Yesterday I read an article in Side-Line stating that by 2012, all major record labels will stop supporting cd's. An hour after this, I was reading an issue of Sound + Vision featuring interviews with and features on Pink Floyd, in respect to their series of box sets called Immersion, which feature 5- or 6-disc deluxe reissues of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. And it got me thinking.
I think giving up on cd's is a misstep - and yes, I've heard of iTunes. My problem with digital distribution for music - which includes Amazon, iTunes, 7digital, p2p sharing, torrents, whatever - is twofold. First, it ruins the experience of an album as being larger than life, with the artwork, the liner notes, the whole visual experience. But that's besides the point.
Just as importantly, I'm one of those "weirdos" who still thinks an album is an album, and should be listened to at least a few times through from start to finish as a whole. Even though only a small percentage of released albums qualify as "concept albums" - in which every song relates to and helps explain a specific concept, point or theme - most songs still sound different when taken in the context in which they're recorded and released as part of a series by an artist. I don't read individual chapters of books when I'm bored, or watch individual scenes in movies. I don't watch just one play from the middle of a game either. I don't go so far as to plan car trips to be long enough that I know which albums to listen to and which ones "not to bother starting," but if I've got an hour to kill, an album's going on and it's likely not leaving until it's finished. Sometimes I do listen to one or two songs from an album and change it out for something else, and I do love making mixtapes - which is where my single-song buying comes into play - but not only do I want to hear an album in its entirety, I'm not the only one.
German prog-metal outfit The Ocean have released five full-length albums. They encourage their fans to listen to them straight through to the point that their liner notes request that you do the same. Their third major release, Precambrian, is the clearest example of this reasoning. Each song is named after a period of the Precambrian age - yeah, that's right; there are songs called Rhyacian and Neoarchean - and are written to represent this, and sequenced chronologically. A double-disc, Precambrian boasts a 25-minute EP-style disc ('Hadean/Archean') and an hour-long album-style disc ('Proterozoic'). Hadean/Archean is five blasting metal tracks, meant to aurally represent a chaotic and fiery time in geology; Proterozoic is more tempered, with some classical instruments peppered throughout, to simulate a time when life began on earth and there was some tranquility.
Strange as it sounds, listening to it straight through just makes sense. Much the same as when you hear Radiohead's 1997 OK Computer and the first crunchy guitar and supporting cello and tambourine on "Airbag" start an adventure that doesn't end until the triangle fades at the end of "The Tourist," each of The Ocean's albums are clearly planned to be front-to-back journeys.
So what if digital distribution and all its necessary technology - iPods, computers, etc - had existed 50 years ago?
Let's look at Pink Floyd again, upon whom I'm focusing for today in light of the Immersion sets and the fact that they're a perfect example for this point. If iTunes existed 50 years ago, you'd have kids across the nation in high schools saying "Pink Floyd sucks. I heard Dark Side of the Moon was supposed to be like the best album ever, and I bought a song from it on iTunes and it was just like clocks going off or something. Why would people buy that shit?" ...which they do now, but their parents smack them on the back of the head and tell them they're morons. Instead of The Wall being an 85-minute descent into madness, and one of the greatest concept albums ever made, it would just be one entry on 20 million iPods - "Another Brick in the Wall (Pt. 2)," or as my generation knows it as, "We Don't Need No Education." It's poppy, short, has a nice guitar solo, and teenagers like it because they think it's all about skipping school.
But it's not just the 25-and-under crowd. I was talking to a middle-aged friend about new albums this fall and how I was falling short on picking them up, and she said "Well you just need to get over the whole 'album' thing; you should only get one or two songs." I can't imagine any piece of Dark Side missing (nor of a specifically defined concept-based album) let alone the majority of it. Plenty of albums tell a story and every song is like a chapter in a book. To discard any one piece of The Wall is to lose a legitimate facet of Pink (the main character)'s personality and tragedy. For example, f you were to only take out "Mother" and "Another Brick in the Wall (Pt. 1)," Pink almost seems like a bratty, anti-military asshole rocker who just can't stand his own fame. You lose the roots about his father dying in the war (an unnecessary victim of Operation Cinder, we found out in the song "When the Tygers Broke Free"), his overbearing and traumatizing mother and how these influences on him shape his inability to have fully-functioning relationships with women, trust his local authorities and finally have a nervous breakdown - only to be cast aside with disdain by the world that sent him there. It's a tragic story, and one that would be sorely missed without the entire album.
The Dark Side of the Moon Immersion Box Set is a real beast. Disc 1 is the original album, digitally remastered this year. Disc 2 is the entirety of the album performed live. Disc 3, a DVD, contains a 5.1 surround version of the album from 2003 and the original Alan Parsons quad sound version, each with standard- or high-resolution options. Disc 4, a visual dvd, includes live performances, a documentary and some other press stuff. Disc 5 is a blu-ray of Disc 3 (the surround/quad disc) and Disc 4 (the live/visual stuff), and Disc 6 is an early stereo mix of Dark Side by Alan Parsons along with some bonus/live/alternate/etc tracks. The set also comes with two booklets, an art print, a replica tour ticket, replica backstage pass (so you can your friends can play "I'm Meeting Pink Floyd" in your basement), a scarf, collectors' cards...and nine coasters and three marbles, because hey, fuck it, why not? (Thanks for the item description, Amazon!) So it's $120 for seven mixes of the album, some live stuff and a bunch of ridiculous crap. It actually sounds pretty awesome; it's what I'll end up using to get my kids into Pink Floyd when they're old enough. A similar package for Wish You Were Here was released this past Tuesday and next year, The Wall will follow suit.
Now, there are a lot of other avenues worth discussing in this topic.
1. How is one song on an album affected by its neighbors.
2. What tone does the artwork set for the album.
3. Is the outsourcing of physical album production (by bands to indie presses like TuneCore) as democratizing as it sounds.
4. Why is the job market doing the exact opposite.
And this is setting aside the issues of
1. Sound quality, which has been in decline for the last four musical formats (we piqued at vinyl, kids; even Beats headphones can't save crappy frequency cutoff points on mp3's).
2. What positive and negative effects the collapse of the music industry is having on bands.
3. What will be the next billion-dollar idea that introduces up-and-coming bands to the world.
and so on. But those are topics for another day and other people much smarter than myself. I'm just a kid who loves some Floyd and "the album experience."
