Taking Sides

Digital music has eroded - indeed removed - the whole concept of a “side” of a single or album. I reckon there’s a sense in which the medium has had an artistic effect on the message...

In the vinyl days singles and albums were inherently games of two halves. Unless your masterpiece was complete within the capacity of a single side (case in point: Rush's "2112") there had to be a split down the middle. A pause, a break. Something that’s easy to forget now we can have hundreds of hours of music literally in our pockets: audience participation was required.

In the break you had to act - to flip the LP, or turn the cassette around. It was like an interval in a theatre show, though of course you didn’t have to pop out for an ice-cream or extortionate gin and tonic. The disruption was lessened, but not removed, by such inventions as auto-reversing cassette players, and I’m sure some folks had record players capable of flipping the LP over. (1)

An artist's awareness of this structure would show up most keenly in concept albums, and I recall Marillion's “Misplaced Childhood” having a distinct “End Of Act One” climax (the end of "Heart of Lothian"), and a rattling, back up to speed Act Two opener with... whatever the first track on side two was called. (Tangent: I reckon concept albums erode one’s caring as much about individual track names... or perhaps I’m just forgetful. Occam’s Razor on standby.)

So though auto-reversing cassette players took the labour out of an album flipping, there was still the pregnant pause as the tape hissed to the end, the silence as it played through its leader, then the click chunk as the mechanism reversed. A few seconds later the hiss of the empty tape before side two began. Tension, house lights down and the chattering of the audience stopping (hopefully). This was dramatic structure, there were choices to be made as a recording artist - which track should close side one, which should open side two...

CDs ended all that. It took a while of course - longer than expected I’d imagine. I reckon it was probably only after the industry stopped releasing albums on cassette that artists were properly free to exploit having an uninterrupted 74 minutes of space, and the big divide in the middle was history. Concept albums, for those still determined to make them, could run uninterrupted! Non-stop dance remix albums were now really non stop - for 74 minutes.

Then the mp3 came along, and now we’re in the tail end, perhaps, of a similar change of structure. The difference this time is that there’s almost no practical limit, beyond the storage space of servers and players. A concept album could stream live and never end, a non-stop dance remix could actually be just that - non-stop. In practice of course the need to chop stuff up into saleable bits means there are still such entities as albums, but this is now largely convention. Once physical media is gone the last barriers will fall away and artists will be utterly free to make an album that lasts an hour, or lasts a year (though their fingers might get very sore in the latter case). Also, the concerts would surely get dull for even the most hardened fan.

"What did you do last year?"
"Went to the John Cage duet with Robert Wilson."
"Any good?"
"Well, March was a bit dull..."

To be more realistic there’ll always be a sense in which the idea of an “album” exists - artists will mostly have to decide the scope of their work, the amount of time they can spend creating and refining material, and the final length that will best suit their material.

Which brings me to another thing - the ability to buy and play music track by track, moreso perhaps than the removal of media limitations, is what’s truly threatening to the idea of an “album”. There was and remains an artistry in choosing the order you present your songs in - the ebb and flow of your work. Many albums show clear signs of structure: a catchy opening or a slow build, then often two or more of the singles you’ve released before the album came out (another pattern that’s changing...), some less immediately commercial tracks, some surprises, some songs that comment on each other by their juxtaposition, and then all the extra tracks the drummer wrote and you wouldn’t have normally included but it’s his garage you rehearse in...

An album was a performance - it had to sustain your listeners all the way through. Who out there remembers an “album track” that didn’t grab you at first but grew into a favourite? Now it’s all too easy to skip straight to the songs that hooked you into buying the whole album in the first place, never giving the slow burners a chance. Or why buy all those songs you don’t know? Why not just get the two tracks you’ve heard already?

It’s something of an act of discipline nowadays for me to listen to an entire album. It's something of a novelty to even listen to music that isn't on shuffle, as with endless choice comes paralysis. But it’s something that I fight especially on two occasions: when I get new music I try to listen to it all in order at least once - to give them all a fighting chance. Then it’s off into the big melting pot of shuffle. The other occasion is when the album’s structure demands it - Hybrid’s work tends to reward linearity, and there are always the non-stop dance remix albums.

Oom tish oom tish oom tish

(1) As I picture this, the room that such a device is in has a deeply disturbing amount of purple velvet on the walls. (2)

(2) Note to statisticians and interior designers: the quantity of wall based purple velvet to qualify as "deeply disturbing", rather than merely "disturbing", is this: any.

If music be the love of food...

My music teacher at my first secondary school was the stuff of school legends, alas for all the wrong reasons. She couldn't control the class. Sagelike older students told of her having been locked in the cupboard by some fifth years. One especially good story told of a student suddenly standing up and shouting "I can't take this any more", rushing to the window, opening it and jumping out. Her classroom was on the first floor (North American chums - think "second floor"), so - somewhat understandably - the teacher was said to have shrieked and rushed out to find the head of the department. (He was made of much sterner stuff, and not infrequently was asked to grace our lessons with his glowering presence, in the hope of our knuckling down to actually working for a change.)

I digress from this poor suicidal student, still plummetting to her messy doom, or at least her messy broken bones - this was only the first floor, so her chances were perhaps quite good. In fact her chances were excellent, as immediately outside the classroom window was the rooftop of an adjacent one-storey section of the school building. As the story goes, she quietly climbed back in and studiously resumed her work, acting all baffled when the stoical head of department arrived with the hysterical teacher, now presumably questioning her sanity.

I have grave doubts that this story is true. There was indeed a suitable rooftop just outside the classroom, but I've no idea if the school was so lax as to have windows that could be opened sufficiently to let pupils do anything as reckless as throwing themselves out, or breathing fresh air for that matter.

What was also true is that the teacher couldn't control her classroom, a problem I had with my French teacher too. Both were lovely people, inasmuch as you ever got to know them, but weren't actually able to teach because classroom rowdiness made learning impossible, even for swots like me who were - initially at least - willing to try. In French I passed the time playing "Catchphrase"(1) with the boy who sat next to me - his name was Martin Laws.

In Music class I had no such intellectual distraction. My overriding memory of the class was that each day I had Music I would buy a King Sized Mars Bar and then make it my mission to surreptitiously eat the thing during class. I recall keeping it in the inside left pocket of my blazer, and I would periodically reach a hand in there and delicately claw out a small morsel of the gooey caramelly chocolatey bar, cunningly convey it to my mouth and luxuriate as it melted deliciously.

I'd make my way through the whole sludgy bar this way, turning an often tumultuously chaotic but more often dull music lesson into a haven of thrillingly illicit pleasure. Note that we weren't actually playing any instruments or (as I recall) listening to any music in these lessons, no - we were sat at desks learning (shudder) theory. I doubt I'd have been able to gradually scoff anything whilst actually playing the oboe, or even the deservedly humble triangle.

I prided myself on my clandestine porking skills, I never once got caught sneakily snarfing half-melted Mars, and I concluded that I was being extremely clever and discreet. I suspect, thinking back now, that my poor teacher had bigger things to worry about than the otherwise-attentive fat kid sat quietly eating five rows back, what with all the looming cupboards and fake suicides blighting her dream of harmonious pedagogy.

This has all sprung to mind as I sit on a train eating wine gums in exactly the same secretive way.

In any case, it's a fine way to eat chocolate. Go, now, if you have a copy of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and read the description, fairly early on in the book, of how Charlie would eat his annual (annual!) chocolate bar. This is what I aspire to: to rediscover the joy of food by eating it slowly and by savouring every bite, although not necessarily from the inside pocket of a scratchy blazer under cover of the mayhem of an uncontrolled Music lesson. Though perhaps that's how all meals should be served?

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(1) Catchphrase was an 80s TV show presented by Roy Walker, where a visual puzzle suggesting a well known saying or phrase was lovingly rendered in state of the art (2) computer animation. The picture was revealed a bit at a time to contestants who had to guess what the phrase was, for fantastic prizes. There's a particularly good clip (here) where the partial revealing of the image makes the picture look extraordinarily rude. In French lessons, without any computerised graphics Martin and I would play on paper and, if I remember rightly, just draw a bit of a picture at a time. We probably didn't make noises like 'beeeowng' or 'doodle-oodle-ooodle-oodle-ooh'. Probably.

(2) Where we define "the art" as making pictures with "fuzzy felt"

The Solipsism of Music

There's a paradox at the heart of musical taste.

Music is one of the universal communicators, transcending language and speaking to people underneath the rational. One of the great joys I have is finding a track that I just *love*, that thrills me and haunts me, that my brain keeps playing back to me constantly (but I don't mind!).
Yet when I feverishly share the track with someone there's (almost always) that crashing comedown as I realise that it just doesn't reach them in the same way. They might say, "yeah, that's cool" if I've chosen carefully who to inflict it upon, they might just politely shrug and mutter "s'awright". (I notice that in my imaginings my friends are all sullen teenagers.)
It seems impossible that they aren't moved in the same way by this incredible music. Are they insane? Are they utterly soulless? Then the embattled grown up part of my mind pipes up and reminds me that "People like different things you know...". But part of my love for the music is diminished, or frustrated in the inability to share it, to experience it with someone else as intensely.
It's one of those things that reminds me of how easy it is to quietly assume that most people around you share your tastes, views and concerns.

So there's the paradox - music reaches everyone, just not the same music at the same time necessarily. I'm not a big concertgoer, but perhaps this is part of the thrill - you're in a room with hundreds of people who for the most part will love the music you're hearing as much as you do.
These moments of failed sharing also make me reflect on my own musical history. I was often influenced by friends, giving the lie to my own experiences above. But perhaps the friends who gave me the music that I fell in love with had the same disappointment - I guess we're looking for instant gratification - an immediate sense of the effect the shared track has on someone. Of course some things grow on you, but there are usually treatments for that. Much music I've fallen in love with hasn't struck me instantly - though there are notable exceptions. Sorry friends if I didn't give you a sense of the effect of the music straight away, but those of you who did give me the music I mention - my sincere thanks. You've enriched my life with it.

~

I grew up with my parent's cassettes around the house. I shudder to recall... my sister and I used to listen to Shakatak, Paul McCartney's solo stuff and probably Bucks Fizz. Oh my... I dimly remember hating "When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman" by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show - which seemed like the most sexist pile of nonsense.
My Dad liked Mike Oldfield and I listened to "Tubular Bells" a lot - I guess that was the first of many concept albums.
My first single was "Spies Like Us" by Paul McCartney, a film tie in theme to a Chevy Chase and Dan Ackroyd movie which I must have liked. I'd have seen Airplane! by then and was probably looking for more of the same.
I'd have listened to a good few of Paul McCartney's solo albums - I remember "Pipes of Peace" and listening many times to "Give My Regards To Broad Street" - my second concept album I guess. Watching the film of this album was the beginning of the end of liking Paul McCartney...

I had a curious relationship with the first two A-ha albums. They're the first band on the list who I still love, and one of the many artists I rediscovered and caught up with when iTunes made nostalgia buying easy. In what's sounding disturbingly like a theme I made them into concept albums in my own mind, listening to them over and over and weaving a Mary Sue style alien invasion SF epic around them.
They became the soundtrack to a fantasy life, and it amuses me to remember how over the years of my puberty the storyline gradually evolved from pure boy's own sci-fi wish fulfilment with laser battles, explosions, spaceships and stuff to subtler more emotional epics involving... girls! The romantic subplot grew to become the main focus of the fantasy, still with sci-fi trappings of course, and all far too soft-focus and naive to involve anything more squishy than kissing. What else was there?
Two songs were emblematic of the whole bizarre endeavour: "The Sun Always Shines on TV" from "Hunting High and Low" and the title track of "Scoundrel Days". Each had an epic quality (which was likely nothing more than chorusey synth and lots of reverb on the vocals) but each were pivotal moments in my narrative and each were "running" songs, usually involving some cinematic chase scene in my head.

I should explain that this was made possible (and useful) by two things. The Sony Walkman and my car sickness....

When the personal stereo was invented, suddenly I had a world of possibilities on long car journeys, a great improvement over my previous two options of 1) stare fixedly out the window or 2) vomit copiously.
Now I could stare fixedly out the window and listen to music.

It was just great, and travel soundtrack albums that persist in my collection to this day include those A-ha albums, Rush's "Hold Your Fire" and "Misplaced Childhood" by Marillion. The music didn't just pass the time, it let me use the rushing scenery to underscore the music. I'd find matches between the staves of the roadside power lines, the beat of the trees ticking by and the open epic of Scotland rolling past me. Nearer objects for quick time and the landscape in the distance for sweeping thematic backdrops. So music was travel, and the landscape danced for me.

So in Secondary School (High School, North American chums) my male friends listened to Iron Maiden and Metallica, so I listened to them also, along with a wide range of what's been appositely called "cock rock". Some of it didn't ever quite convince me, but to a fifteen year old the lyrics of "Infinite Dreams" sounded profound, and although I'm still fond of (but never actually listen to) the first two Iron Maiden albums, I found that I couldn't quite get over what an insufferable prick Bruce Dickinson was, and so my tastes softened into Rush and Marillion, more concept albums and all the lyrical profundity I'd ever need.

At Uni I'd dance in the good old Queen Margaret Union to hits of the time. "Step On" by The Happy Mondays, "Size of a Cow" by Wonderstuff, "Losing my Religion" by REM, and the ultimate floor filler: "Sit Down" by James.
I got into so much more music, I was learning to play the guitar. As I shared a room I used to sneak out in the night to the communal kitchen and, being a considerate (or at least confrontation-averse) type I'd play very very quietly. I found a book of tabs to Suzanne Vega songs and - after a long stage where I'd need to use my right hand to reconfigure the fingers of my left hand into the next chord - I got the hang of finger picking.

I went to a friend's flat one night, a cool guy and fellow guitarist called Kev Fulton (with whom I've sadly lost touch.) He was fired up about something and beckoned me over to his tape player, pressed play and said "Listen to this guy..."

And so I heard Nick Drake for the first time. Thanks Kev.

He played me "Pink Moon", the bleak, haunting final album recorded by Nick in the profound depths of the depression that killed him. By "Road" I was hooked. It remains one of my favourite pieces of music.

"How many guitars are playing?" I asked.
Kev grinned "Just one. Just him. He uses weird open tunings."

And Nick Drake's weird open tunings made a rolling cartwheeling utterly beautiful sound that I fell instantly in love with. Kev wasn't a solipsist at that moment, and I'll always be grateful to him for sharing that music. Proof that it doesn't always leave a friend cold, and while they may not melt into a puddle straight away, sometimes things stick. I've had the pleasure of that experience from time to time, and it's always a great pleasure. Gives you the sense that, yup, someone else feels this way about these sounds.

You're not alone.