[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

[Alan Rudy]

I'm mostly with Bhaskar on this, though "the album" has at least four
varieties.
There's the collection of singles in the long player format, there's the
collection of singles and other songs arranged to present a sonic whole or
apparent flow, there's a group of songs all written together that evoke a
more or less singular mood/moment/dynamic - but not so much a narrative -
some of which may turn out to be singles, and then there's the concept
album.
The intensified resingularization of popular music tied to the intertubes,
iTunes and their ilk (TIRoPMtttIIatI) is pretty meaningless for the first
two varieties which always were the vast majority of long players -
fragmenting or re-arranging them, so what?  TIRoPMtttIIatI is sometimes a
problem for the third form as the setting, flow and context is intended to
add meaning by the artist/producer/songwriter... but, hell, the order of, or
listening to individual songs from, After the Goldrush doesn't matter in the
slightest to me.  I guess TIRoPMtttIIatI could be seen as problematic for
concept albums but most I can think of - and we ARE focused on popular
music, no matter how much it sells (and I don't want to get into a
discussion of boundary maintenance here) - I listened to once or twice while
taking the narrative seriously and then started playing favorite sides,
taping favorite songs to make mix tapes that generated a different meaning -
or none at all... so who cares.  How many people listen to the whole of The
Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Wall, Big Science or... for the narrative?
And while it is interesting isn't authorial intent less authoritative these
days, which is a good thing?  In short, sometimes you want narrative
sometimes you don't... its kinda like feeling like a nut.

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 9:59 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara
<bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>wrote:


> I think the much heralded "death of the album" is mostly hype, there are
> still artists putting them together.  I've made a similar point about
> Itunes
> sort of helping make this a singles-dominated era (some crappy filler in
> between) with less cohesive albums though, but wasn't even the 1960s a
> singles-era?  Hasn't that historically been the norm?  If anything the
> digital form should give artists more freedom from medium-imposed limits
> (the max length of a single lp / cd, etc).
>
> On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
> >
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-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319