I had an interesting conversation with a friend a while back that came to mind again today as I copied a new CD onto my computer. We had been reminiscing about our high school days, when we would drink beer and talk nonsense at one or the other’s house, all the while listening to our favourite CDs. By the time I was eighteen my copy of ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magic’ had been completely worn out, and various other soundtracks to my youth had also spun their way towards near oblivion – ‘The Battle of Los Angeles’, ‘Word Gets Around’, ‘Nevermind’, ‘Without You I’m Nothing’, ‘Relationship of Command’, and others too embarrassing to mention here. I guess it was the same for millions of other kids born in the 80s. But no matter where the house party, how late the hour or how many cans of Strongbow lay empty in the sink, the night would always end with a run through of the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘The Holy Bible’ for the few remaining stragglers sprawled out on the carpet as the grey morning approached. From the opening dialogue of ‘Yes’ to the desperate voice at the end of ‘PCP’, the room was silent but for the album and the occasional cry chiming in with James Dean Bradfield’s ‘who’s responsible – you fucking are!’ or ‘so damn easy to cave in, man kills everything!’. The record would finish, the CD would spin out, and silence would descend.
My friend told me about having recently listened to the Holy Bible again through an iPod on speakers. It sounded fine, and the songs were as brilliant as ever, but there was something important missing from the experience – he was talking of course about that sound at the end, after the music stops. For my parent’s generation, it would have been the scratch of the needle as it wound its way towards the centre of the turntable before rising and returning to its bed. For us it was that whoosh as the spinning of the CD came to an end. That sound has now been lost, thanks to digital playlists and shuffles and iTunes and all those other inventions which are killing the concept album.
I remember the first time I saw an iPod when I was seventeen or eighteen. One of the kids in my school had one set up with the radio connector which allowed you to play it through a stereo. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I wanted one immediately. I saved up my money, and the summer before my first year of university I bought an iPod. My oh my, who’d have thought it would have ever gotten so huge. Who’d have thought that only a few years later you could instantly buy any song online and have it playing on your phone in seconds? Steve Jobs maybe. When I was a kid, if there was one song you wanted, you had to buy the entire album. Hence my possession of a Smith’s cover album just for the Cursive song; of the Godzilla soundtrack for ‘No Shelter’; of the Good Will bloody Hunting soundtrack just for Eliot Smith. If only I had grown up in this age of pick ‘n’ choose, I’d have been a far richer teenager.
So, maybe I’m an old fart. But I miss the excitement of going out, buying a record, coming home and flicking through the artwork for surprises. Remember the hidden booklet in the Kid A album? Anyone else line up to get a numbered edition of Maladroit? What about hidden tracks? There is no mystery if you can already see that the song is 14 minutes long before you start listening to it. Super Furry Animals put a hidden track at the beginning of ‘Guerilla’, so you actually had to wind back from track 1 in order to hear it. That’s impossible now that everything is sold per song, and all the information is given away before you have a chance hear the record. What about short interludes, such as those in ‘The Wall’ or even as recent as ‘The Ugly Organ’ – do people just not buy these, opting to spend their money only on the song-length tracks? What is the point in even making full albums anymore?
This new CD is the first I have bought in 2011. In 2010 I think I bought only two or three, and only because they were from bands not available digitally. Icon Girl Pistols hope to make our second album this year, but a big question facing us and every other indie band is ‘do we make a CD or just sell downloads online?’ As a music fan, I want to make albums, tangible objects that you hold in your hands, flick through the pages of, discovering things you could not see when you bought it. I want people to hear the scratch of the vinyl or the whoosh of the CD when it finishes. But realistically, I know that when the album ends, the music will just keep on running straight into the (International) Noise Conspiracy. Although to be fair, that’s a great band to be opening for.
-christopher-
