[atlantaprog] Fwd: [ARTNEWS] death of the album?

from The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/ 20040220/ALBUM20/

Death of the album?

Digital music, bonus content and labels' desire for lower costs are causing the traditional music format to change faster than the music it holds,

By GUY DIXON
Friday, February 20, 2004 - Page R5

'Albums are overrated, maybe the music industry is just figuring that out."

It seemed like a casual remark at the time, but an apt one. The New York Times pop critic Kelefa Sanneh said it at the start off a recent audio review on the paper's website, making the point that rapper Missy Elliott's albums sound "more like mix tapes. There's no real theme or storyline, just a whole bunch of beats and jokes and hooks."

But something in Sanneh's voice suggested that maybe the whole notion of albums has become a little overrated these day. It could have been one of those declarative statements that music writers make and then take back in different contexts. But what may be surprising is how many people seem to agree.

Thirty years ago, at the apex of the concept-album era, calling albums overrated would have sounded hopelessly disparaging. It was assumed then that albums made for art, coming after years of pivotal releases from Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, to say nothing of predecessors such as Miles Davis's definitive exercise in modal jazz Kind of Blue and John Coltrane's meditative A Love Supreme. For a critic to have called albums overrated would have been prime bait for ridicule.

Now it seems to be the new orthodoxy. When listing its choice for the number one album of the 1990s, the influential music web site Pitchforkmedia.com led by saying, "The end of the nineties will be seen as the end of the album. The rise of MP3 technology and file downloading returned pop music consumption to [a] collective pre-Beatles mindset, where songs are judged as singles." This was meant as praise for Radiohead's OK Computer, as if describing that record as the passing of an era.

To say the least, the idea of what constitutes a proper album is unravelling, and the artists, as always, are causing a lot of that change themselves. Missy Elliott is only among the latest to push and pull, elevate and trash the album format. The rap duo OutKast succeeded by going the grandiose route, expanding their latest album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below into a double CD and splitting the two rappers' individual styles into separate discs. They managed the nearly impossible: high praise, high sales and a closing spot on the latest Grammy Awards with their win for best album of the year.

Soul-rap singer Erykah Badu, meanwhile, is among those who intentionally demur. From the start, she described her latest album, Worldwide Underground, as merely an EP, even though it contains 50 minutes of music, more than many full-length R&B albums. It was a belittling move, as if to label her latest effort as not being a true follow-up to 2000's Mamma's Gun. She confused matters, though, by suggesting to Billboard magazine that she viewed the disc as a unified, album-length statement: "I want people to listen from beginning to end -- to feel the whole movement." In the end, Worldwide Underground received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album. Luther Vandross's Dance With My Father wound up winning.

All of this is of course occurring at a time when the industry holds nothing sacrosanct. Week after week, the idea of the album as an integral, whole unit is flying out the window as new ways are pushed to buy songs off the Internet individually and new incarnations of digital technology, such as Apple's iPods, keep coming on the market, allowing users to store thousands of songs in one's palm.

Is the CD album -- in its unpleasantly clattering case, capable of holding 75-plus minutes of pure brilliance -- still the highest state for recorded music? It seems impossible to imagine people thinking of their record collections as mere data waiting to be transferred onto their computer hard drives. But is that the idea?

Some of Sony Music's top U.S. executives raised more questions than they answered by reportedly suggesting late last year that the tendency to overfill CDs with music, simply because CD technology allows more music per disc than old LPs could hold, has meant more filler that listeners don't want.

It's a common complaint, especially among filesharers who say that having to pay for filler is a justification for downloading music for free. Who really wants deliberate filler? (Actually, I don't mind. I like the glimpses into the creative process and marketing decisions that lesser songs on a record provide. But that's another story.) The comments attributed to Sony also imply an interest by record executives in cutting costs, possibly making shorter, stripped-down albums which could conceivably become more like a collection of prospective hits geared to iPods rather than longer, artistic statements meant to be heard in their entirety.

The head of another major recording giant, however, envisions albums going in the opposite direction by carrying more -- particularly more video content such as documentaries and concert footage. Not surprisingly, his company is among those aggressively pushing into music-video DVDs. "The physical product five years down the road won't be the CD as we know it," he said candidly during a visit to Toronto.

Yet, there's an irony in Sony's comments, since it is the parent company of Columbia Records, the originator back in the late 1940s of the 331/3 LP and, in many ways, the album format as we know it.

Of course calling albums the highest artistic statement for recorded music inevitably runs into myriad contradictions. Miles Davis's seminal statement for the cool jazz movement, Birth of Cool, was initially issued as separate singles. Early Beatles albums in North America were truncated versions of the original British LPs and the later CD reissues. But for those who grew up with the warmer, folkier U.S. LP configuration of Rubber Soul with I've Just Seen a Face as the first track, can the CD version leading off with Drive My Car ever sound right?

Then there's the Who's Tommy -- so self-consciously conceptual that the band's subsequent Who's Next, a hodge-podge of songs from Pete Townshend's ambitious and ultimately aborted concept-to-end-all-concepts, the Lifehouse project, is now more commonly held as the better of the two.

But perhaps no group mustered the ethos of album-as-paramount-statement quite like early Chicago, long before the group devolved into the power balladry of bassist Peter Cetera. Today, the group's pianist and singer Robert Lamm, who is still with the band, seems to disparage the passing of the album era.

"We always were at odds with the record company for doing any edits at all, ever. We had really vicious discussions with the record company and with our management. And of course our management was used to working in the music business hierarchy and knew that to get this music played on radio, it needed to be edited," he said in an interview.

"We always thought that if artists and record companies held fast, that radio would come around and play music in its entirety, like classical radio does and like jazz radio does." Side two of the band's 1970 widely popular second album -- the kind of album that sits in dads' aging record collections -- famously contains the multi-song movement Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon, including the hit Make Me Smile. In the version edited for AM radio, the song's intro was shortened and the final chorus was spliced from a reoccurring refrain much further down the second side. The edited version sounded convoluted -- and helped cause the band to begin losing some of its album-oriented, rock-festival crowd for a more pop-minded audience.

Twenty years on, as the industry replaced LPs with CDs, an entirely different take on albums arose -- the idea that more music wasn't always a good thing artistically. Take another, perhaps less obvious example, an album such as hip hop artists Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's nearly 80-minute 1992 disc Mecca and the Soul Brother. The album today is a treasure trove of older style, James Brown-meets-R&B influenced rap. But at the time, some criticized it as being overloaded by three or four tracks.

The new idea then was that more songs per CD meant more value for buyers. And in the case of Mecca, it was also a statement on DJ and producer Pete Rock's highly prolific stretch at the time, remixing numerous other rappers' tracks while also writing his own material. The album has aged remarkably well. Yet could Mecca, in its entirety, be released if it came out as a new album today?

At the same time, the CD era brought reissues also loaded up with extra cuts -- partly in an effort to attract new buyers -- to the point where old albums now seem sparse without all the bonus tracks and alternate takes. It turns the CD reissue into more of a comprehensive history of the artist at a particular time in his or her career, rather than just an album. Few labels do this better than Sony's reissue label Legacy, and here again Sony/Columbia is pushing the evolution of the album.

"We consider the original album to be critical, and we try in every possible way to maintain the vision of that record as it was presented in the marketplace upon [its original] release," said Jeff Jones, senior vice-president of Legacy Recordings and Columbia Jazz.

Legacy's catalogue is a wealth of recorded history, but let's take one example: The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds from 1968. Hidden after the bonus tracks is a recorded argument between band members in the studio, with drummer Michael Clarke getting the worst of it. It's a marvellous addition. For me, it's the best thing about the reissue. But it can't help changing the experience of the album.

Jones was adamant that Legacy never presumes to get into the mind of past performers or try to know what they had intended beyond what was actually recorded. Still, "I know that conversations take place where that alternate take or that particular version of that song [are discussed]. There was a reason why it wasn't on the record. There has to be some musical evaluation and creative look at what material gets added to existing records to make sure that we're not just adding additional songs for the sake of advertising," Jones said.

Finally, yet another development is emerging in the history of albums' (de)evolution: the re-emergence of shorter EPs and even strategically distributed downloads and 12-inch singles, which in a way become test releases for later albums.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., art-rock band TV on the Radio, for instance, with their experimental, gospel-meets-Peter-Gabriel sound, garnered raves from the indie-store set with their latest Young Liars EP last year, adding to the anticipation for their upcoming album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, expected next month. Another band, The Rapture caught fire with Echoes, an album that had been much delayed for business reasons, but which nevertheless made Pitchforkmedia.com's top album of 2003 and had been heralded the previous year by the 12-inch pressing of the band's guitar-driven dance track House of Jealous Lovers.

"I think that a lot more artists are putting out EPs when they are new and developing," said Denise Donlon, head of Sony Music Canada. "Do it with more of an underground, independent feel for the [EP] release, while you are working on the bigger opus, which will come with all the bells and whistles and the marketing machine behind it, the big videos."

The problem for some artists is that the next step, in which producing a "proper album" can mean more compromises.

"Whether or not you are going to end up with 10 or 15 tracks on [the album], often there is a creative dialogue that happens between the labels and the artists," Donlon said. "The labels says, well, that song's got to go on it. And the artist says, no, this song is my favourite, favourite track. . . . So sometimes, you may say that is an artistic discussion between a label and artist that results in the number of tracks."

That level of negotiations has been a part of the album-making process since the birth of albums. But it must also drive some artists crazy and make them want to tear down and build up the whole concept of the album yet again in their own way.




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