The title makes me sound like an old fart. There are times I’m a member of the order of old fartdom, but not today.
There were many albums that were influential to my musical growth. The Marillion album “Misplaced Childhood” and Floyds classic (a word not used lightly here) Dark side of the Moon are very close to the top of the list. I owned both on vinyl (and my parents got rid of them a few years ago) and both were incredibly important. I’ve owned Dark Side of the moon on Vinyl, cassette tape, CD and now the remastered digital download.
A quick aside, one of the things I miss about the passing of vinyl was the artwork, as interesting as the “digital booklets” that iTunes provides with some of their downloads, it does not touch the 12 inch Album cover of my formative music years.
Don’t get me wrong the advent of the CD and digital music was very welcome, we got to hear music as it was recorded, not through the buzzing and clicking that a needle running in a groove added to the proceedings.
But, I do miss the quality of artwork that was possible with a 12 inch by 12-inch (or 12 by 24 if it was a double or gatefold album) cover.
Lets take one of the recordings I mentioned earlier: Misplaced Childhood. The cover had themes (jigsaw pieces, jester, magpie, roses and so on) that were carried were from the previous Marillion albums. The detail and quality of the artwork were standard for the time.
Some bands were alleged to have spent more money on a high concept album cover than that recording itself, and I don’t have trouble believing that for a second. The cover was an important part of the experience. It was a marketing tool; it was an artistic statement and set the scene for what was about to be put on the record player. There was a lot of very poor music around in the early 80’s and I brought some of it purely on the quality of the cover.
There was something even cooler than great cover art – picture discs. Vinyl, typically a 12-inch (album sized) single, with the cover art being the disc that the music is stamped into. I had a copy of Aces High by Iron Maiden with a close up of Eddie (Iron Maidens rather abused, but ultimately still alive and kicking, mascot) flying a Spitfire on it. Very cool, and once again a copy in perfect condition was disposed of by my parents. I won’t mention what it’s going for on EBay today, I may start to cry.
I’ve spent enough time sidetracked by album artwork, as important a subject as that is…
I get that with the invention of individual song downloads the idea of putting the CD or album on, starting with the first track and ending with the last track seems rather strange to many. I understand that today the idea of listening to an entire album in track order is so last century, but I miss what it means.
The two albums I mentioned at the beginning, along with many others (everything by Pink Floyd for example) were concept albums and written to be played in this way. The play order was designed to flow from song to song and tell the story.
We talked about this today at work, when I buy from iTunes; I still typically buy the whole album. It’s rare that I just buy one or two tracks and call it done; the intern on the other hand can’t remember what the last full album he brought was.
Then it dawned on me, for many people the entire idea of an album no longer exists; let alone the even higher notion of a “concept album”.
The only actually real live CD’s I’ve brought in a long time are those not available on iTunes for whatever licensing or financial reason. AC/DC, Kid Rock and most importantly The Beatles are about the only bands I’ve brought on CD rather than downloading recently.
Just to prove a point I played Pink Floyds “The Wall” in the office this afternoon. It’s 30 years old, but it resonates as strongly as ever. The albums protagonist (Mr. Floyd) has an increasingly strained relationship with the father and this carries on until his father death. He is tormented by his dependence upon his mother, moves to a new town, moves back and is treated badly by his teachers. Each one of these events causes him to erect a wall between himself and the rest of the world (yeah, I get there may be some inexact parallels, but it hit home), hence the title.
It’s the same with Marillions “Misplaced Childhood”. The story arc concerns the lead singers failings as a partner and his subsequent fall into alcohol and drugs. The arc of the album is not positive, but like The Wall, when listened to in its entirety it is more than the sum of its parts.
The concept album is not dead, but iTunes and file sharing has done it considerable damage. The obvious artist that has released a couple of concept albums is Green Day, both “American Idiot” and “21st Century Breakdown” are keeping the idea alive.
I did a little Googling, and not only is the very of purchasing the whole album so 20th century, but the idea of buying something physical is not too far behind it. Over the last few years CD sales have dropped from a high of about 660 million in 2005 to about half of that in 2009 and probably less than 300 million in 2010. Since 2002 the sales of individual tracks went from essentially zero to almost 1.2 billion in 2009, and this format is still showing double-digit growth. Apple and iTunes had it right.