Music transformed thanks to technology. Nothing is more obvious in the modern state of the art, where MySpace pages, word-of-blog hype, and the virtually unavoidable album leak become the central ways we hear new music. It ain’t perfect, but it works.
The industry has to change. This much we know. Recently, we’ve seen iTunes exclusives, strains of viral marketing, and pay-what-you-will downloads take the place of more traditional pitch-and-push revenue streams. While the availability of new music really needs a music fan to stop and think a moment, moments that aren’t allowed since the Hold Steady record leaks today and the Oneida will leak sometime tomorrow (etc. etc.), my question is, is this detrimental to the art of studio albums and formal recording?
In many music discussions in which I’ve been involved, I’ve always offered my opinion that music is democratic, that technical competence of instruments isn’t always necessary, and that if you can think up the hooks and riffs but can’t sing or play them, there’s something there that needs to be recognized. I hate to evoke a T-Pain example on a blog that almost exclusively serves alternative tastes, but T-Pain thinks up hooks that are splattered all over the Hot 50 Billboard singles and cures them with a vocoder. In my opinion, that’s perfectly ok. He thought up the hooks. He deserves the credit for their execution.
Democracy in music becomes a central idea now, where music can be transmitted anywhere in the world via the internet. However, I think the idea of making albums suffers because of this fluidity. At the head of the post, I placed a picture of Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary which I believe to be the last great indie/alternative album that I’m aware of. Of course, this is very much subject to debate, but since then I can’t think of an essential record along the lines of a Funeral, a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, or a Forgot it in People. For me, it’s due to the intrusiveness and instantaneous information transfer on the internet. Your favorite band played a new song last night in Toronto? Youtube it. We become familiar with the songs when they are just sketches of what they will become, so when the album comes out, the effect isn’t as jarring as it should be because your first impression is a skeleton of the song, a shadow of the glossed up and mastered version.
Noticeably, the only albums that have really elicited the “oohs” and “ahhs” of the media have been debut albums, where the album’s content wasn’t wholly available before the record release. After that, the listening audience, thanks to the legions of blogs in cyberspace, is privy to any musical developments the band makes; the Youtubes I mentioned before, the band members’ MySpaces, personal accounts from seeing a live performance, etc.
In 2006, I was fortunate enough to attend two Radiohead concerts on back-to-back nights in Chicago, part of the mini-tour where the band tested/worked through some new material. Due to the widespread availability of mp3s of the new songs, and the fact that the curiosity consumed me to the point where I, somewhat of an audiophile, gladly downloaded 128 kbps tape recordings, I had grown familiar with each of the new songs. I found them underwhelming and questioned the bands’ new softer direction. However, seeing them live (always superior than listening to a great bootleg) put the new songs in a different glow, but I had already formed opinions on them, which somewhat diluted the effect of hearing “new” material live. My first listen of their 2007 In Rainbows suffered because of these preformed ideas.
Many sophomore releases have suffered due to this effect. Even bands who I thought were on the way up-and-up, like Interpol, stagnated in their future releases. Neon Bible was good, but not what I was expecting. The second Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! album flat out sucked.
It’s a constant war with many moving elements: technology, expectation, innovation. Due to the pressures from all three, the album, as an idea, takes the hit.
The solution? The complete veiling of new tracks, giving an album’s first listen a much-needed punch.
Can a band still make money and retain its die-hards without showing constant (i.e. week to week) signs of progress?
I urge bands to start surprising us. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult for the album format to recover.
