The Album. Let me get into Andy Rooney Curmudgeon mode again sonny. Ok so I am a fossil. I remember days without the Internet , Cd's and MTV. In terms of MTV that was a good thing. You see for me music was at its best listening to an album where what was on it was exactly what the artist intended. I don't mean greatest hits or movie soundtracks or compilations. I mean a real album where the tracks were recorded by the same people, written by the same people and sometimes at the same time and place. This whole idea of "hits" for the masses who had short attention span and did not know music. Usually for these masses , music had to be trojan horsed via some other medium like a movie or music videos. You see the album was not enough if you were not a hard core music fan.
I'll give you an idea. My mom loves stuff like Everly Brothers and Ventures and stuff popular during her high school years. I have to admit I would not be the music junkie I am now since I was introduced and still appreciate stuff like Bacharach and Tchaikovsky from her.
But for her the seventies did not happen. Eleven years ago when Princess Diana died she had to ask me if Elton John was a pop singer. Whether or not you were hip to music , Elton was a celeb that was all over the place in the 70's and 80''s. Yet in 1997 it took a trojan horse of Diana's funeral to get my mom to know he existed.
Anyway this whole idea of listening to an artist's original album is actually something I feel passionate about. Which means this won't be the last time you will hear me talk about it. Bob below captures a lot of what I know and feel.
Anyway before this becomes War and Peace. Just know that a good / great / classic album is one that totally proves the concept of the "whole being more than the sum of the parts" or totally explains the concept of "synergy".
Think of a real album like your favorite movie. You would never remove scenes or rearrange the order of the scenes. It would ruin the flow . Well I am here to tell you, the generation raised on MTV and one hit wonders that these things exist in music form.
And when experienced without MTV you are truly at the mercy of the musical artist ( which is a great thing) and not some "creative director " and their interpretation of the song. You have your own. What a concept!
If any one should question why I don't appreciate much music produced in the 90's and beyond, just tell me the good albums I missed in the same context I described. Something you can listen to again and again in it's entirety. No compilations or greatest hits . Just one artist and an original album. Enjoy Bob's piece below
Ed
****************************************************************************
Don't make an album. And whatever you do, don't send it to me! I don't have time. And neither does anybody else. Except for your hard core fan base. Assuming you've got one. And they might not even be interested either.
The album was a moneymaker. Let's string together 10 or 12 tracks so we can charge more. That's why the labels' enabling of iTunes/Amazon/Wal-Mart to sell singles is a death wish. You get one-tenth the money! It would be like buying a car wheel by wheel. Worse. Being able to buy a car for $1000. Manufacturers want to load your automobile up with gadgets, so you'll pay a high price, so they can make a lot of money! Labels can't pay their bills at a buck a track.
And maybe you can't either. Which is why you need a career.
How do you garner new fans? By selling them sixty minutes of music? No, through the single! One track!
Sure, the Beatles turned the paradigm upside down and made the album an art form unto itself, releasing "Rubber Soul" in the U.S. with no singles whatsoever. But that was forty years ago. Today albums are endless productions, over sixty minutes long, that everyone gave up listening to prior to the Napsterization of the music business, back in the nineties, when they realized albums only had one good track. They had to purchase the album to get it, but no more. Furthermore, how many of those nineties acts have careers today? Turns out it was only about the single!
Heritage acts. Classic acts. Cut one great single! That you can do your best to work. Shit, give it away for free... As an inspiration to buy a concert ticket, where the true money is. Why spend all that money and time to cut an album that almost no one's going to hear?
Come on, when your favorite old classic act has a new album do you buy it? No, not unless you're the diehard of diehards. And even those people don't expect it to be good, since the act hasn't cut anything great in decades. But what if Styx put out only one track. You'd check out that track. Hell, if I got e-mail telling me Styx had one great track, I'd check it out, even though I'm not a big fan of the band.
Everybody's got time for one track... If they hear it's good. Sample fifteen seconds? Sure... If you say so. But as soon as you tell me about ten tracks and you want an hour of my time, I'm out of here. Most albums take days to devour, to fully understand, to get...and I've got much better things to do with my time, and so does the rest of your potential audience.
The album is a circle jerk, perpetuated by so called "artists". Do you really have that much to say? Does it really all tie together? Do I need to hear it all at once? No, you just believe you're the new Beatles and you're important and you're entitled. But you're not! You're competing for mind share with not only the greatest musical hits of history, all at one's fingertips online, on one's iPod, but 500 cable channels, video games... Make it easy for me. Just give me one steaming single. That I can't deny!
When we heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand", we didn't put our fingers to our chins and say...wonder what the album's gonna sound like! We did buy an album because we were infatuated with the sound, and were rewarded...but we were still jerked off by not only Dave Clark Five albums, but early Stones records too. And Animals albums. And Gary Lewis & the Playboy albums. Shit, the album really didn't gain traction until "Sgt. Pepper", and now everybody believes they've got a "Sgt. Pepper" in them. Wrong!
I'm not saying you've got to create a Clive Davis hit. Rote, by numbers, just like everything else. But it must grab the listener. Maybe because it's so damn different, but there must be instant magic. So maybe you can have instant karma, and become an instant success, so people will want more!
But you don't give them ten more tracks... You give them a dribbling of killers. So they end up becoming fans of the act, not the track.
Everything you know is wrong. The train has jumped the track. The slate has been wiped clean. The old era is over. The Internet and iPod have changed everything. Now you're only one of thousands of tracks. You've got to make it into a listener's pantheon, or be deleted. How good are you?
New bands... One track only. Maybe you'll get radio play, good luck. But even so, if it's that good, people will trade it. And, if you get no traction, you can go back to the drawing board at a much lower price. In the old wave system, you cut an unsuccessful album and you're over. Today, have a stiff single and you go back to the studio!
I know, I know, you don't like it! You want to be like the bands of yore. Maybe you are a band of yore. But no one's paying attention! They just don't care!
We're constantly trolling for great stuff. We say no, no, no and then yes! There's not an issue of scarcity, there's tons of music out there. And we haven't got time for all of it. Face that fact. Can you earn our time? It's precious. Start by asking only for a little. If we like what we hear, we'll give you more. Continue to spoon-feed us, let us become addicted, we want to become addicted. To something good!
Maybe if you can get the record company to give you a big advance, or Wal-Mart to cut you a guaranteed check, then you should make an album. But then it's about money, not success. You're just interested in pocketing the dough. If you're interested in having a career, don't spend six months or a year in the studio working up ten tracks, cut one and give it away on your Website!
Even the hippest haven't gotten this memo. I like a small slice of what Trent does. If he'd only put out one track, and the buzz was good, I'd have checked it out. A whole album? I pass. I'd rather spend my time listening to satellite radio, playing only singles, trying to find good new stuff.
The buzz is everything. It's why "Iron Man" is a hit and "Speed Racer" will be a dud. Create something great and let the Net minions spread the word. But they can't spread the word on something that takes an hour to digest. It's kind of like when someone tells me to check out a movie online, or sends me more than one track or a CD, I don't bother at all! I figure this person's got no respect for my time, no understanding of the marketplace, thinks their shit is so great that they're entitled to attention. You've got to earn attention. You've got to beg for a minute of our time. You've got to create something so good we want to give you our time!
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment