Gordon Downie falls into a reverie as he recalls the epiphany he and his bandmates in the Tragically Hip experienced while making their most recent album, “World Container”:
“Bob Rock, who produced the record, reminded us how important it is to remember all of the wonderful albums we loved when we were getting into music, all the great history that had come before us. And we realized that so many of those albums had helped make us who we are, and that we shouldn’t in any way try to deny the fact that we are music fans, as much as we’re musicians.
“All those albums hang over you and inform what you do. And realizing that again liberated us to make this new record.”
Thanks to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper,” for 35 years the album has been the unquestioned medium of choice through which popular music is expressed. Artists thought of their records as novels, with each song acting as a chapter. The listener knew to listen all the way through. That has changed.
Ironically, the Tragically Hip delivered the strongest record of its career last year, just as many, both inside and outside the industry, were sounding the deathknell for the medium of the album itself.
As far back as 1997, the advent of digital downloading threw the music industry into a tailspin from which it has yet to emerge — all concerning the album and its future. As technology began allowing for the sharing of digital files across the Internet, the iPod has taken over the industry as consumers sidestep the retail aspect of music distribution.
Today, anyone with a computer can cherry-pick, download, burn a disc, or create personal playlists on an MP3 player. With the iPod taking over, conventional modes of music-making and distribution seem suddenly antiquated.
What effect does this have on the album?
Is it now just an artifact of a bygone era? Or is the personal playlist craze another in a long line of passing fads in popular music? And what effect has all of this had on the quality of the music itself?
Shifting priorities
“The paradigm has certainly shifted,” says Hank Bordowitz, music journalist,
musician, radio consultant and author of the recently released “Dirty Little Secrets of the Music Business: Why So Much Music You Hear Sucks.”
“Then again, everything goes in waves, in cycles,” he said. “Of course, the great records of the ’60s made it necessary for a serious artist to make serious albums. Prior to that, even though the album was the holy grail for people who listened to classical music, popular music was predominantly a singles market. It turned into one again in the late ’70s, when singles became huge again, and disco was the craze. Then it changed again in the mid-’80s, when suddenly, the compact disc arrived.
“Technology has always changed the way that music is delivered and listened to, and that’s certainly the case with the MP3 player.”
The difference this time, however, is that the commerce side of the art/commerce dialectic has become the first priority. The balance has shifted dramatically, and the ambiguous state of the music industry in the wake of the digital music explosion has meant that labels are even more bottom line-conscious than ever.
As a result, more money (and time) is spent in recording studios, as artists are encouraged to create music with instant appeal, easy single marketability, and more hooks than a fishermen’s convention.
The music industry has always been run by business people, even if in the beginning, they had artistic sensibilities, in the Ahmet Ertegun mode. Now, however, the business is having a direct effect on the music being created by the artists themselves.
“There’s no question that this is the case,” says Bordowitz. “Today, you not only need a hit single, you need a hit single with as many 10- second hooks as can possibly fit, so that they can be pulled off and sold as [cell phone] ringtones.”
Feast and famine
So what, if anything, has been lost? Both Bordowitz and Downie stress that there is plenty of great music being made today. Bordowitz goes so far as to insist, “There’s more good music today than there has been at any time in history.”
So why all the fuss about letting the album die of natural (or even unnatural) causes? Why should anyone care?
“I think you lose the bigger picture of the artist and their subtler qualities, as well as their larger vision of music,” says musician/composer Gregg Bendian, who currently leads the Mahavishnu Project, a repertory ensemble dedicated to furthering the work of pioneering jazz-rock musician John McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu Orchestra.
“That’s something that develops as you listen to three, four songs, a whole album without interruption. For music that was created to be listened to in one long sitting, the iPod also destroys segues, so that two tracks that were previously designed to be connected by sound, now have an abrupt silence between them. Thanks, iPod!
“And what about album art — the visual connection to the sound? Those old Yes albums, for example, had beautiful landscapes that accompanied them, and they were palpable, so real. But now the folks that grow up with iPods and downloads as their primary musical experience will know none of these joys.
“Realistically, though, how can you miss what you’ve never had?”
A good point, and one that Bordowitz, also an adjunct professor of music and business, has experienced with students in his classes.
“At the beginning of the semester, I always ask my classes, ‘How many of you have ever sat down to listen to an album all the way through, and done just that? Without using it as background while you did something else, or while you’re driving around in your car?’
“The most recent time I did this, one student out of a class of 30 raised their hand. This wasn’t surprising. But it was certainly a little disheartening.”
Taking the journey
Does concern over the album’s fate have more to do with previous generations railing against the dying of the light, than it does with any real changes in music? Somewhat.
Musicians, however, tend to have their formative musical experiences at a young age. For the most adventurous of today’s musicians, that often meant immersing themselves wholly in an artist’s full album, not making a “mix tape” of favorite songs to play at parties. Ultimately, both the quality and the quantity of those experiences defined the adult musicians these young listeners became.
“I loved the concept album,” said Bendian, in reference to the lengthy song-suites boasting thematic connective tissue, both in terms of music and lyrics, that have been big sellers in every decade since the Beatles’ “Pepper” laid the template.
“I used to sit and listen to Jethro Tull’s ‘Thick as a Brick’ and stare at the album cover, which you will recall was a full-size, multipaged newspaper, replete with Monty Pythonesque local interest stories. I would sit and listen to the entire Genesis album ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,’ and live through that journey of the main character, Rael. When you reach the final song and Rael’s moment of epiphany, it’s a very uplifting musical moment! But you have to listen to 80 minutes of music to really ‘get there.’ ”
Taking the time to “take the journey” seems to be a recurring theme echoed among those lamenting the death of the album. For Bordowitz, the inability of many modern listeners to do this is a symptom of a larger disease.
“People love to fill up space,” he says. “I mean, how many graphic designers really like to leave a lot of white space in their designs? Most don’t. They see space, and they want to fill it.
“As technology has allowed more and more tracks to become available for recording, artists feel the need to fill them all up. A CD gives you the potential for 70 minutes of music, so artists cram it full. How many artists have 70 minutes of great music in them at any given time? Not many. The same goes for a lot of listeners, I believe,” says Bordowitz.
The wheel is still in spin, of course, so it’s premature to pinpoint an outcome of the digital music revolution. It might be argued that iPods and their attendant music-downloading capabilities have made real music fans out of folks who might not be otherwise.
The key to a successful music industry is to create a marketplace of engaged listeners, surely. For some, the iPod culture has offered an avenue of such engagement.
Certainly, there will always be a market for the album, though the actual artifact itself might be radically altered, as has been the means of its distribution. The significant paradigm shift brought about by the digital music movement means that looking backward for old solutions to new problems is no longer an option. It’s not just the rules that have changed — the game itself is hardly recognizable any more.
“The renaissance, if there is to be one, will take an awful lot of work,” says Bordowitz. “It will take someone from the new generation to come up with their own generation’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or ‘Nevermind.’ Something that captures the zeitgeist, something that can’t be ignored, that tickles the imaginations of those who hear it enough to inspire them to imitate it.
“I remain cautiously optimistic that this will happen.”
leflaw
pessimist
autodidact
leedsquietman
gdZiemann
HenriRoger
PrincessTast...
I like this album!!!!
InsaneWayne
