Sunday, February 28, 2010

Albums or Singles? You Decide!

Then:

Were you a singles person or an albums person?  Did you prefer the simplicity and immediacy of a single song, or the adventure of an album full of them?  Did you just wanna dance?  Or were you, like me, pretentious? 

Did you hover over the record player, ready with another 45 the moment the first one finished?  Or did you sit back while the more leisurely 33 1/3 rpm unwound over twenty or so minutes?

My hovering with the forty five period began at age seven and lasted until about twelve, which is when singles began to suck, which encouraged the aforementioned pretentiousness, resulting in the switch.

Would I be wrong to say that girls liked singles and boys liked albums?  I find this weird because while singles seemed more slutty (Sorry, I didn’t catch the name of that song), albums were more monogamous.  They required some commitment to listen all the way through, including the weaker songs. 

There is a short story/novel equivalent here, and as you might guess I prefer novels. 

The singles people had more fun, but they worried about seeming superficial, so every once in a while, they’d buy albums.  They usually ended up with a single disguised as an album - you know, an album with only one good song on it.  They’d get bored and go back to the singles life.

At least until they turned thirty, when they thought they should settle down and be album people.  And even if they got a pretty good album, they’d get bored with it because whatever they might have thought, they got themselves a relationship when what they really wanted was just another one night stand.  Such people should just accept themselves and stick to greatest hits albums.

It could be embarrassing to be an albums person.  Everyone thought you were very serious.  (You were.)  And depressed (ditto).  And not having fun (true, which is why you needed those albums - to fill up the time.)

We album folk were the first geeks.  Lacking anything else to be geekish about, we could quickly get past the music itself and focus on the album as package.  After all, what did you get with the single, anyway?  A flimsy paper cover, a very suspect B-side (unless it was a Beatles or Stones record).  And not even a yellow plastic thing to stick in the hole in the middle, in order to play it without feeling seasick.  To this day, I’ll hear a song from the sixties on the radio and marvel at how much less woozy it sounds now.

And no matter how badly you treated your albums, you still treated them better than your singles.  The occasionally skip caused by the scratches on an album could never compare to the dust and grime encountered on the average 45, which should have had us arrested for physical abuse.

Album covers were like paintings.  They gave you something to look at - something to study while everyone else was talking to girls.  The untitled front covers were the best, with no words to distract you from the image (like "Abbey Road").  But the minutia on the back, about the songwriters, musicians and production would make up for this. 

And let’s not forget the most fascinating, or at least most minute, minutia of all - song durations, which I thought had no reason for being except to fascinate me alone.  (The fact that it helped radio stations figure out what they could fit on their programs was just a side benefit.)   My fascination began when I noticed that “Strawberry Fields” clocked in at just over four minutes!  The last time I had looked was when “Help” clocked in at 3:15 - the longest I had ever seen up to that point. 

(Real Quick: How long is “Hey Jude”? A: 7:11).

And they got longer and longer.  “In a Godda Da Vida”, “Dark Star”, took up entire sides.  Canned Heat’s “Refried Boogie” and the Allman Brothers “Mountain Jam” took up TWO sides each.  How cool is that, huh?  Not that cool?  Okay.

And how can you forget the slug line?  (Uh, by not knowing what it is to begin with, Jaybee.)  All right, let me school you.  The slug line is the labeling on the left edge of the album cover - usually the Artist Name and Album Title.  Don’t care?  Well just try to find your favorite album on your bookshelf then.  Okay, I’ll admit that CDs make this much easier, but back in Vinylandia you needed it. 

But it couldn’t help if it wasn’t straight and even, like the spine of a very (very) thin book.  And it just looked awful if the lettering spilled over onto the front or back of the cover.  There was a time when I would not buy an album because of this.  I would look for another copy – one with a straight and even slug line.  It told ya it was nuts.

And the lyrics!  (Uh, I really don’t care about lyrics.)

In any case, with the front picture, the useless minutia, the slug line and the words I didn’t understand, with an album, you really had something in you hand.  Hopefully the album.



Brave New World:

So do these two distinct types of people exist anymore?  I don’t know.  I think the line is blurring.

My son’s been downloading music.  The albums sit somewhere on his iPod and the computer’s hard drive.  There isn’t much to look at.  And I don’t have the slightest clue what he’ll do if either device crashes.  Are they backed up?  Is there a receipt?  Or do they just buy and download them again?

And I don’t feel any better about it when he plays an album directly from his iTunes library, without even putting the CD in the drive.  And the slope gets really slippery when you can play the songs selectively.  In other words, you can play only the parts of the album you really like.  Which sounds an awful lot like singles heaven to me.

So, as an album person, I’m having some trouble with it – not so much with the digital age, but rather the virtual age.  The “thing” itself seems to be fading away, leaving only the music.  But if it’s the music that matters to me, why do I find this so disconcerting?  Because I’m still a freaking albums person, that’s why.

After all, isn’t downloading songs just a small innocent step away from making a mix tape (or, in a quantum leap forward, burning a mix CD)?  But the difference now is that our iPods and computers don’t have nearly the space limitations that tapes and CDs have.  Those 90 minute mix-tapes had to be planned, and they could take hours to make.  CD burning took less time, but encouraged tinkering to get the songs in the right order.  (If you don’t understand why that’s important, you should have stopped reading a long time ago.)  Not only could one be a musician by proxy, but also a DJ by proxy, too.

So now with your 100 Gig hard drive and whatever gig iPod, you can listen to whatever you want and as much of it as you want. If you choose to, you could listen to an endless playlist of songs you know and love.

This might sound like a great thing, and I’ve spent many a morning playing songs randomly from my Windows Media Player library, and enjoying it immensely.  But I feel there’s something missing.  I feel as though the album - the self contained unit that “forces” you to listen to a number of songs you haven’t heard before, thus giving you an opportunity to discover hidden treasures, or to have something really grow on you - as a concept, is fading away.

And that’s the bad news.  We can, if we wish, ignore the rest of the music world.  But hopefully you don’t want to do that, because, if anything, it’s almost too easy to identify and find music you like. 

When you were a kid, you could have been captivated by a song on the radio, but miss the title, and be haunted by it, waiting for it to come on the radio again.  Or, you might have been in a record store, staring longingly at the album you wanted to explore, but didn’t have the money for. 

But as an adult, you could spare the money to buy that record you love.  And the radio stations even post their playlists, so that if you hear something you love (not likely), you could look it up and then buy it from amazon.com.

So there are no more obscure songs that catch your attention and then fade away, haunting you forevermore.  The mystery is gone. 

The only limitation is us, and what we’re interested in hearing.

It’s a sick world my friend.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Music Even I Can Dance To

Denial:

Remember how disco sucks?  If you do, then I’ll ask that we instead speak of dance
music. 

Back in the day, I hated disco as much or more, than the next (white, straight) guy.  Being
a very serious person, my music had to be serious, too.  No fun allowed.  Fun included
dancing, which wasn’t allowed the moment “Dancing in the Streets” finished playing. 

I had my way for a few years when all those singer-songwriters came from out of the
woodwork, but then all of a sudden, another crowd began having a great time doing
something I couldn’t (dance) or wouldn’t (dress up) do.  Obviously disco - oh, sorry, 
dance music - had to be stopped.

I’m not saying that the music didn’t drive me up the wall.  That big, steady beat seemed
to be aggressively stupid.  Hey, what can I tell you?  I’m a snob. 

Looking back now, I’m sure that disco has as good a batting average as any other music
genre for having something interesting to say, even if it appeared to be designed to avoid
saying it at all costs.  My personal taste prevented me from perceiving or even
experiencing a lot of it.


Bargaining, Depression, etc:

Cut to 1979, and I’m listening to “I Zimbra”, the opening track from Talking Heads “Fear
of Music”, a record I deemed somewhat inferior to the life-changing (mine, that is)
“More Songs About Buildings and Food”.  There was more weirdness than melody this
time around, and “I Zimbra”, with its chanting and throbbing beat, seemed less like a
song than a novelty that happened to be good to dance to.  I struggled to explain to
myself how Talking Heads – a band I loved – made a record that sounded a lot like music 
I hated.  This minor crisis threatened my enormous self satisfaction.

Jump now to the summer of 1980 when the Heads are playing around town at an outside
venue.  I don’t actually get in, but I hear enough to be appalled.  “I Zimbra” turned out
not to be a novelty but rather a new direction.  And now at this show, instead of the spare,
angular minimal Talking Heads, I get a big band.  There are about 10 people on stage,
including background singers (I hate background singers, by the way), and the guitar
player is actually shimmying.  I left, disgusted.

Later that year, they came out with “Remain in Light”, which featured the new sound
they were previewing that summer - but for some reason by now I can handle it.  In the
privacy of my apartment I can appreciate what I couldn't then.  I hear the words and the
core sound of the Heads, and can better handle the new trappings.  I also realize that they
wanted people to dance to their music, not just stand around being ironic.


Acceptance:

Speaking of irony, I can now see a clear difference between disco and the newer Talking
Heads sound, but it's a good thing I couldn't then.  It forced me to confront the likelihood
that I was just an uptight stick in the mud. 

I also caught them again about a year later, and this time they sounded great, even though
the show wasn’t much different from the earlier one.  So I guess they forced me out of
my comfort zone.

Once outside of it, it becomes much easier to enjoy other dance music (although I have
my limits – the Salsoul Orchestra Christmas Album still sucks).  I negotiated a
compromise with myself, and have developed a tic when this music is on.  I call it
dancing.  My kids call it Tourettes.


So the following are some records that helped me in this transition. I have to stress that
these are not objects for study.  They are extremely enjoyable records:

Substance - New Order
This greatest-hits-at-the-time is just the right blend of new wave and dance music.   It
takes you from their dark Joy Division roots to the prime of their dance floor hit era.

Saturday Night Fever
Okay, the hits are way overplayed, and the filler is, well, filler, but attention must be paid.

Discography - Pet Shop Boys
So you can dance and be ironic at the same time!

Very - Pet Shop Boys
And then the irony wears away, to reveal actual feelings.

Haddaway
Friends laugh when I tell them how much I like this Eurodisco album.  Is it because I’m a
dead ringer for the fella on the cover?  Not.

Wise Guy - Kid Creole and the Coconuts
Between the carribean beats, the funny/intelligent lyrics and the tunes, this was one of the
greatest surprises of my record buying life. 

The Immaculate Collection - Madonna
I don't even own this one yet, but I dare you to not like “Borderline”.  Once you’ve done
that, there’s “Holiday”, "Vogue", etc.  And before you know it, you’re practically gay.


At root, dance music encourages the display of a grace and self assurance that
I simply can’t identify with.  It just isn’t modest or awkward enough for me.  These
people are having way too much fun.

Stop me before I dance again!