In high school, I was fortunate enough to have permission to drive my mother’s 2007 Volvo station wagon. It was in relatively good condition but lacked one element: an AUX cord. As a teenage girl doomed to listen to the crackly Top 40 radio waves of central Mass., I only had one choice. When life gives you a CD player, you start burning ~sick~ playlists.
Quickly, I realized the art of arranging song selections in an order that “made sense;" I learned how to set a mood, build emotion or tell a story. Last week, I was considering the success of The Chainsmokers singles, and I was wondering if they really needed to release an album to harness their popularity.
Let's take a step back in time to a different era. It's the '50s, and you're doing what '50s kids do: listening to your record collection. These bulky pieces of vinyl were the original "singles," as they could only store one song on each side, for a total of two songs on a disc. My grandmother's collection consisted of 78 rpm records, aptly named for the number of revolutions per minute.Spinning the records at higher speeds reduced the static relative to the musical sound, but as technology improved, the same level of quality could be maintained at 45 rpms and then 33 at 1/3 rpms sold for about $1. In 1948, the LP was introduced, standing for "longer playing," and allowing roughly 20 minutes of music per side of the record. Now, artists could collect at least ten songs on the same disc - things were starting to get interesting. LPs, or albums as they were called in the United States, could be themed; they could illustrate a period in the artist's development.
Consider The Beatles' development as musical professionals. Listen to any of their early work on albums such as "Please Please Me" (1963) and "With The Beatles" (1963), and you'll notice something -- every single song is under three minutes. Their first single in the United Kingdom, "Love Me Do" (1962), was a mere 2:22 long; that's almost half the average length of a track today. The lyrics are simple and the verses are brief. Recording capabilities of the era prevented broader musical experimentation. However, as track length increased, we began to see The Beatles' sound maturing, as well as the utilization of new techniques. Off of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967), we see adjacent tracks segue into one another for a more complex experience, such as the title track and "With A Little Help From My Friends" (1967). On their later albums, we can hear their experimentations, their struggles and their departure from the four moptops who stepped into the spotlight in the early '60s. Fast-forward back to 2016, and online music culture has negated the necessity to release music as collections. While some artists certainly still use careful thought in album creation, we may see a gradual loss of this truly beautiful archive of an artist's growth and development.
