A cliche title for an equally cliche topic: the changing landscape of the music industry. However, I'm gonna try to bring something new-ish to the table. Are itunes and amazon killing the album as an art form unto itself?
I bring it up for a reason. While discussing music with some friends the other day, I was struck when somebody remarked that they preferred Beatles covers to actual Beatles-performed songs. They cited as an example how much they enjoyed music from "Across the Universe" compared to the same songs done by the Beatles.
Outrage at this rather blasphemous opinion notwithstanding, I can see his point. Think about it. Which of the following would you most want to listen to?
(a) "A Day in the Life" done by the Beatles, as an individual track
(b) Jeff Beck's fantastic cover of "A Day in the Life" as an individual track
(c) "A Day in the Life" as the denoument to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
If I listed these in order of what I would want to listen to, from most to least, it would go C, B, A. The reason is, I just don't think the average Beatles song goes down well on its own (with exceptions, such as "In My Life", "Hard Day's Night", "Let it Be", and a few others). "Across the Universe" tracks and other covers stand better on their own, because so much emotion and craftsmanship is packed into the one performance of an incredibly well-written tune that you feel as though you have had a complete artistic experience by the end of the track.
As a whole, however, the "Across the Universe" album does not hold up to a Beatles album. Why? Because nobody wants to have their senses assaulted by climactic tune after climactic tune, and that's all "Across the Universe" is. Every song is performed as though it were the finale to a rock concert. There's a reason the average Broadway musical only has one or two "show stopping numbers"; if all you show an audience is a "show stopping number", the law of diminishing returns demands that by the end the audience is sick of the main course and would like to get some dessert or appetitezers for god's sake.
A Beatles album, on the other hand, is a piece of art as a whole-not just in terms of individual tracks. Would I listen to "Mean Mr. Mustard" as an individual track? No, it's not a great song. But coming in between "Sun King" and "Polythene Pam", it becomes a fun, pace-changing little bridge. Did Joe Cocker do a better "With a Little Help from my Friends" than the Beatles? Yes, but it's hard to imagine "Sgt. Pepper" without it. The Beatles weren't about writing hit singles; they were about the album.
This love of the album is drowning in the age of napster. Why buy a whole album when you can just buy the most famous song and put it on repeat? Not to say that this is an entirely bad thing. The benefits to the mp3 system are immense. I don't want to own the soundtrack to "Rent", but "Without You" is a pretty beautiful song, so buying that individual track from itunes is considerably less wasteful than buying the whole thing. There are plenty of CDs that are essentially just compilations of catchy tunes, and breaking those CDs up into little tiny mp3 pieces hardly compromises their artistic merit.
But consider this; if "Dark Side of the Moon" had been released today, would it still be the cultural milestone that it is, or would everybody just buy "Money" and ignore the rest of the album? "The lunatic is on the grass" would not be an instantly recognizable phrase, that weird triangle with the rainbow shining through would not be a staple t-shirt for stoned hipsters, and nobody would know about that crazy thing you do with "The Wizard of Oz". Basically, as a country, we would be fucked.
Watching "Freaks and Geeks" makes me long for the days when it was totally cool to just lie on your floor with a pair of headphones and listen to the greatest rock albums in the world. I missed that age by being born in '88, and now that the album has essentially been downgraded from art form to ipod fuel, I'm pretty sure we're not going to get it back anytime soon.
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