I miss albums
I still buy music on compact disc but, lately, very rarely. I was thinking to myself that I should buy more CD’s but then I had to stop and ask myself why I’d bother. The album as a format is dead. Many would argue that it was an artificial contrivance designed by record companies for profit motive in the first place and that it dying is a natural progression. The digital era gives us access to music on a song-by-song basis. More bang-for-buck and less extraneous nonsense. Most would say that since an album is just a couple good songs and then a bunch of filler, it’d be easier to do away with the excess anyway.
And I agree with this. But only to a point. I think the reason I still have some subconscious desire to buy a CD for a band I like is that it gives you more of a complete picture of a band. Instead of just downloading the couple catchy songs that hook you and ignoring the rest, you get the good moments, the bad ones, the fast songs, the slow ones… you get a better sense of range and dynamics from a full album, warts and all, than you could by cherry-picking songs piecemeal. It’s like the difference between having a lengthy conversation with someone versus just getting a couple bits and pieces from a twitter feed or soundbites. The little excerpted quotations trim the fat and give you a better signal to noise ratio, so to speak, but the long conversation, with its awkward pauses, rambling tangents and non-sequiturs is messier but probably a fuller encapsulation of the person you’re talking to. My love of simplicity and minimalism in all things abides… things that are direct and uncomplicated are more elegant and transparent but for some reason, I sometimes want scope and the album gives you a wider panorama than the single.