The End Groove

Something I never considered today: Over at Leftsetz, a site that I frequent and check often, particularly when fueling my fear of how my method of listening to music is quickly becoming irrelevant, the discussion turned to a topic that is frequently on the author’s mind. Namely, that I should stop whining about the already happened digital revolution and admit that my method of listening to music is, for the most part, irrelevant.
While that’s a hugely big concept for me to swallow, there was something that he wrote which made me think. “There were no albums before 33 1/3 records. The medium begat the artform.” And this is true. This doesn’t negate the fact that I’ve never lived in a time when there wasn’t this thing called an album and I don’t think I want to be a music fan in a world that’s solely focused on singles…or tracks...or files…or whatever the fuck they’re called now.
Change is always a difficult thing, but it’s even more exacerbated when it involves something that’s vital important to one’s core. And music is surely a part of my DNA by now, to the point where if you start fucking with it, I get a little antsy.
At the same time, it is important to consider that while artists took albums to another art form, they also had a hand in totally dismantling its importance too.
Take the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Bloodsugarsexmagic, probably the first album in which I felt “These guys could have easily whittled this thing down to a manageable 40 minute long effort and had an undisputed classic.”
I haven’t purchased a Chili Peppers album since Bloodsugar and, when you consider how irritating the filler was on that effort, it must have been enough for me to think, “You know what? I think I’m done with buying Red Hot Chili Peppers’ albums.”
I never felt that way about Freaky Styley, or Mother’s Milk or The Uplift Mofo Party Plan.
It’s not just the Chili Peppers that are guilty of pointlessly maximizing every square inch of the cd format, God knows rap music is unforgivably guilty of it consider every retarded skit or track called “Interlude.” They merely represent a time when I discovered there was something about an album that clocked in between thirty and forty-five minutes.
Besides, anything beyond that made it tough to put on cassette.
The point is, for all of this, is that I now need to start considering a time when not only is my delivery method of getting new music is completely different, but so it the very way in which they are conceived. Meaning: are we about to see a time in which the idea of the concept album, sequencing, flow, and all of that shit are completely gone. It won’t be long until it’s purged to a relic that decreasingly considered and only nominally supported by aging music fans, like me, that find themselves lost in an era that does not intend to slow down.