Kill your idols. Kill the record album.
That's the Nietzschean whisper in the corridors these days. Any survey of downloads and compilation sales goes to prove that most people now want songs much more than they want groups of songs.
How did we get here? The advent of the CD convinced some musicians that they need never again have an unrecorded thought. Marketers tried to cover by bamboozling buyers they were getting a bargain, if you priced by the minute. But with a fistful of new dial-up-for-dollars on-line music shops entering the market this month, soon most musical transactions will be conducted on the broadband, not the hand-to-hand combat of cashier and clientele.
Brutal as it sounds, the currency will be hits, not sleepers, not hits' punier siblings, and not any stinkin' filler. Why, runs the rallying cry, would you pay for songs you don't want and listen to them in an order someone else chooses? It's a CD-mix world now. Kill the album.
It's not like music has never existed independent of the long-playing format before. Your grandparents bought 78s, with three or four tunes they loved, like today's EPs. An album was originally just that, a scrapbook-style booklet with a bunch of 78s to be taken out one by one. And then they were packed in the basement, replaced by 45s, and then, somewhere around the Beatles' Rubber Soul, the album took over.
The album had 35 good years, or maybe a dozen good years and a 23-year diminuendo. It had its chance. Kill the album.
Decrepit critical tags will vanish with it: "This is their sex album." "This is her coming-of-age album." "This is their strung-out-on-Quaaludes album." Real music, actual songs and recordings became inaudible amid the mythos, towering redwoods lost in a bustle in the hedgerow. Kill the album.
Albums expend too much overhead for too little quality control. They breed debt and hubris. They spoiled Metallica. Kill the album.
Sure, some albums are just one concerto or jazz performance that happens to last 50 minutes. They can stay. But kill the Britney Spears album. Kill the 50 Cent album. Kill the Strokes album -- if any band should just put out a big pile of singles, this is it. Kill the Radiohead album before you see the whites of its conceits. Delivereth our rock stars from temptation. Kill the album.
And then bring it back to life.
But only if you've got one like Aesop Rock's new Bazooka Tooth, a long mix of abstract rap and musique concrète that only begins to set when you're immersed in it for hours. By the fifth or sixth day, you may -- I'm not there yet -- be able to pick out phrases from the polymath shrapnel of this mangled-Manhattan multi-track tract.
First, though, you'll hear how the sprung tick-tock of its beats (dense as Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team but deliberately defocused) sounds like the 60 Minutes watch transposed into a quantum universe that's running not just out of time but out of infinities . (Aesop Rock plays the Funhaus on Queen Street West in Toronto with fellow members of the Def Jux stable on Monday.)
Or the future of albums may be like the Swords Project's aptly titled Entertainment Is Over If You Want It, a suite of electronic-indie-rock-exotica from the Seattle six-piece that ex-Pavement headmaster Stephen Malkmus calls his current favourite band.
It's a brisk 40-minute mood-alterer, as the notes slide away from the ear whenever you lean over to catch them, yet hold on to a palpable collective identity. It's a bit like a subliminal drama about a singer who fears he's alone when in fact he's supported and protected every moment, though whether by the living or by wraiths from beyond remains to be seen. (The Swords Project joins I Am Robot and Proud and the Magnetars at the Music Gallery, 197 John St., tomorrow.)
When the album is no longer the graveyard of all music, you see, the only excuse to release a full hour of music will be that it belongs together. Album and song will become separate art forms.
Often, then, album making will fall to specialists. San Francisco's John Vanderslice, for instance, constructs mini-novellas in his intricate series of linked folk-pop songs on albums such as Time Travel is Lonely and Life and Death of an American Four-Tracker, assembled out of vacuum tubes and twine at his own Tiny Telephone studio. (Fans of, for instance, Bob Wiseman or Hawksley Workman should check out Vanderslice when he opens for Beulah at Lee's Palace on Bloor Street West on Monday.)
Among the others who've recorded at Tiny Telephone is dark poet Richard Buckner, who's been prescient enough to start overlapping the tracks on his albums to keep his rough beasts from being dismembered. His last, Impasse, surveyed the wreck of his second marriage in a series of speech fragments and folk-rock panic attacks that intersect and contest one another -- his signature approach since he left country-roots stylings behind. (Buckner appears at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street West, Saturday.)
Other songsmiths will cross over to the form only under special pressure. Past full-lengths by Death Cab for Cutie, another Seattle outfit, would lose me after three or four tracks that were competent in a way sustained attention didn't flatter. The new disc Transatlanticism not only does more with its morning-after punk guitars and singer Ben Gibbard's reedy voice, it's haunted track to track by heartbreak and by the frustrating stupidities that precede lost love -- dumb outbursts spilling oceans of distance across a bed's white plain.
Gibbard finds his theme early -- on second track Lightness, in one of the year's best rock couplets, "Instincts are misleading/ You shouldn't think what you're feeling" -- and follows it right down the spout. (Death Cab is at the Opera House on Queen Street West tonight.) I doubt Gibbard will repeat the feat anytime soon, so this is a strict one-album licence.
But don't be too liberal with them. We've got the album cornered; don't let it slip away. One shot to put it out of our misery. Kill the album, so the album can be saved.