40's by Columbia Records as a collection of songs by a singer or band. Right through to the early 60's, however, the single remained the most important way to get music to the mass audience, and to get songs played on the radio. Most early rock albums were recorded hastily as a way to capitalize on a hit, and often consisted of a couple familiar songs and a lot of filler.

But the Beatles (particularly with Sgt. Pepper) helped change that, and soon albums were often crafted as a whole, and a record company would then try to make hits out of a couple of the songs. Interestingly, Sgt. Pepper, one of the most successful and influential albums of the rock era, had no singles released from it, though songs like "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and "With a Little Help from My Friends" would become universally known. Since then, there have been many, many albums that work both as a collection of songs and as a whole work, not just "concept" albums like Pepper or Tommy or The Wall, but even less ambitious works in which the ebb and flow of the songs, sequenced in a particular order, adds to the experience of listening to the music. For me, this category would include Joni Mitchell's Blue, Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection, Paul Simon's Graceland, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.

As anyone who has talked to me for more than five minutes about the state of music today will know, I blame much of the music industry's problems on its attempt to kill off the single. Back in the 90's, with the advent of the CD, sales of singles had fallen off and labels started releasing "radio-only" promo singles to get songs played, but refused to release them commercially, forcing consumers to buy albums. Now the massive popularity of the mp3 has made the idea (if not the physical artifact) of the single hot again, and is threatening to make the album unnecessary and even unpalatable--why pay for "filler," especially when you can essentially make your own single (choose which songs you like and want to hear over and over again and not rely on a record label to choose for you).

Tom's point, however, is important. For the generation that grew up with vinyl records, listening to an album can be a very different experience from just listening to songs. When I listen to my iPod or to songs on my computer, I never choose the "album" option, partly because I have ripped very few entire albums to mp3. Instead, I like reproducing the experience of listening to 60's era radio, but a radio station that plays all songs I like. When I want to hear an album, I put on a CD. I think artists are still making "albums" which they want to be listened to as a whole (The Decemberists's The Crane Wife, for one), but it's much easier for the consumer to say, no, I don't want to listen the long draggy social commentary song, I just wanna dance, so I'll just buy the dance song and leave the rest of your album alone.

I have to say, it feels kinda fun to be able to subvert the artist despite his/her/their best effort to make me have a full album experience (I love What's Going On, but honestly, I usually skip "Save the Children," because when Gaye howls, "Save the babies," I laugh, which is certainly not the intended reaction--I have nothing against babies, but the cry comes off as a little silly). But I suspect that, when the music industry tried to subvert the singles business, they got more than they bargained for, and now, ironically, it's the album (at least as an art form) which is dying, and in a few years it will come full circle--albums will just be collections of song which were already hits on mp3. And that is kind of sad.

Everything's everything

I've got Marvin Gaye on my mind since watching the PBS American Masters documentary on him earlier in the week. The hour-long show had some good interviews with people like Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson (who, as my partner pointed out, is looking more and more like Lena Horne as he ages), and author Nelson George. Gaye's personal problems, primarily his lifelong inability to please his father, a cross-dressing preacher, were covered in detail, and a lot of concert footage was shown, but missing was any deep examination of his music, what made it different and great.

Gaye is mostly identified with make-out music (the opening few notes of "Let's Get It On" seem to have penetrated the DNA of modern Western humankind as shorthand for seduction, almost to the point where the song is funnier than it is sexy), and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" has been selected by at least one critic as the greatest pop song ever--and even constant overplaying on oldies radio hasn't blunted that song's dark, paranoid power. But for me, Gaye's classic work is the album What's Going On. Released in 1971, it was seen as a collection of protest songs, and Motown's chief, Berry Gordy, thought it would be a bomb, but it was a huge hit which produced three top-10 singles.

Listening to the album now, I don't hear it so much as protest music but as an album of soulful laments about a wide range of troubles and concerns: not just war but crime, pollution, poverty, drugs, race relations, religion, and family. Few solutions are offered, except turning to God and loving one another, but the sorrow and despair expressed in the music and vocals are truly cathartic. Individual songs such as "What's Going On" and "Mercy Mercy Me" are real classics, but the album should be listened to as a whole, as most of the songs segue together to create a whole experience. Some songs, like "Save the Children" and the seven-minute jam "Right On," even have segues within them, as a driving funky beat will suddenly slow down into a section dominated by lush strings--much of the album has the "song cycle" feel of side 2 of Abbey Road. Mention must be made of the great work of the backing musicians, Motown's Funk Brothers, who veer from funky to jazzy at the drop of a hat, and the fine work of the unknown arranger who made the orchestral sections so intense and effective.

The album climaxes with the brilliant "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," which is basically a recital of problems mentioned in previous songs : "Inflation, no chance/To increase finance/Bills pile up sky high/Send that boy off to die." But the hopeful inflections of both voice and music which sweeten the album aren't to be found here until the very end when, after a guttural scream, the song shifts into a brief reprise of "What's Going On" and Gaye finishes with a beautiful, shivery howl of despair. That moment, so beautiful and so sad at the same time, always brings tears to my eyes. I'm glad to have seen the PBS special if only because it sent me back to this album, which I hadn't listened to in its entirety in years. Now I may check out "Here My Dear," his divorce/revenge album from late in his career which was a flop but which some critics now claim is a masterpiece.

Oh, yeah, the title of my post is kind of a dedication to my old grad-school friend Tom McLean who pointed out to me the repetition of the line "Everything's everything!" in amongst the party-atmosphere chatter that runs through the title song; now I can't hear that line without smiling and thinking of Tom.

Accelerating

The new REM album arrived with lots of buzz about how it was their hardest-rocking work in years, going back in inspiration to the early days of Murmur and Life's Rich Pageant. As I've stated before, I like REM in all their stages; my favorite album of theirs is Automatic for the People, but unlike many fans, I've stuck with them through the recent quieter, artsier albums, and I quite liked the last one, Beyond the Sun, which all the critics hated and seems to have sold about 12 copies.

Accelerate is a return to form, of sorts; the sonic atmosphere is like that of the earlier albums, but the melodies are stronger and the recording is sharp and clear, not as murky as Murmur. It's certainly their "hardest" album since Monster in 1994, and I like listening to it in the car, but so far nothing has jumped off of it as a great REM moment for me. The single "Supernatural Superstitious" opens with a hell of a riff, but the lyrics make the song yet another whiny ode to teenage-angst; it's about time Stipe got over the "humiliation" he felt in his "teenage station." As usual, the lyrics are weak, but I'm mostly used to that; the best songs lyrically are the dreamy "Sing for the Submarine" with its references to older REM songs, "Houston," which takes an oblique approach to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and "Hollow Man," in which the singer believes he's turned into the kind of person he hates ("Believe in me, believe in nothing/Have I become the hollow man I see?'). Almost all the songs are catchy, especially "Supernatural" and "Mr. Richards." The album has done well on the charts, but it's not quite the miraculous re-invention it was reported to be.

Favorite summer song of the century, so far

I'd never heard a single song by Panic at the Disco before last month, but when I read reviews of their new album "Pretty. Odd." which all used the Beatles and Sgt Pepper as jumping-off reference points, I thought, I will like this album, and I bought it completely unheard (whatever the aural equivalent of "sight unseen" is). And I do like it, though overall the album sounds less like the Beatles and more like an '00 band influenced by the Fab Four as filtered through ELO, Cheap Trick, Oasis, The Posies, and on through The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, etc.

The problem: the lyrics, which are more ridiculous than average for the 21st century. Musically, the choruses are catchy but the words you have to sing along with are a little embarrassing, like, "I know it's sad that I never gave a damn about the weather / but it never gave a damn about me" from "Do You Know What I'm Seeing?" Even worse, "You remind me of a few of my famous friends / Well, that all depends on what you qualify as friends" from "I Have Friends in Holy Spaces." And the titles of many of the songs have little or nothing to do with the lyrics. But I'm carping about things that no one cares much about these days. There's also a throwaway folk song parody appropriately called "Folkin' Around" that I could have done without.

The good things: most everything else. There are a number of direct Beatles references, such as the Sgt. Pepperish opening, horn riffs used as coloring, and a "Day in the Life" cacophony. But really the band sounds more like a less drugged-out, more high-energy Oasis (though some of the songs, like the wonderful "Nine in the Afternoon," are in fact about being high). And as far as the title of this post, there's a great summer song called "When the Day Met the Night" which I haven't been able to get out of my head for days: "In the middle of summer / All was golden when the day met the night." Unlike a lot of recent pop, this one will probably stay in heavy rotation in my car for the rest of the year.

Spring reading

I hate that I can't seem to get into any fiction these days. All the best-sellers are romances (not for me) or serial-killer crime novels (I read Michael Connelly's "The Poet" and that was enough for me), and the mid-list "literary" stuff I look at just doesn't grab me. I've drifted away from fantasy and sf in the last 20 years or so, and even old-fashioned genre mysteries (like Martha Grimes) don't interest me much any more. Which leaves me non-fiction, mostly history and celebrity bios and books about pop culture. Even there, I'm in a slump, as most of what I've read lately has left me unsatisfied:

"Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art" by Simon Louvish: The balance of the book is on the art, to the point where the book should have been called "The Films of Cecil B. DeMille." Though there is an almost exhaustive amount of material about DeMille's very early days, once he starts making movies, the focus shifts to plot summaries of films that run to multiple pages, and very little about DeMille the man and what made him tick.

"The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America" by David Hajdu: I very much enjoyed Hajdu's earlier book "Positively 4th Street" about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Richard and Mimi Farina, to the point where I went out and bought a CD set of music by the Farinas. But this book, which mostly covers the postwar years when comic books came under federal scrutiny, feels unfocused and disjointed. Though EC comics like Vault of Horror were at the center of the storm (and EC's publisher William Gaines rightfully gets a lot of attention here), Hajdu doesn't spend much time talking about the comics themselves, or the actual contemporary reception of them by their readers. A book about comics should have lots of illustrations, and this book has only a skimpy 8 pages of photos, and black & white ones at that. And "how it changed America" is never really addressed.

"Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography" by Richard Stirling: I opted to read this one instead of Andrews' own recent memoir because hers just covers her early years, leaving out her film career. This book is breezy and easy to read, but it's hardly "intimate"; the author has actually met and interviewed Andrews in the past, but he's not a close friend, and he obviously didn't gain her confidence for a full-fledged "authorized" bio. Still, the book does help bring the iconic figure of Andrews to more full-blooded life, and Stirling does share a couple of fun gossipy tales.

All this bitching makes me think I should end on something positive, so I'll mention "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," this year's Caldecott Award winner for best picture book for children. It's a wonderful story about a young orphan, living alone in a Paris train station, who is obsessed with trying to finish building an automaton left by his father. To quote from the ALA/Caldecott web page, "Neither words nor pictures alone tell this story, which is filled with cinematic intrigue. Black & white pencil illustrations evoke the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage." And that makes reading the book a unique experience. Still, I couldn't help but occasionally wonder about the waste of paper--almost 550 pages to tell a story which can be read in an afternoon. The cinematic swoops and close-ups and far shots are fun, but might have been more effective in a larger page format. But it's still a memorable tale, well told.

Satan in the swamps, God in the Alps

My DVD viewing this week consisted of two wildly different films:

1) The Reaping (2007)--I grabbed this at the library on impulse, knowing almost nothing about it except it was one of Hilary Swank's "gotta pay the rent on my vacation house" B-movies. I figured it for a fun campy horror flick to swill beer and eat pretzels by. It was actually a little better than that, with almost no campiness, but it's ultimately a little too pretentious to take to heart. Swank is an ex-missionary who lost her faith and is now a college professor who goes about debunking claims of religious miracles. A somewhat hunky schoolteacher (David Morrissey) asks her to come to his small town in Louisiana to investigate what appears to be a visitation of Biblical plagues. The townies believe that a young girl and her mother who live in the swamp are devil-worshipers who have brought on blood in the waters, frogs from the sky, and lice in everyone's hair. Swank offers scientific explanations for all the Bible plagues, but soon realizes that things are not quite what they seem in the town, and that science can't explain everything that's happening.

This is a deadly serious flick with no sense of humor, but there is fun in finding the many references (in plot and visuals) to other films, most obviously The Omen, The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby, but also The Blair Witch Project, The Birds, Carrie, The Ten Commandments, and in its ridiculously overdone climax, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Swank and Morrissey work well together, and 13-year-old AnnaSophia Robb is very good at being creepily enigmatic for most of the movie. An odd little subplot with Stephen Rea, which feels like it was almost literally dropped in at the last minute for the sake of exposition, doesn't work, but the plague effects do work quite well, with the best saved for next-to-last, a hellish swarm of locusts that quite creeped me out. Some critics have said this movie was intended for the "God" market, but I don't see the pious faithful going for this; it's directly in line with religion-tinged horror films like The Exorcist.

2) Into Great Silence (2005)--This is usually described in summaries as a documentary about life in a monastery in France, and might, like The Reaping, be taken as "God market" bait. But this isn't really a documentary, and with a slow deliberate pace, a running time of 160 minutes, and no narration or explanation of what we're seeing, this is most assuredly not for the folks who ate up The Passion of the Christ. The director, Philip Groning, spent six months living in the Grande Chartreuse monastery with some 30 Carthusian monks who live in austerity and silence. Though we do get a sense of time passing, both in the larger sense (a snowy winter becoming a warm spring) and the smaller (the daily rituals of the monks), this is more an impressionistic take on the lives and circumstances of the monks.

The experience of watching this film is more like looking at a work of art; the visuals are always stunning, and often we're looking at men in robes and cowls not moving (in prayer or meditation, napping, sitting for hair cuts, studying) for long periods of time. The camera gets in remarkably close to the men's faces so we have an unusual sense of physical closeness to many of the monks. There is no music except for the monks' chants, and almost no dialogue except for occasional snippets of talk during the monks' weekly outdoor walks. The movie has an odd rhythm, with lots of lots of long, mostly immobile takes, interspersed with some choppy shots of candles and water. Though the look of most of the film (as I saw it on DVD on a hi-def TV) is absolutely sharp and crystal clear, there are some sequences with heavy film grain, which gives those scenes an evocative antique look. There is one beautiful shot I will remember forever: a time-lapse scene of stars and clouds moving across the sky over the monastery during one 24-hour period. This takes patience to get through--I wound up watching it over two nights, though I suspect it's more effective in one sitting--but for a unique experience, I would recommend it.

My favorite Beatles songs, period.

It's difficult to pick just a few songs out of the Beatles canon as my favorites. It would be easier to make a list of my least favorite Beatles songs; it would be a short list, less than 10, maybe "I Need You" and "Old Brown Shoe" and "Doctor Robert." There are some I tend to skip when I play albums, like "I'm Looking Through You" or "Mother Nature's Son." I can tell you my least favorite Beatles album is the American release Beatles VI. But generally, a Beatles song is a good song; I've even listened to "Revolution 9" more times than I can count, certainly more often than I've listened to any other avant-garde sound collage ever recorded (unless "Pump Up the Volume" counts). So heres a baker's dozen of Beatles songs that give me the most bliss (aside from the first two, in no particular order):

1. "Hey Jude"--such a simple song, endlessly sing-alongable. Some think it's too long, but for me, it always fades out a little too soon.

2. "Strawberry Fields Forever"--fabulous studio trickery that doesn't feel like trickery. And all the variant versions from the Anthology and the bootlegs are also worth hearing more than once.

3. "Can't Buy Me Love"--I think of the Beatles as having three phases in their career: the happy, peppy early stuff; the slower, depressing songs of '65 and '66; the psychedelic stuff and beyond. This song is the epitome of the early stage, a happy opening burst of sound, a swinging beat, and those naughty choirboy harmonies. "A Hard Day's Night" is almost as good.

4. "I Am the Walrus"--the lyrics are total nonsense, but when I was 12, I was sure there was something sinister and profound going on, and who knows, there might be. The definition of "psychedelic music" in about four minutes, rather than the 6 or 8 or 12 minutes it takes Pink Floyd. [BTW, the Oingo Boingo cover of this song is damned good]

5. "A Day in the Life"--another song that struck me as unutterably profound when I was young; now I just think it's brilliant, especially the beautiful orchestral crescendos.

6. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"--druggy, dreamy poetry with meandering ethereal verses and a kickin' chorus.

7. "Boys"--a Ringo Starr rave-up. I don't know why he's singing to his girl about how wonderful boys are, but it's too fun to think much about.

8. "For No One"--Paul's most depressing song; simple, sad, evocative, and with a killer ending, musically.

9. "Tomorrow Never Knows"--the birth of psychedelic music, and I don't care if that's a lie. Like a scary window into an H. P. Lovecraft world.

10. "Across the Universe"--a mellow cosmic meditation; like Strawberry Fields, a song that is worth listening to in its various versions and remixes, and the covers by Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright are both fine.

11. "Blue Jay Way"--another wonderful hazy dream.

12. "Things We Said Today"--to this musically unsophisticated listener, this melody sounds complex and adventurous, but still fun to sing along with.

13. "Norwegian Wood"--the best folky song the Beatles did; like others on this list, a little scary sounding with a meaning that seems to be hidden just below the surface.

And how can I leave off "Eleanor Rigby" and "Penny Lane" and "She Loves You" and "The Two of Us" and "Fool on the Hill" and "Back in the USSR" and "Come Together" and "Dear Prudence" and "Magical Mystery Tour" and "Lovely Rita" and ...