I laughed as I read rent-a-gob John Harris’s article about his scepticism about R.E.M.’s forthcoming album Accelerator threatening a “return to form”, not least because of this passage:
The recent(ish) career of the Rolling Stones provides plenty of examples. As I recall, their propaganda machine did its work, and 1989′s Steel Wheels was said to be “a return to form” and “their best album since Exile on Main Street”, only it wasn’t. Five years later, memories of this outrageous con trick had been forgotten, and much the same reaction greeted 1994′s Voodoo Lounge (garbage, aside from the pleasantly pantomimic You Got Me Rocking). Ditto 1997′s Bridges to Babylon. By 2005, boomer nostalgia, record company hype and – once again – the critical fraternity’s absence of collective memory conspired to couch A Bigger Bang in terms of a comeback that would somehow tilt the world off its axis. But no: once again, it was a howling disappointment. Far be it from me to blow my own trumpet, but I made the point in a review for The Observer, only for at least one outraged rock hack to contact the paper and tell them that – you’ve guessed it – it was actually a “return to form”. Sometimes, you just want to give up.
I don’t like to say, “I told you so,” but, er, I told you so, Mr. Bearded_Baby.
Anyway, I adore R.E.M. I believe R.E.M. to be among the very best of those acts on the rung below The Beatles, occupying the same area reserved for the quality of creativity of such artistes as U2 and David Bowie. Without R.E.M. my life would have been immeasurably poorer and, though they maintain you should never meet your heroes, I would very much like to buy Michael Stipe a drink and stroke his head.
The Minister likes R.E.M. so much, he even willingly dosed himself up on anti-inflammatories and voluntarily assumed pain to stand in a 20,000-strong crowd in Trafalgar Square (with the Minister’s Wife and Mr. and Mrs. Domdeplume for company) for about five hours to see and hear the band perform a truncated set at the 2001 South Africa Freedom Day Concert.
But, as with U2 and David Bowie, I do not defend their every recording: Monster, for example, was every bit as bad as Green, Out Of Time and Automatic For The People had been magnificent. And while they contain some wonderful individual tracks, neither 1998′s Up nor 2001′s Reveal were great albums.
But I found myself buying into the hype ahead of the release of 2004′s Around The Sun. The lead single, Leaving New York, remains one of R.E.M.’s loveliest songs and I found myself anticipating the album’s release more eagerly than almost any before or since. I actively made a point of going to Fopp on the Monday of its release so that I might examine it in detail at the earliest opportunity.
I still can’t put into words just how colossal a letdown I received.
The warning signs started flashing when I discovered Leaving New York was side one, track one. Sure enough, there isn’t another decent track on the album.
I listened to it twice that night and twice the next night. My criticism, if anything, grew harsher with each play. On Wednesday night I put the CD on eBay and within a few days I had sold it.
I still can’t quite believe that an R.E.M. live album has subsequently been released and I haven’t bought it (particularly considering just how much cash I’ve spent over the years on their bootlegs), but the Around The Sun experience still stings to the extent that I will not be buying Accelerator straight off the bat.
However much the Recording Industry Association of America might squeal, BitTorrent sites like the Minister’s portal of choice provide a valuable service that has not really existed in my lifetime as a music buyer – the listening booth experience of the Sixties, whereby you could listen to what you were buying before you parted with hard cash.
I’m very happy indeed to pay for music – I believe musicians deserve to be paid and I like owning a tangible, permanent recording – but I don’t want to pay for lemons like Around The Sun. And if you treat your customers with contempt by hyping a second-rate product such as Around The Sun, you can’t really blame customers for finding a cheaper way of educating themselves.
The 30-second track previews on iTunes are OK as far as they go, but as every Match Of The Day producer knows, it is just about possible to polish a 90 minutes-long 0-0 turd into a watchable 120 seconds-long highlights package.
The Pirate Bay means I will be able to listen to Accelerator in full before deciding whether or not to invest further in Peter Buck’s pension fund. If it’s worth it (and I very much hope it is), I’ll buy it. Human nature being what it is, I recognise that not everybody will do the same and that many will just download the torrent, whack it on their iPod and think no more of it. If a similar facility had been available to me when I was a student I probably would have done the same – but maybe that’s as much to do with the overcharging for albums with which record companies persist than it is to do with greed. If albums cost a fiver, I hazard that record labels would sell a lot more of them than when they persist in charging £12.99 for them…
While I consider Radiohead to be comically overrated, their experiment with their recent In Rainbows release was a brave – but necessary – experiment. It is a shame they have so far refused to release the details of how many people downloaded the album, how many paid for it and what they paid, but Thom Yorke has commented:
In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever.
In the same piece Yorke also acknowledged:
The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we’ve gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place… It only works for us because of where we are [in terms of our popularity].
It seems unlikely that a similar exercise by an unknown new band would have made them any money or seen them bestride the charts; that’s the one area where record companies can still add some value.
But unless the industry starts thinking soon about radically different operating models (including – potentially – the end of The Album, always an artificial construct in any event), more and more music buyers will seek out the Accelerators of this world via digital distributions that yield nothing for the suits (no bad thing) but nothing for the bands (a less positive development).
The end of the Album? Ballsy!
I declare an interest. I like the R.E.M. from our student days very much. And more importantly, so does my wife. And some of her friends. I also like radiohead. I haven’t really kept up with either, sadly.
I have now listened to the tiny extracts of the Around The Sun album, on truncated iTunes 30-second snatches. For anyone who thinks this disqualifies me from holding a view, it pains me to say that the last time I did this it was with Take That’s new album, upon which it was quite easy to discern at least 5 very good tracks and 4 others which were more than listenable. I cannot say the same for Accelerator. With the exception of Leaving New York (which sounds like student-days R.E.M.) I don’t know if it was a new direction, the distraction of the US presidential elections or old age setting in (for them or me) but I share the Minister’s deep thumbs-down view.
Logically, The Album no longer makes any sense.
Unless an artist makes a “concept album” – a phrase that should cause everyone within earshot to shudder whenever it is uttered – an album is simply a collection of songs connected only by the fact that they were (usually) recorded during a specific period when the artist had studio time booked. As Thom Yorke and David Byrne observe in the Wired article I linked to above, studio time is expensive (though that is less true today than it was historically) and it therefore makes a great deal of economic sense to record more than one song at a time.
But that does not mean that everything recorded during sessions is up to snuff or should ever see the light of day. Unless it is a compilation, every album contains filler because very, very few acts can produce an entire album’s worth of genius. (The potential exception to prove this rule is a debut album. A debut album can be written over any length of time while the act “pays its dues” and therefore can afford to employ quality control standards far in excess of those employed for subsequent releases. Second and third albums are often described as “difficult” precisely because the same person/people who wrote 10 or 12 blinding songs over six years have now got to write the same amount again in six months.)
I’ll shout until I’m blue in the face defending Revolver as representing the best album ever made but let’s not pretend that Love You To or Yellow Submarine represent the best of what the Beatles could do: they were included on the album because, respectively, George wanted some of the songwriting royalty action (and had a new tabla to play with) and Ringo usually got to sing one throwaway track each album. If both tracks were removed and Revolver was presented as a 12-track album, would its overall standard go up or down? Most people only listened to Yellow Submarine more than once because they couldn’t program the machines playing their vinyl LPs to skip it.
The Album is an artifical construct that evolved to fit the constraints of 12″ vinyl rotated 33 1/3 times each minute. This format could handle an absolute maximum of 26 minutes each side, though most were pressed using less compression of the grooves and weighed in at about 20-22 minutes each side. (It is not coincidence that the most popular length of cassette was 45 minutes a side.)
12″ vinyl now barely exists outside of DJ’s booths and cassettes are almost as rare. CDs have always had a greater capacity – between 74 and 80 minutes – and average song lengths and album lengths have consequently increased significantly. Most songs are now too long; most albums inadequately edited. The public isn’t entirely daft and is well aware of this. The digitisation of music, however, means that they now can avoid the Love You Tos of this world – initially by skipping to the CD’s next track and now by simply not ripping it to their MP3 players.
The iTunes Music Store sells albums, but it sells an awful lot more individual tracks. Making a sweeping generalisation, most people recognise that most albums contain filler and most people now tend to listen only to the stuff they like on any given album. As you said, the 30-second preview facility means that you can pre-separate (to some extent) the wheat from the chaff. If an album has four or five really good tracks and five or six mediocre or poor tracks (which, today, would make an album worthy of four stars in most reviews), it is cheaper, quicker and takes up less hard drive capacity to download only the good tracks and ignore the rest.
It also means that many people now miss the slow burners, the less immediately catchy gems that only emerge following repeated listenings, but that’s the way of the world. I’m a freak who loves music and I always try to listen to an album at least three times before reaching my opinion on it: some albums don’t do it for me first time around because I’m not listening to it properly (eg I’m crammed onto a tube) or I’m not in the right frame of mind for that music at that particular time, but become much more appealing after a couple of walks around the block. But most people I know don’t want or are not able to devote three hours to every new album they buy; they would give an album one listen and then begin to filter out their own choices. Two people I know give each track 60 seconds and won’t “waste” more time on it if their curiosity is not poked in that first minute; given that most songs these days don’t get to their chorus until after the first minute that’s always seemed like a daft way of listening to music to me, but there you go…
The Album is crucial to some acts (eg Pink Floyd) but The Single is ultimately what pop music has always been about. That said, I’ve often wondered whether the old four-track “EP” format might not be the most logical place for minds to meet – enough music to satisfy most fans’ desires; not so much music that the artist is spread too thinly; and more economical to produce that a succession of singles. I’m not sure The Album will (or should) die, but I do fear for its long-term health.
And yes, I am overexcited about BBC Four’s Pop Britannia season.
Just watched Charles Haizlewood’s programme on BBC4 – loathed by the classical establishment for being on TV despite having achieved nothing, he’s well placed to dissect the genre as he had just enough musical credibility to bring plausible technical analysis to the table. I enjoyed it, though it bounced around a bit.