> 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.
Yeah, and Double Nickels... is another example - there are great individual songs but it makes more sense as an album.
For a non-rockist example - Wergo put out Morton Feldman's 'For Philip Guston' a couple of years ago on 4 CDs. It's more than four hours long and there aren't really any gaps. They put separate 'fade out' and 'fade in' tracks at the beginning and end of each CD so that it sounded ok if you had to play one disc at a time, but so you could easily chop them out and assemble the rest of the tracks on the computer to play continuously. So digital finally makes it possible to listen properly.
It's not that album is _the_ form, but it's still _a_ form. Personally I'm an album kind of guy. I only use shuffle to choose an album.
Mike Beggs