Hey hey, my my… pop music albums will never die

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/08/2010 (4982 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THAT tireless troubadour Neil Young, I see, has earned the wrath of cut­ting- edge music pundits over the release strategy of his forthcom­ing solo album.

Le Noise, as it’s now being called (wasn’t the work­ing title Twisted Road when Young played here a month ago?), will hit stores in CD and vinyl, as well as in a digital format for iTunes, on Sept. 28. His mistake, apparently, is in decid­ing to hold back for another month on the release of the Blu Ray, iPhone and iPad versions.

Good grief! Doesn’t he realize the world has changed? The ubiquitous music industry blogger Bob Lefsetz (yes, even I now subscribe to his never-ending emails) felt Shakey should give equal opportunity to the early adopters, to maximize his rev­enue streams.

“This is not trendsetting,” Lefsetz told the Globe and Mail. “Nothing here seems like a breakthrough.”

Lefsetz’s objection, by the way, seems similar to that of e-book pro­moters who get cranky when publish­ers don’t release their wares to Kindle the same day as bookstores.

Young seemed oblivious to the problem. “Forgive my use of the word ‘album,’” he was quoted in the press re­lease for Le Noise. “I am old school.”

That’s OK, Neil. I’m old school, too.

Maybe more old school than you.

For example, I didn’t know anyone had an issue with the word “album.”

I understand that “record” (as a noun referring to vinyl) was anachronistic in the age of CDs, but I have always as­sumed that “album” was an acceptable for any collection of songs.

Then again, maybe that’s the point.

Young understands, as I do not, that it’s these very collections of songs that are so 20th-century.

As we’ve been told endlessly for at least five years, nobody buys albums anymore. Everybody downloads indi­vidual tunes (“tracks” may be the pref­erable word) for their iPods and MP3 players, then shuffles them according to their own whim.

That’s fair enough. Technology has changed the nature of artistic con­tent — from mastodon blood to using acrylic paints, from Aeschylus traged­ies to Cameron 3-D movies — through­out human history.

But if albums have gone the way of the dodo, why do so many musicians continue to produce them?

I have only to walk over to the desk of my music-writer colleague Rob Williams to see a towering stack of CDs. (It’s almost as big as the stack of books, that other quaint technology, on my desk as book-review editor.) All those albums aren’t from fossils like Neil Young. Most come from young bands who are trying to distribute their wares on Myspace or via mental telepathy or however they attempt to do it.

This newspaper, at the same time that it publishes stories about the death of the album, continues to review them as though they still make some kind of relevant statement.

And hasn’t the Canadian music industry, in just the last few years, championed a national award, the Polaris Prize, for best album? What’s with that? Why don’t they just offer cash for the top medieval madrigal?

Gadflies like Lefsetz would say that the industry’s attachment to the album is about laziness and greed. It’s easier and more lucrative to produce and sell a package of 12 songs (half of them crappy) for $12, than to come up with 12 good ones that fans will pay a $1 each for.

He has a point. But the album refus­es to die for other reasons. Most people understand, unconsciously, that if they buy only what they like on first listen, they will never discover anything new. The pleasure of most albums comes in living with them for a while and finding cuts that grow on you. Popular music is almost by definition super­ficial, and its serious practitioners will always strive for the novelistic ambi­tion of the suite.

Ninety-nine per cent of albums really are nothing but a collection of unrelated songs, linked by their com­mon instrumentation and perhaps by having being written and recorded at a moment in time.

But it’s hard to imagine technology making obsolete the desire for some­thing more substantial, either from artists or listeners.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca