The Eclipse of Albums
Artistic creation in the online age is nothing like the 20th century
There used to be albums. This lasted for a while. They were a set of about ten or twelve songs, give or take, put together in a certain order. They came out at once, after all the preparations were done, in a physical thing you could hold, with a title and a canvas on the cover that you would associate with the collected sounds. It was all wrapped up in a bundle. You bought the thing and you owned it and it took a little while to digest and it was fun.
That was back in the 1900s. Back then, albums measured time—you could pin an age or an era on when a certain album arrived, or when it nudged its way into your life. They still come out, new ones, and we’re still informed by them and love them, but it doesn’t happen in quite the same way as before. They no longer announce or measure consensual generational seasons, and they certainly don’t enjoy the same unanimous exposure and impact as before. There’s more than ever, but sometimes it even feels like nobody’s really making them at all, because none of them turn the culture in the way the old ones did. They can’t. Those legacy 1900s artists, they’re still re-releasing everything—best-of compilations, “lost” tracks, remasters, retakes, retrospectives, deluxe editions, and tributes. All of that’s a big game and there’s plenty of legacy albums being re-released in various configurations and ways. But that’s all memory-lane, and quickly running its course. It’s the form itself that’s in question.
A new album as vital as the old ones that shape our landscape, but something of the moment now? It’s not happening and it won’t happen. It won’t be an album that does the shaping. Everybody trying to move the culture knows that today, you can’t move the culture—or even pretend to budge it—with the old machinery. It’s like trying to use a horse and buggy to rocket into space.
There was a time when music was separate from the recording—it was the symbol, the notation, sheet music, that was the published aspect of the artist’s musical creation. I can’t tell you how many people making music today can’t even read that anymore, and look at it as alien and irrelevant, like cursive handwriting. The same reaction will also eventually come for albums.
It’s sort of like books, which for a long stretch of time was what literary work was contained in. But even if words still have their power, what impact at all does a new “book” have anymore, be it a novel, a collection of poetry, anything in bound and printed form? They’re still treasures, but like albums, they exist now as collectibles—antiques, really—or as objects for the diehard fans, but not as the primary means of explosive mind-to-mind transmission of singular ideas. It’s not the material object anymore that makes the hit or is where it’s at, but it’s the stream and flow of electric current, the constant mix and situation that’s electronic and uniquely online.
Online—that’s the whole key. You have to go where the audience is. Artists ask me all the time to sell their albums in my record store. And I do, but if they ask me if their record or tape or CD might ever be as big as one they name from an old legacy artist, I tell them no, because such a thing’s impossible. It has nothing to do with merit. It’s like publishing a set of sheet music in 1968 and hoping it will have the same impact as Rubber Soul.
Albums were containers for songs, a way to package them out. But the net has come along and packaged all the albums. We have them all, from all styles and periods and places and times, and it’s changed the mode and meaning of the lot of them together. Some time, probably quite soon, there will be a thing that will enclose and package that. This is how technology rolls.
Meanwhile the need for albums, as a final distribution method and everything else it once was—a container for songs, a heralding of a moment when things have shifted—is eclipsed by other things. In that sense, an album is almost an irritation, an inconvenience. (The same can be said for brand-new books.) There are distractions now that pull away from that. This is a different environment, and it only makes sense for artists to experiment with the method, type, length, placement, and frequency of their work now, since we can. Actually, we have to. And real artists are. Albums are not the primary means of recorded music distribution and playback and they’re not the primary means of artistic expression anymore, so the structure of music doesn’t have to fit inside one now. They’ve become a specialized, collectible product for fans, and also a way to curate and stylize an experience.
This is so much like what Kevin Shields had said in some interview a while back, a point that stuck with me ever since—he’d admitted that he didn’t think in terms of songs anymore, but in what he called “tunes.” These “tunes,” or “tunage,” are sessions of spontaneous and transitory music-making, sound-sculpting, improvisatory playing in the center of the moment, what Eddie Van Halen used to call “noodling,” making up the music as you go, thinking of the journey or the stream as your canonical work, as opposed to referring back to one particular recording—and every seated session, every time you talk through your instrument to say what you say, you’re speaking out a story that’s grounded in that particular instant and situational awareness. It’s a tap, an infinite pulsation drawn out from the well. Shields had said that if he had his way, that’s all he would do. “Tunes.” Every day, always morphing, expanding outward in a thousand ways. And honestly, I wish he would—what better and more awesome followup to Loveless could there ever be than a life of steady well-recorded “tunage” from that guy?
Charles Berthoud, a virtuoso bassist, recently admitted to Rick Beato that when he creates songs for his YouTube and he works on it and then puts it out on video, it’s a composition that’s made for the immediate moment, he performs it—and then it’s basically forgotten. If he ever needs to play it again, he has to go back to his videos and relisten and slow it down again and again and relearn what he’d already done. This is really the current way for a lot of relevant music and musicians. Even more than virtuosity and technique, the habit of assembling and streaming and sharing with constancy is what makes effect and relevance in the present moment. It’s also a relief to hear Berthoud admit this, because it’s a pain I’ve felt forever: I notate what I can but old recordings are often a terrible struggle to relearn, and sometimes when I hear them I wonder how I even did it.
One of the unrealized, latent art forms of the Internet age are webcams. As they populate the landscape they show us what we’re looking at, the places that we want to see and where we want to go. And you can’t hold all the contents of their captured moments in a two hour or even hundred hour “film,” nor could you in a book—or encyclopedia—of still photos. It’s a new kind of container. Good music, rich and colorful and textured, is suddenly re-containered like that too, or like paint on an enormous, multileveled canvas—one that’s bigger that can fit in any gallery anywhere. There’s just more going on, and that’s a universal dynamic of technology and art. Songs and riffs and words and stories are all still here, but the tapestries are bigger, they’re huge and incompatible—and the galleries are empty, anyway; everybody’s looking at their phones.
Michael, you're onto something here — an observation about the digital environment; which has implications for all media environments. For a guide, we can go right to the work of McLuhan, who was the first person I know of to define the idea of a media environment and to explain that as a conducting vector, it has more power than the content that it facilitates.
This is what is meant by "the medium is the message." It is the vector — the medium — that transforms people and society, rather than the content. But people tend to obsess over the content and forget that the environment exists. You are talking about what the digital environment is doing to the content that it conveys — which is basically everything.
Let's consider another environment you didn't mention — food. I'm so old that when I was a boy, there was such a thing as "going out to eat." It was contrasted with "the family eating dinner at home." Going out to eat was a little quaint, and it has a slightly formal quality and you put the napkin in your lap. Back in the day, there was such a thing as a "meal."
Today, I would estimate that most people with jobs eat most of their food prepared out — but it's no longer "going out to eat." Some people eat in; and there is a heck of a lot of take-out as well as the digitization of food, all those delivery services where so many people take a cut that the restaurant makes little profit and the person who used to be called a chef has little influence over something crucial, which is the presentation of the dish. We still have that if you eat in (which used to mean eat at home, and now means eat in the restaurant).
Then there is eating out that is itself digitized, by third-party reservation services and contactless checkout in the restaurant — you pay your tab like you're at one of Walmart's self-checkout lanes.
When I was little, there was a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn called Jay Wong's. Mr Wong himself worked there every night. The metal dish of pork fried rice would come out covered, and when the cover was lifted, the rice was shaped perfectly and there was the (intended) effect of a burst of aroma.
That has nothing to do with the slop thrown into a cardboard bucket in most Chinese takeout places today, which sometimes have a creaky, greasy table over in the corner. No such meal is memorable, unless it's connected to some other significant life event, like running out of gas right near the place. It has no value of its own. And any teenager with kitchen skill can be taught in about 10 minutes to make fried rice that may not be Jay Wong's but would be many times better than takeout slop.
Then there are the phantom restaurants that take no customers — they only do delivery. They could be in the back of a warehouse or in someone's garage. That's actually a pretty good idea, since the whole table service thing has very little to do with the food preparation thing, or the delivery thing.
Digital conditions have expedited this whole process. They have expedited all processes. There used to be a thing called journalism, which gave way to the blogosphere, which has given way to the ongoing mass shooting known as Substack. The problem with the blogosphere and Substack is not that the copy is not edited; it's that hardly anyone has heard of, much less met or worked with, a copy editor.
The result is an ongoing horror; yours is one of the few Substacks I did not unsubscribe from this summer (notably, I only unsubbed from one of the Stacks I pay for, kept the rest of the ones I paid for, and ditched about 50 that were not worth paying for because they gave me agita and because the authors would do things like photograph their computer screen and push the photo into the article and think that was an "illustration." As a photographer who would take a photo, then develop and print the image, then reproduce the image in what was called a stat darkroom and then place it in the article, the torture was worse than finding typos in a book of poetry.)
As for Eddie van Halen, he's a clown, even if someone thinks he's the 4th greatest guitarist of the Anthropocene. I can't name one of his songs, and I am not ignorant of the music of his era. He can complain about noodling all he wants, though he seems to miss the point of improvisation — which is not a product of the digital age but (as we know it) a product of the jazz age (the early radio era). Nearly all jazz has an improvisational element, which comes across as freshness. Of course, all music back to the Paleolithic is based on improvisation. There was a time before songs, and nearly all songs are based on some form of an experiment.
When my teacher Joe Trusso arrived at conservatory in the 1960s, there was a sign on the wall of all the practice rooms that said NO IMPROVISING. So the first thing the students did was...improvise. Aah, the Sixties. Usually, good improvisers have some real training and then they let it go and learn how to be with the music and do something that is based in how they feel and what their surroundings are feeding them in that moment. As one great guitarist said to me, "Fuck the modes."
I can point you to many great Jerry Garcia solos (which were different in every rendering of every song). Brian Eno composed Music for Airports using tape loops strung around the legs of furniture in his apartment. Then the virtuosos known as Bang on a Can transcribed it and did a new version that is amazing but probably too complicated and dynamic to be called ambient music; it is more properly classical music.
This essay is improvised. It's a "comment" in a "Substack" about 1000 words long, which in the past an editor would have been happy to pay me for, since it's a focused piece of commentary. But tonight, it's just a comment to one of the last Substacks I care to read.
PS, once upon a time there was a thing called a book, and it could change people's minds about topics and issues they had not considered before.