Noisemakers

The Daily Dish posted a reader's email regarding the iPod as the nail in the coffin of the album. It sounds right, but I don't think it really is. Sure, there were the Styx concept albums and all in the past, but most "Top 40" albums have for a long, long time been collections of songs, and often a bunch of boring, uninspired songs wrapped around a couple of catchy tunes anticipated to get radio play. Even the good albums, the ones that were listenable from start to finish, were most frequently still just a collection of really good songs, rarely thematically connected. The iPod didn't create that dynamic. I was making mix tapes twenty-five years ago. It's now simply easier to pick out the songs we like, and we can have much more variety, rather than being limited to the twelve or fifteen songs that the cassette could hold.

But more significantly, I think the reader is wrong about the existence of albums as albums. "All that's over now," the letter says.

You don't hear albums that are made to be listened to from start to finish anymore? I don't think anyone listening to many top notch artists (which doesn't necessarily mean popular artists) would agree. Listen to a Springsteen CD, for example. Or get outside of radioland and listen to some of the more creative, thoughtful performers on the music scene today. Listen to the new CD from Abigail Washburn, City of Refuge, that just came out last week, an album that is so coherent from beginning to end that it is almost a crime not to listen to the whole album, over and over, which I have been, on my iPod, doing since it's release.

Now, whether or not all audiences appreciate what some artists are doing, that's out of the artists' control. If the Dish reader isn't appreciating the albums for all that is there, he has nowhere else to look but in the mirror. For me, the iPod gives me the opportunity to take those albums with me. I don't have to pick out my favorite few songs so that I can have a variety in my car or in my Walkman. Which values the music more - having the entire album on an iPod, or just a couple of choice picks on the mix CD? Because let's face reality, those records were mostly sitting on a bookcase or a box, gathering dust, and music was created to be heard, not looked at or held. I can now take my whole collection with me wherever I go, and I can listen to and revisit entire albums, start to finish, knowing that tomorrow I can do it again, or listen to a whole other album start to finish, or shuffle through my collection, or explore something new. The iPod lets me appreciate more - more artists, more music, more albums, in their entirety or not, as I choose and as the artists intend.