Archive for April 2009
“I’m on a modulated wavelength:” Auto-Tune as a Weapon or Tool?
In looking at pop music, one must marvel at the stratospheric rise of Auto-Tune, the little plug-in that could. Auto-Tune, an Antares product that automatically tunes the voice to a correct pitch given the melody (Get it? Auto, tune?), has swept the pop world. This rise is credited as one of the downfalls of music, namely with the loss of vocal character. Those critics are right. It is also credited with enhancing music, giving artists a new sound and avenue of expression. Those critics are also right. Conclusively saying whether Auto-Tune helps or hinders is a difficult question to answer. Read the rest of this entry »
In defense of Nickelback: Popularity and its Discontents
Contemporary music critics have often chosen to use popular acts as whipping boys for the decline in taste of the populace at large. They have a point: there no longer seems to be such a solid link between creative strength and record sales. Many bands follow the same formula to songwriting to find success: driving beat, slow burn on the hook, soaring chorus, wash, rinse, repeat, solo, wash, rinse, repeat again. This can work for some bands. The issue is with how repetitive it becomes (and how fast it becomes repetitive), restricting it from challenging the audience. Additionally, it weakens the formula’s strength when weaker bands use it ad nauseam.
However, it’s irresponsible to overlook that these bands are among the most successful bands in recent memory. Furthermore, such bands have been around since the beginning of rock music. The easy question is why they’ve been successful. The more difficult one deals with whether or not their success is legitimate. Read the rest of this entry »
The Death of the Album (or, How A Resurrection Really Feels)
People of my generation have seen music marked by an absence of one of rock and roll’s common threads: strong albums. Let’s face facts here. The days of bands releasing albums that sound both coherent and have a set of songs that are worth making singles are largely over — the music industry has had a hard time doing even the latter, reaching very far on mediocre albums to get something to promote1. Albums nowadays are used for two goals: to push singles and to push tours.
The question this raises is twofold. First, why did the album fall out of favor? Second, where does the industry go from here to either fully kill or revive the album?
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The digital revolution is an oft cited explanation for the death of the album format. This criticism isn’t unfounded at all. MP3s drastically changed the avenue of distribution for labels to release music in both the illicit and legitimate realms; both led to picking songs over collections. P2P services thrived on a desire for consumers to skip the music that they didn’t want to listen to2, allowing listeners to download individual songs. Labels capitalized on this, creating sites that would avoid selling albums exclusively. This has certainly left bands with little impetus to focus on the album as a whole. Another byproduct of the digitization of music has been a devaluing of the physical side of the album: album art. Labels have seen album art go from a valued commodity to a set of press photos3, which is a definite result of music consumption being in either the car or on media that removes the tangible side of music enjoyment.
However, citing the digital revolution is a copout. The move to digital ushered in a series of changes that were already happening in the music industry at large, namely the movement to singles-oriented artists4. The music industry seems to have lost the plot on albums for a couple of key reasons. First, it’s simply more difficult to make a set of fantastic songs every year. What the Beatles did in the 1960s is unbelievable and breaks any curve that can be set5. Mere mortals settle for the usual path: strong debut, sophomore slump, and (if they continue on past there) decent later albums. This happens because after the debut that spans an artist’s life to that point’s best work, a label will demand a follow-up. If that artist wrote all of that first album on the way to recording sessions, he may be in good shape for the follow-up, which ostensibly was written in the van during the debut’s tour. If, however, it was written throughout that artist’s musical development, one year likely is not enough lead time to write a quality album. That next year demands another, begetting more subpar work, cheapening the album as an art form. The only alternative is taking your sweet time making a better album, which may lead to you getting dropped by the label. At the same time, labels have taken to the realization that, for some, one good single is enough of a redeeming factor to purchase. A prime example of this is the inexplicable success of Soulja Boy. The success of “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” led the truly unlistenable souljaboytellem.com to sell one million copies, despite reviews that said that, “If you’re seeking a circle of Hell lower than the one in which ‘Crank That,’ is ubiquitous, listen to his entire album.6” Realistically speaking, the album could be an EP that only includes “Crank That” and “Soulja Girl,” but he seemingly made the other 13 songs out of obligation. Nonetheless, Soulja Boy’s success proves there is still a willingness to buy albums of whatever quality provided they include the best-known hit. As a result, the music industry has shown its sloth in shipping out albums that, for the most part, are 95% filler, destroying the art of a well-sequenced, fully musical album for bands that genuinely want to make something better.
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There are two tracks (pardon the cheap pun) that the music industry can go down in response to the decline of the album, a combination of which is the most likely. The first is a pessimistic one: abandon the album. The album, at some point, probably won’t be the venerated standard that the industry still values. Artists won’t even have to bother releasing 15 other songs to go with the surefire hit they’ve made. Songs will be released on a couple of choice formats: MP3, to reach the masses; and vinyl to benefit audiophiles and DJs. Labels will promote these singles in the same way — send them to radio, throw them on iTunes, maybe even make videos. This wouldn’t be unprecedented. In fact, singles were the primary mode of music in the early days of rock and roll7. Additionally, such a move would drop the amount needed to spend on producing an album. Cut out thirteen songs made by top producer Scott Storch and immediately a label would save around $400,000 from the production cost8, along with saving on pressing CDs and distribution. Consumers would still get what they want: the gratification of the single. By satisfying market demand, labels would be able to succeed.
There is, however, another track that the industry can make. Bands that value the album can continue to make them. Consider it this way: it’s not like every band is putting out a terrible album these days. The art of sequencing tracks to tell a story isn’t totally dead; hell, one of rock’s biggest acts, Green Day, plans to follow up their megahit rock opera American Idiot with, shocker, another rock opera. Major bands are also revisiting the idea of spending time on their crafts, not only through recording over lengthy periods of time9 but also in the other facets of the process. Radiohead, never seen as a “prolific” band, made a point with In Rainbows to release a very elaborate “discbox” to satiate music purists, augmenting the MP3s of the original release with a remastered CD, remastered double LP, a fifteen page book of artwork, and the requisite bonus tracks disc. Radiohead may bust the curve in terms of artistic focus for rock musicians, but they can also serve as a model for using the medium of packaging to enrich the experience10. One final positive is in the shift toward releasing albums on vinyl. Vinyl causes a band to do a few important things. First, it necessitates decent album art. Album art is a product of the iconic 12″ cover on old LPs, compelling designers to fill space in creative ways; the shift back to albums, then, necessitates designs that use the medium to its fullest extent, enriching the physical experience. Second, an album on vinyl has to be well-sequenced. The beauty of CDs is also a curse, in that the skip track button allows the listener to make their own tracklist and the artist to put the single at the top and the filler at the end. Vinyl doesn’t work that way. Listening to a record means having to listen to it front to back unless you want to get up, aim the stop arm correctly, drop it, and sit back down. Instead, the listener must actually listen to the entire side, then listen again. This creates a welcome opportunity to focus on, again, use of space. Albums on vinyl play out like an epic, with a strong intro, some sort of continuation, and some sort of punctuation before the natural intermission, then restarting the process with something to catch the ear and a barnburner at the end; returning to this form over what has passed in the CD age is a welcome action.
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I have faith that the album is not dead. The past 20 or so years have certainly been a rough patch for the format, but I think that the paradigm didn’t fully shift and (more importantly) will not fully shift without some sort of anti-artistic backlash within musicians. Commercially speaking, the form is a formality nowadays; however, the key to music being a viable form in the first place is a thriving group that sees music as an art form. Seeing music as an art that creates a viable career path has driven the greats in music throughout the years. Hopefully it continues.
1See Nickelback’s All The Right Reasons, which saw five songs inexplicably chart in the Top 20 (and two others that didn’t fare too well) over the span of two years.
2Which, in turn, led to the age’s precursor: the rise of the compact disc.
3Examples abound of both sides of the coin. For album auteurs, Andy Warhol’s work for the Stones’s Sticky Fingers is the mansion on the hill. Modern disappointments include the MSPaint-esque writing on the live version of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
4Want some evidence of my claim? How about this: Since August 1991 (the release of Pearl Jam’s Ten, possibly the last great and insanely successful album), the ten top selling and newly released albums include two Garth Brooks albums, Shania Twain’s country-gum money pot Come on Over, Whitney Houston’s soundtrack to The Bodyguard, Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View, Santana’s Supernatural, the debut from the Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears’s …Baby One More Time. As much as I dislike using sales as a metric, these bands honestly were the most popular and most pushed bands of their times, namely their years. An interesting side note: None of these albums were released after 1999 — in fact, nine more were released before 2000.
5To recap for those who forget how insane of a run they had… In 1963 the Beatles released two singles collections often considered in the top 25 albums of all time that contained about 3/4ths original material each, both of which hit #1. They followed that up in 1964 with A Hard Day’s Night, their first real “album,” two more #1 albums between 1964 and 1965, then a nineteen month stretch that saw them release Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They obviously needed to catch their collective breath and took about 18 months to put out the White Album, then caught up to put out Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road in 1969. In sum, between the 78 months from March 1963 until September 1969, the Beatles released eight albums and three singles collections that spawned 25 #1 hit singles, along with a canon of music-changing songs. Oh, and Let it Be came out in 1970.
6Entertainment Weekly’s finest hour, the 2007 Worst Albums of the Year list. For a good time, I suggest reading Metacritic’s reviews of the monstrosity.
7For example, Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions, his highest ranking album on the Rolling Stone 500, was a compilation of the Sun Singles he released circa 1957 that came out only a year before his death; the same treatment for Chuck Berry’s early singles makes up The Great Twenty-Eight.
8Storch has claimed that he charges around $30,000 per track. Assuming that he charges points as well, it’s safe to assume that he makes well more than that.
9As much as some may cringe to cite U2 as a positive in rock, No Line on the Horizon was recorded over the span of 18 months, not including the time spent recording and scrapping songs with Rick Rubin. Compare it to Bruce Springsteen, whose most recent work, Working on a Dream, was rush-written after the Magic sessions ended. It shows.
10For example, Atmosphere’s latest album When Life Gives You Lemons… included rapper Sean “Slug” Daley’s first foray into children’s book writing. For another, The Hold Steady put out a comic book version of the album’s lyrics in the vinyl release of 2006′s Boys and Girls in America.
The Return of the Musings
Hello all -
The blog has returned, now that I remember the password to it. I’ll be posting the first column shortly. It’s a treatise on the album: whether or not it’s viable as an art form, why it died in the first place, and whether there is hope for its revival. Coming soon will be some record reviews (including my thoughts on 2006′s remake of Catch-22′s Keasbey Nights and the new release from Dethklok) and more musings inspired by both whatever I think up and whatever you tell me to do. I plan on this being at least a biweekly thing, so stay tuned.
Colin O’Donnell
P.S. Hopefully the footnotes work on the first one. They’re pretty rich in detail.
