![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/45rpm-Record-Player-300x267.jpg\" "\\"45rpm")
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A couple of weeks ago I attempted to help a friend work through his difficulty with buying individual songs vs full albums. In this digital age he has struggled with buying only the tracks he thinks he’s going to like off iTunes or eMusic. I told him it’s all right, that he should buy what he wants to listen to, save space on his hard drive for more of the good stuff. But he holds deep, sincere feelings that doing so does not respect integrity of artist’s work. He’s as true a believer in the album format as any rock nerd I’ve ever encountered.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got to buy the whole album and listen to the whole album in the sequence the artist intended,” he told me. “I want to respect the integrity of the artist’s work.”<\/p>\n
“When you go to an artist’s exhibit,” he continued, “do you walk into a room and immediately skip half the paintings?”<\/p>\n
“I look at them all in some order, as they’re presented,” I said, “but I don’t spend 3 minutes and 30 seconds on each<\/em> painting. I first glance at them, the way I listen to the 30-second sample of each song on an album I’m checking out on eMusic.”<\/p>\n “How do you know a song’s not going to get better after the 30-second clip you hear?”<\/p>\n “I don’t know for sure,” I replied, “but there are certain devices that usually suggest I’m not going to like a song, like a long, slow, finger-picked minor chord intro.”<\/p>\n My friend was incredulous. “When you buy a new album do you skip right to Track 3, or do you listen to the entire album?”<\/p>\n “The first time through I listen to the entire album, but the second and third time I listen I may start lifting the needle over the songs with long, slow, finger-picked minor chord intros. Life’s too short for that shit!” Then I assured him that I eventually give \u00a0these songs another chance and sometimes learn that I do like one of them.<\/p>\n This went back and forth until I learned a key detail in my friend’s Rock Nerd Profile: my friend had never bought a single (ie, a 7-inch, 45 RPM slab of vinyl), not even as a little kid. Now it all made sense.<\/p>\n I was compelled to restart our debate, which was now growing quite heated.<\/p>\n “That’s your problem. You never experienced the joy of a single Buying a single mp3 from an artist is like buying a single! I’m going to buy you an old-fashioned record player and load a couple of 45s on the spindle.”<\/p>\n My friend appreciated the thought, but he had commitment issues: he was too committed to the integrity of the LP to see this any other way.<\/p>\n “Would you be happy if someone just bought one song off an album you released and took care to sequence?”<\/p>\n I assured him I’d be thrilled if they liked no more than the opening riff of a song I wrote and recorded. “Come to think of it,” I said as I thought of it, “if I may call myself an ‘artist’ of any small degree, our band has only released one record that felt to me like it truly stuck together as one organic piece.”<\/p>\n I agreed with my friend over the notion of a record album that truly functions as a coherent record album, but for the most part the format is a convenient way to package a collection of songs, most likely written and recorded over the same span.\u00a0Then I challenged my friend on how many \u00a0many albums truly maintain the integrity of the album format. I asked him if he could name 20 albums that truly functioned as works of art, meant to be experienced from start to finish, promising layers of insights? I rejected a few of his initial suggestions, pointing out, for instance, that any album sequenced to give the drummer and\/or bassist or otherwise third-wheel writer a bone was almost automatically disqualified, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em> and London Calling<\/em> excepted. That left a few Pink Floyd albums (Dark Side of the Moon<\/em>, Animals<\/em>, and The Wall<\/em>) and not much else.<\/p>\n As a group, can we agree on 20 albums that truly function as coherent works of art rather than a lucky collection of great songs (or, on the other hand, a forced “concept album”)?<\/p>\n Finally, to help my friend, if you had to suggest one (1) single track from an otherwise less-than-stellar recent album for him to download this week, what would it be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of weeks ago I attempted to help a friend work through his difficulty with buying individual songs vs full albums. In this digital age he has struggled with buying only the tracks he thinks he’s going to like off iTunes or eMusic. I told him it’s all right, that he should buy what […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[131,56,99],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}