Is it all over for the album?

My home is full of vinyl. It’s there in the living-room, the study, the spare
bedroom – all my yesterdays, the good, the bad the ugly, filed in batches of
30 in sturdy black plastic boxes (they weigh a ton!), stacked up like
children’s bricks.

Occasionally I’ll reach for an album I’ve not played in ages, and put it on
the turntable, relishing the satisfying hiss as the stylus hits the groove
and I drift off into… well you get the idea. Or perhaps you don’t.

Turntable, stylus, groove – the words are almost redundant now. As too, of
course, is the word vinyl – nowadays the sole preserve of middle-aged
aficionados like me, or groovy young hipsters who relish the fetishistic
qualities of the album sleeve with its abundance of arcane information (who
engineered those sessions exactly and where were they recorded?) And
”album’’ is fast going the same way. For the past few weeks, the internet –
where most music lives now, not in black plastic boxes – has been alive with
debate about the place of the album in modern music – and indeed whether it
has a place at all. According to George Ergatoudis, the head of music at
Radio 1, the album is ”edging closer to extinction’’, as consumers instead
turn to downloading single tracks on iTunes, or ”renting’’ music from
online streaming services, which enable listeners to share and access
playlists, the most popular songs of the moment or specifically tailored for
a certain activity or mood.

In other words, the era of listening uninterruptedly to 10 or 12 songs, put
together by a group or artist in a specific chronological order to tell a
particular story or reflect a certain moment in their creative development,
is all but over.

Sales of music bear this theory out: according to the Official Charts Company,
album sales are down 18 per cent compared with last year, when there were 30
million fewer albums sold in the UK than in 2009. Meanwhile, there are some
1.5 billion playlists on the most popular music-streaming site, Spotify,
compared with 1.4 million albums.

The proliferation of music on the internet is a wonderful thing. There is more
music of any type and period now available – and at the touch of a finger –
than at any time in human history.

Looking at my collection stored on my computer, I could press random play and
listen to music for 13.5 days without interruption. A James Brown track,
followed by a Rickie Lee Jones track, followed by a Keith Jarrett track,
followed by…. Much is gained. But something quite special is lost.

The history of the record album provides a very specific example of the medium
shaping the message. Because the duration of a recording was determined by
the limitations of available technology, the first ”record albums’’ were
exactly that: collections of two or three shellac recordings packaged
together in cardboard sleeves to make up a complete concerto or symphony.

In popular music, the arrival of the 12-inch vinyl long-player (how quaint
that term sounds now!) in the 1950s presented not only a commercial
opportunity – more tracks! more money! – but also an artistic one. A
collection of songs could now be shaped to reflect a particular theme, or
establish a mood, be it musical or lyrical. The Frank Sinatra albums made in
the 1950s, In the Wee Small Hours (heartbreak and bourbon), Songs For
Swingin’ Lovers (Martini and seduction) and Come Fly With Me (the glamour of
far-off places) provide early and classic – in every sense of the word –
examples.

Pop music was slow to cotton on to this. The first pop albums were mostly
collections of singles – 2 minutes 45 seconds of instant excitement –
leavened with “filler”. But as artists increasingly took hold of the
creative reins, writing and producing their own songs, so the album began to
assume a particular shape and form. The album became a window into an
artist’s state of mind, the cumulative work of thought, planning and
deliberation, reflecting the period in which it was written and recorded,
the different musical ideas that were being experimented with at the time.

The longer format allowed greater artistic freedom, and the possibility of
songs being ordered to flow seamlessly from one to the next – much like a
live performance. The best albums were – and still are – often thematic,
linked by mood if not by an actual narrative, with a coherence that means
even the best songs, when removed from their context, seem like orphans.
They oblige you to listen in a different way, to stop what you’re doing,
listen carefully.

This idea of sitting up and paying attention (or more likely lying down,
possibly on a bean-bag) reached its apotheosis with the concept album – a
form that rose in the late 1960s and flourished in the 1970s. The Who’s
Tommy and Quadrophenia; Pink Floyd’s The Wall; David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust
– these are the album equivalent of novels: deaf, dumb and blind boy seeks
spiritual redemption through pinball; Second World War orphan becomes
unhappy rock star; space alien descends to earth and becomes rock prophet.

At its worst, the ”concept album’’ was a medium that encouraged over-weening
ambition and boundless pretentiousness; the unholy miscegenation of rock
groups and symphony orchestras, struggling painfully to adapt the works of
HG Wells and Jules Verne – sometimes ending up literally and metaphorically
on ice. It’s a form that seems to have disappeared in recent years, even
without the help of internet streaming.

Of course, even at the height of the “golden age” of the album, not every
artist was an alchemist. Very often an LP might contain say, half a dozen
good songs, three fairly decent ones, and three that were absolutely
terrible. Lost in a reverie, you would have to crowbar yourself to a
vertical position and walk to the turntable or CD player to move things
along, or carry on listening through gritted teeth out of a misguided sense
of reverence for the artist’s creative ”vision’’ – or simply because you’d
paid good money for it – until the next good track.

Even the best albums contained the occasional dud – did anyone ever look
forward to hearing the obligatory Ringo song on a Beatles album? There were
times when one longed for someone to invent some kind of time and
labour-saving device that would allow you to filter the wheat from the
chaff, or skip to another album in your collection, or even put together the
best tracks from different albums, and maybe a single or two – a device like
Spotify, say.

But this process of meddling, of shuffling and chopping and changing, will
never be quite the same as the album experience. Twelve great songs whistled
up on the internet and arranged in no particular order may provide their own
pleasures and satisfactions. But they do not an album make.

Now where did I file that second Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen LP?

Five albums worth listening to from beginning to end

_{Marvin Gaye turned pop music on its head with ‘What’s Going On’}

Beach Boys

Pet Sounds (1966)

Perennially at the top of those ”best album ever’’ lists, Brian Wilson’s
masterpiece is sometimes, wrongly, described as a concept album, but the
songs are all of a piece: messages from the bedroom of a lonely boy, his
head bursting with harmony and melody, looking for his place in the world
and dreaming of how things could be better. Wouldn’t It Be Nice…

Marvin Gaye

What’s Going On (1971)

Gaye’s suite of songs about the woes of ghetto life, drug addiction, the world
going to hell in a handbasket, and the hope of spiritual redemption really
only makes narrative, and musical, sense when listened to from beginning to
end. It not only turned soul music on its head, it opened new vistas of
sophistication for pop music at large.

Laura Nyro

New York Tendaberry (1969)

Imagine a pale-faced, bohemian girl wise beyond her years, with a head full of
poetry, opera and street-corner doo-wop. A song-cycle of dazzling
originality, delivered by one of the most heartfelt voices in pop music, and
vibrantly alive with the clamour, danger and wet-pavement sadness of the
city from which it takes its name.

Sam Amidon

I See The Sign (2010)

Amidon is a contemporary singer who takes traditional Appalachian songs and
reinvents them as a sort of folk chamber music with cellos, splashes of Moog
synthesiser and off-kilter percussion. He sings in a plaintive voice, which
transports you to a world that seems half-familiar yet at the same time
wholly strange.

Kanye West

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)

A cinematic journey in which songs exploring themes of power, celebrity,
hubris and uncertainty segue from one to the next in a variety of musical
styles from the strident to the baroque that demolish the familiar
conventions of rap. Once you’ve started, it’s almost impossible to stop.