> I happen to like cd's. I like experiencing the songs in
> the order that the artist presented them (just as I prefer
> a film's reels (or data) to be projected in the order
> determined by the filmmaker [excepting CHELSEA GIRLS]). I
> scrambled Ella Fitzgerald's Ellington Songbook on my cd
> player and it was nice, but when I went back to the original
> ordering, I noticed that some connections that became apparent
> when the album was played that way. Maybe albums are no
> longer made this way (I stopped with Sarah Vaughan), but this
> hyper-dividing seems to present some serious aesthetic issues.
Yes. At the risk of sounding all rockist, the most annoying thing about iTunes has been this emphasis on songs, the three-minute individual unit, and abandonment of formats that let artists express themselves more freely. One of my favorite records is Zen Arcade. It's hard to imagine anyone downloading "The Tooth Fairy and the Princess" or "Reoccurring Dreams," but those songs were essential parts of what Husker Du was getting at with that record. One time when I interviewed Mike Watt, he mentioned that he paid as much attention to the space between songs as the songs themselves. iTunes completely erases spaces between songs.
More generally, the whole "interactive" way of participating in art has made us all like petulant, self-absorbed 12-year-olds.* Instead of accepting and grappling with the artists' presentation of things, we demand to structure and control exactly how we experience them. It seems to me that it's closeminded and even paranoid to refuse to submit to someone else's creative world. Of course I don't think that art is or should be above the laws of commodity production, and maybe I'm a just a silly romantic, but I think it'd be nice if we didn't order music the same way we order cheeseburgers and batteries.
*This is an insult to tweens; the ones I know are more open to new experiences than most adults.