From: mighty65@pacbell.net (mighty recording corp.)
Newsgroups: rec.music.beatles,rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1960's
Subject: "How the Album Got Played Out" (great long read)
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 20:41:30 -0800
How the Album Got Played Out
CD's, the Internet and computer-programmed radio have made the rock LP
irrelevant. Kids these days -- they just don't listen.
By GERALD MARZORATI
Gerald Marzorati is the articles editor of The Times Magazine.
=====
The 40th Annual Grammy Awards will be held at Radio City Music Hall
Wednesday night, and among the nominees for Album of the Year is
Radiohead's "OK Computer," which you've probably never heard of, much
less spent a lot of time listening to. Upon its release in July by
Capitol Records, one of the country's biggest labels, it was hailed by
popular-music critics -- whereupon it peaked at No. 21 on the Billboard
200 album chart and then sank like a stone. Its appearance on numerous
year-end "best of" lists had it climbing again last month, to No. 70.
Radiohead is from Oxford, England, and on "OK Computer," its third
album, the band fluently draws on the entire history of album-oriented
British rock -- the Beatles and Brian Eno, U2 and Joy Division, Pink
Floyd and Queen -- to construct a cycle of songs by turns clever and
bodeful about the jangly reconfiguration of the self in this moment of
hypermarket capitalism and technological transformation. It's a
stunning, soaring album, and it's not stretching much to think that it
might have been 1997's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," or maybe
its "Nevermind," Nirvana's 1991 melody-and-metal ode to family
breakdown, or anyway one of a number of ambitious rock albums that have,
over the past 30 years or so, put the moment to music and loudly and
successfully insisted on being heard.
Alas, the new tendencies and habits of mind that Radiohead sings about
are most readily found in young, white, relatively affluent American
males, long the core audience for rock albums, and one of the things
these new Digital Dudes do not seem to want to do is listen to albums
like "OK Computer." At least not in the numbers or with the intensity of
the young, white, relatively affluent American males who wore out albums
by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and then the Band and the
Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, and then the Clash and Bruce
Springsteen, and then Nirvana and Pearl Jam and R.E.M. -- albums that
were lovingly blasted again and again in ranch-home bedrooms and campus
dorm rooms across the nation. This, I think, best explains why Radiohead
failed to go big, as Beck, with his album "Odelay," failed to go big
last year, though he, too, received a Grammy nomination for best album.
The recording expected to get that award this year is Bob Dylan's "Time
Out of Mind." Last year Dylan was back in the news, hospitalized for a
heart ailment in May and honored in Washington at year's end, and if
"Time Out of Mind" is not among the greatest Dylan albums, it is
remarkable in its insistence that it be comprehended as an album. Like
"OK Computer," "Time Out of Mind" demands to be listened to all the way
through, to be engaged, interpreted, identified with, inhabited. It has
a bluesy musical cohesiveness and a thematic unity to the lyrics, as
Dylan, his voice at its goutiest, ruminates Rabbit Angstrom-like about
old love troubles and the diminishments and death-haunts of midlife. If
you're someone who grew up with Dylan in the 60's, as I did, you've
probably bought the album. (It actually managed to sneak into the
Billboard Top 10 for a week last fall.)
But then, if you grew up with Dylan, you grew up with a certain
understanding of how albums like the dozens he has made were to be
approached, an inclination imparted not simply by the instrumental and
lyrical demands of the songs but also by album-listening's basic
technological underpinnings -- a large vinyl disk placed gently on a
turntable and left alone to spin. It was a manner of listening
reinforced and expanded by FM radio stations devoted to serious rock
music, stations that would introduce the albums and years later, if they
held up over time, play songs from them together with songs from new
albums, thus creating for rock, and its growing audience of enthusiasts,
a sense of musical history and esthetic development. At their best,
these FM stations brought their loyal listeners together in a kind of
long-playing republic, where rock-and-roll's founders were cherished and
its most interesting young exemplars encouraged.
This relationship of listener to album was not readily unlearned, even
as vinyl LP's gave way in the 1980's to tape cassettes and then to
compact disks. But rather suddenly now, this kind of listening is
showing every sign of being lost on more and more of the young for whom,
above all, rock albums are made. The Billboard charts and that part of
FM radio devoted to the latest rock music are all at once dominated by
mindless pop singles, dance-party hits and novelty songs -- stuff that
aspires to be little more than background music for somebody's teen
years. Culturally speaking, the ambitious rock album is where it was in
the early 1960's of Top 40, the "Peppermint Twist" and the Singing Nun:
Nowhere.
What accounts for this, I suspect, is not some woeful lack of a new
musical trend -- the most common explanation proffered by music industry
executives. Twenty-five years ago this week, in what was arguably the
Golden Age of the rock LP, turntables across the country were spinning
with equanimity Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," Joni Mitchell's
"For the Roses" and the Band's "Rock of Ages." Name that trend.
Listening to an album is ultimately a matter of giving yourself over to
somebody else's choices -- this song, then this one. The digital
revolution promises precisely the opposite: what do you want, want right
now?
The Big Album, the album that is the realization of an artist's or
band's vision, is not so much suffering for lack of a musical trend as
it is suffering under the weight of larger trends in the music industry.
A Big Album cannot slowly unfold and cohere on digitally formatted
compact disks that can be scanned or reprogrammed at the impatient push
of a remote's button. It cannot be nurtured by record labels owned by
large, publicly traded companies increasingly living quarter to fiscal
quarter and basing more and more of what used to be artistic judgements
on market research from the likes of Soundscan, a company that delivers
instant sales figures to the record labels -- doing for music-sales
statistics what Dick Morris did for polling. Nor can a Big Album reach
sophisticated listeners via FM rock stations that ever more depend not
only on Soundscan but also on computer software programs that crunch an
array of survey data and spit out playlists heedfully purged of anything
too demanding or adventurous.
The Big Album cannot, finally, hold its own in cyberspace, where rock
music is headed. MTV, with its emphasis on "look" over "sound" -- and on
a video director's interpretation of a song over all others -- was only
the beginning. Now there are countless Web sites with instantly
available "stereo sound clips" and links to more rock videos than MTV
could show in a year. Already there are sites where shoppers can pay to
make their own CD compilations, and technological advances in this
do-it-yourself album-making could spell an end to the way rock music has
been sent out into the world -- an end, perhaps, to the very notion of
an album of music thoughtfully composed and assembled by a songwriter or
a group.
Listening to an album by Radiohead or Bob Dylan is ultimately a matter
of giving yourself over to somebody else's choices -- this song, then
this one, because it was conceived to be heard that way. The digital
revolution promises precisely the opposite: you get to pick and choose,
quickly, effortlessly, endlessly. What do you want, want right now? It's
the ability to gauge and provide just that that's killing the Big Album.
In 1988, which was just about the time it became clear that compact disks
would be the dominant recording format, the Artist Formerly Known as
Prince released an album titled "Lovesexy." The CD version was encoded
in such a way to deprive you of all the things that your new, digital CD
player allowed you to do -- skip or repeat a song at the push of a
button, or use the "program" option to change the order of the songs. If
you bought "Lovesexy," you could put it on and listen, period. What
Prince was saying was that this was an album, and his album, not yours.
This is more or less what songwriters and groups first began saying in
the mid-1960's, when the rock album emerged as something more than a
compilation of hit singles -- as a medium with aspirations to esthetic
and even cosmic significance. Dylan and the Beatles led the way, the
Beatles luring him to plug in an electric guitar and Dylan showing them
there was more to sing about than holding hands. It happened
breathtakingly fast, even by pop standards, over the course of months in
1965: Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited,"
and then "Rubber Soul," the Beatles' rumination on young-love trouble.
Stereos were more and more replacing suitcase-size record players in
teen-agers' bedrooms, and stacks of 45's were heading for the attic. Pop
was stretching, and slowing down.
By the summer of 1966, Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" was in the Top 10 and
the Beach Boys, urged on by Brian Wilson, had released their album "Pet
Sounds," which ushered in an era of studio experimentation and was
lauded as the first "concept" album by new, sophisticated rock critics
writing in publications like The Village Voice and Crawdaddy. Meanwhile,
the Beatles had announced they were completely abandoning concert
appearances because they could no longer play live the music that
mattered to them, music that could only be made in a studio -- a densely
textured pop that, in August 1966, was unveiled on an album named, quite
simply and pointedly, for the very term British youth then used for an
album.
I bought "Revolver" shortly after starting the eighth grade. I stared at
the cover art a lot, and thought how the titles for the group's songs
had gotten pretty weird. ("Taxman"?) The first time I listened all the
way through to the final song, "Tomorrow Never Knows," with its tape
loops and backward-recorded guitar solo and lyrics drawn from "The
Tibetan Book of the Dead," I was sure something was wrong with my hi-fi.
Then I played the album again and again, getting to know the songs --
know them in terms of one another, as you'd learn lines in a poem, or
elements in a landscape. And I thought about stuff I'd never thought
about before.
"Revolver" demanded and rewarded close attention, but there was
something about the technology that inevitably and crucially imparted
the delicacy and slowness the music called for -- the whole
give-yourself-over-to-it aspect that is at the heart of sensitive
listening, however loud or raucous the music might be. Moving the tone
arm around from one song to another, flipping the disk again and again
-- making the album yours -- was just too much work. You flopped across
the bed and took it in.
There were, beginning in the late 60's across America, FM radio stations
that would play albums in their entireties, especially brand new ones,
as anyone tuning in on June 1, 1967, the day "Sgt. Pepper's" was
released, probably remembers. More commonly, though, the disk jockeys on
these stations would move the needle around, but with the intention of
deepening an understanding of the music -- segueing, say, from a Rolling
Stones song to one by Paul Butterfield and then on to one by Eric
Clapton to show the range of the electric blues. It was a jumping from
song to song not to play hits but to advance the argument that Pop could
be Art.
This is not what a 14-year-old is doing when he, remote in hand, skips
around a CD or repeats one song again and again. He's simply getting
quickly, like that, what he likes and wants. (My album.) Today's FM
stations mostly encourage this kind of listening, playing only what
they've painstakingly ascertained is their listeners' desire that week.
The 130 or so stations devoted to modern rock, as it's known in the
radio industry, are more like the old Top 40 than like FM of the late
60's, or, for that matter, of the early 90's, when more daring deejays
got behind the Big Albums of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and
R.E.M. Deejays today do little more than provide patter between songs
that they have had no hand in selecting.
Using software programs like one called Selector, music directors at
those stations sequence a day's worth of songs in a minute or so. The
directors themselves still choose the songs, but this is mostly a matter
of reading the numbers every morning -- taking into account local sales
as tracked each week by Soundscan. The typical modern-rock playlist has
about three dozen new singles, or "currents"; a "hot" current will be
placed in "heavy rotation," airing four or five times a day. A single
that fails to catch on quickly is history, and history -- rock music
from other eras -- is pretty much history, too. Albums have nothing to
do with it, and songs that are neither short nor hook-driven -- songs
like those on "OK Computer" -- don't have much to do with it, either. If
you want to hear radio today that, for instance, might mix in several
tracks from Kate Bush's seminal 1985 LP, "Hounds of Love," with newer
songs by such female artists as Bjork and Beth Orton, you pretty much
have to find a college station. (New Yorkers interested in the kind of
rock radio that FM once provided have a choice of precisely one show:
Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight," which is broadcast on Sunday nights on
WNEW-FM.)
In the age of modern rock, the big record companies -- already under
pressure to keep quarterly profit margins as high as possible for the
entertainment conglomerates that own them -- are spending increasing
amounts of time and money chasing, signing and feverishly promoting
one-hit wonders. One recent survey often mentioned by record people
found that 40 percent of record-store shoppers in 1996, as compared with
28 just three years before, will buy a CD after hearing only one song
they liked. If these are the listeners you want to sell to, and the
record industry has by and large decided they are, you don't put your
resources into developing and promoting the kinds of artists who might
make Big Albums. You churn out singles (available on padded-out
album-length CD's for $16.99) and hope a few of them become hits.
The market is flooded with product: hundreds of new pop recordings a
week, when dozens were once the rule. At the same time, no top
modern-rock hit of 1997 was taken from an album that could stand up to a
third or fourth listening, much less find a place in a collection to be
listened to years from now. New music exists now moment to moment, in a
fickle, flattened present, where to be huge is, paradoxically, to matter
not at all.
You choose the song, you arrange them in the order you want, you
personalize the disk with your own title and name." This is the promise
of www. musicmaker.com, a Web site where you can assemble 9 or 10 songs
from thousands they've got posted and they'll make a CD for you for
about the same price you'd pay for a store-bought CD.
This kind of "personalized" album-making is only the beginning. The
price of a computer drive capable of creating CD's has fallen
drastically, as has the cost of a blank CD. A new company called N2K not
only plans to open an on-line music store, of which there are already
dozens, but also has the larger ambition of distributing music to be
downloaded directly through buyers' personal computers onto blank CD's.
One day you may be able to sit at your computer and assemble a new
"album" without ever buying or even encountering an actual album that
some artist or group put together.
There is no telling whether the big record labels or the artists would
ever stand for this. But it is where the technology is headed --
already, artists are releasing "advance tracks" on their Web sites. And
where the technology has gone, rock music has generally followed. I
imagine that even if such a time should arrive, there would remain those
devotees who continue to insist on purchasing an album as a songwriter
or band meant it to be listened to -- an "artist's edition" or some
such. Perhaps these albums would have their own modest Billboard chart,
and a place in the culture akin to that of serious jazz.
The ambition of album-oriented rock has always been grander, though --
to be musically unique and great but also popular, successful, cool. It
is best thought of, perhaps, like the higher aspirations of youth
culture itself, as some last great manifestation of Romanticism --
mind-opening, authentic, electric, fantastic, fraternal, ecstatic. To
have a great album grow on you, listen after regardful listen, is to
come to know things you suspect you could not have learned in quite the
same way from novels or plays, movies or paintings. Marvin Gaye's
"What's Going On?" the Stones' "Exile on Main Street," Stevie Wonder's
Innervisions," the Clash's "London Calling," Paul Simon's "Graceland,
numerous Beatles and Dylan albums, hundreds of others: there are truths
and recognitions to be gotten from these albums that can be gotten
nowhere else. But they cannot be gotten quickly or piecemeal.
The promise of all that is now coming to bear on the album experience is
essentially that you already know all you need to know; you just need
the means to get to it, get to it fast, again and again until the
pleasure stops, when you -- phtt -- move on. This is something for sure,
but it is not, well, Art.
"Hey...man...slow...down," Radiohead's lead singer, Thom Yorke, howls
repeatedly, imploringly, at the very end of the last track on "OK
Computer." It's a place worth getting to, the end of that album, and
something worth listening to, carefully.
Sunday, February 22, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
FOR BEST RESULTS AND HIGHEST FIDELITY DO NOT OPEN PLASTIC CARTRIDGE. WHEN NOT IN USE DISENGAGE FROM PLAYER. USE SLIPCASE TO STORE AND PROTECT CARTRIDGE.