By Richard Brunette
There are very few mediums that have impacted our culture like the album. There are albums that literally shaped the course of a generation and changed the tone of popular culture. When I was young everything was primped hair and leotards and then Nirvana’s Nevermind came around. Overnight people forgot who Poison and Warrant were and traded in the pig hair for plaid and Doc Marten’s. Every generation has that album that changes the zeitgeist of the era.
Albums can be part of the of the spirit of a generation, butt can also be deeply personal. Going through someone’s record collection can often feel almost invasive, like you’re going through a diary that’s put on display on the living room shelf. You learn so much about someone. You can connect with someone just from seeing an album you love on someone’s shelf and share what it meant to you.
Sometimes I throw on an album that marked a certain point in time and I feel myself transported back to that time. It can serve as muscle memory and make you feel the same as you did in themoment.
It is with a heavy heart that I realized that the album is a dead concept. It’s been laid to rest. It had seen many blows over the years but it had persisted. As resilient as the album was, they say no one defeats father time.
Most blame the advent of digital music, but that’s not it, at least not directly. Sure, we lost the thrill of removing the wrapper and putting that record or CD on for the first time, rifling through the artwork and liner notes during that first listen. I can’t remember the last time I lost an hour flipping through albums at the record store. Yeah, we lost that, but at the same time albums had become more accessible than ever. I can now lose hours on Spotify browsing new artists and discovering new music. Instead of organizing our shelves, we were organizing folders on our hard drives, still divided into albums.
The realization came to me that albums were dead after setting up my new phone. I loaded all my music on it and brought my dog for a walk. I loaded up one of my favorite albums, one of those albums that I know by heart from years and years of repeated listening. Over the years, I’ve owned 3 copies on CD, one on vinyl and Spotify still lists it as one of my top plays. Which album it was is unimportant because you know that album too, or your version of it.
Track 1 came on and we were off. That old familiar trumpet kicking off the journey. The track ended as we reached the park and something unexpected happened, track 6 came on. This threw off my whole rhythm. I sat there at the edge of the park trying to figure out what went wrong, my dog staring at me confused why we stopped at the edge of the park. It seemed that my phone’s music player was set to shuffle as default. Not only was it the default, but it took me a good minute to figure out how to take it off. I consider myself tech savvy, but I had to go deep into the settings to turn it off.
My new install of Spotify was the same, shuffle was the default. This was my realization that shuffle had become the main way in which people consume music. This boggled my mind. I thought of all the albums that were designed with a certain ebb and flow in mind. I thought of all the great concept albums that tell a story. I thought back to the great opening tracks that kick off an album. Walking through the park I thought back to the movie High Fidelity where Jack Black and John Cusack debated the great side 1, track 1s in history. I wondered if 10 years from now no one would understand that argument.
I decided to poll a neighbor’s 14 year old son. I asked what album he was listening to the most these days? He responded with the new Twenty One Pilots. He told me he listens to it every day. While this whole thesis of mine may make me sound old, I am not out of touch and know that album starts with the song “Jumpsuit.” I asked him what the opening song to the album was and he just stared at me like he didn’t even understand the question. I elaborated.
“What’s track 1?”
“Like on the CD?” he asked.
He couldn’t answer me; he had no clue what I was even asking of him. If you’re thinking this is preposterous, you’re probably old enough to have had a physical record collection. I tried again and again and the results were similar.
That to me was the death blow. The album survived cassettes, CD’s and even survived into the digital age. After such a valiant fight, it was finally killed by the shuffle button. If I listen to Nirvana’s Nevermind and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” isn’t the first track that comes on am I really getting the same experience the artist intended? Will you get the same experience listening to Dark Side of the Moon out of order? Sgt. Pepper’s? American Idiot?
There’s a difference between a set of songs and an album. Great artists have a vision larger than a single song. A song is a flower and an album is a garden. A flower can smell sweet and bring you some momentary joy, but you can walk through a garden, you can experience it. The whole can be much larger than the sum of its parts. But now it seems the trend is to pick all the flowers, throw them in the air and see how they land.
Sure there’s beauty in it. There’s beauty in all art, even the art you don’t like. But it’s time we let go of this medium moving forward. Art evolves. Musicians are releasing singles more and more, throwing in some filler and packaging them as an album once they have a few decent tracks. I’m not saying we need to like it, but if we are to continue appreciating new music we need to move on. If you have no clue what this old man is rambling about, don’t worry, throw on your summertime playlist and you’ll be fine while the dinosaurs mourn.
