More Intelligent Life is a favorite new addition to my Infobahn
travels, in part because I enjoy its erudite take on culture, and in part because
each article isn't followed up by a bunch of chuckleheads having stupid
arguments and making fun of one another's typos. There are also very few references
to death panels, of which I am very afraid. But I digress. Or I'm about to
digress. Either way, my point is this:
There's recently been a bit of a back and forth over there
about a recent statement by Radiohead's Chief Malaise Officer Thom Yorke. Apparently
the recent "leaking" of individual Radiohead tracks reflects a general
ambivalence about the album-making process. More Intelligent Life, being a
British site and thus required to parse Mr. Yorke's various pronouncements with
a zeal normally reserved for the Zapruder film, has now extrapolated this to
mean that we are most certainly nearing the end of the album era.
But could this be
a good thing, as this correspondent suggests? After all, the kids these days
are downloading their single mp3s and shuffling their Ipods and wearing their
pants so low you can see their underwear. The LP is a vestige of an earlier
time, when serious artistes made epic statements, some brilliant, some
ridiculous. According to the Brave New World types, it was a model that couldn't
sustain itself, and eventually we'll be free of its tyranny altogether.
But hold on a second. There's always been a schism between
singles artists and LP artists, hasn't there? It used to be as clear as the
delineation between AM and FM radio. AM radio was for singles; it played the Archies
and the 1910 Fruitgum Company and Creedence Clearwater Revival. FM radio was
for the groovy Album Oriented Rock; it played Pink Floyd and Genesis and, uh, Creedence
Clearwater Revival. Since the advent of "rock" as a separate genre from "pop,"
these distinctions have been made.
The difference is that the album as an artistic artifact seldom
makes its way to the mainstream anymore. TV only cares about musicians when
they forget to wear underpants or beat their girlfriends. Non-music
publications (Time, Newsweek, Guns & Ammo) seldom offer music reviews. And
radio... well, the less said, the better. That's part of the lesson Axl Rose
learned last year when he tried to make a major event out of Chinese Democracy.
(Wait, scratch that last bit. Axl Rose has never learned a lesson in his life.)
It's quite likely that the end of the album era has been underway for some time
now, at least to Joe Twelvepack and Polly Peoplereader
(if indeed those types ever lived in the album era, judging by the prevalence
of John Denver's Greatest Hits at garage
sales). And as long as the fragmentation and instant backlash of life in the
digital age continue, we may well be witnessing the end of rock history. More
on that later, but for now, let's settle in and enjoy a classic album track by one of the all-time great singles bands.
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travels, in part because I enjoy its erudite take on culture, and in part because
each article isn't followed up by a bunch of chuckleheads having stupid
arguments and making fun of one another's typos. There are also very few references
to death panels, of which I am very afraid. But I digress. Or I'm about to
digress. Either way, my point is this:
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