The Art of Albums
Zoom In
After my last piece on the changing pop music scene, I couldn’t help but feel like I was coming off as a bit jaded and perhaps a bit too much like an angry grandparent cursing the current music idols of America’s youth. So, in this final installment, I thought I would inject a bit of optimism back into my conversation about current music and the direction in which music production and consumption are headed:
1. Singles, and the artists who focus on them, are not all bad: turns out T-Swift and Meghan Trainor don’t have it that easy, as artists work hard to produce songs that get stuck in the world’s ear. But while many manage to gain widespread popularity, there are some who still work to integrate intricate chord progressions with hummable melodies (Clean Bandit), showcase killer vocal ranges (Bruno Mars, Sia), or bring innovative sounds to pop (Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams).
Let the Music Play
My a cappella group, the Harvard Opportunes, has a tradition that originates from the group’s founding in the 1980s and continues to appear in all of our performances. While most a cappella traditions are better left unexplained, this particular one provides us with an appropriate starting place for a discussion of some of the reasons why albums have seemingly fallen out of style in the recent history of pop music.
At every concert, the Opportunes pick four or five songs from Billboard’s “Hot 100” list to perform as part of a medley called “Let the Music Play.” The medley is unlike any other, though, in that it samples these top-performing singles (no more than a verse and chorus of each) and injects them into a “frame song”—“Let The Music Play,” a 1983 chart-topper by one-hit-wonder Shannon. The effect is a tribute to pop music of the past and present in the form of a disjointed, disorienting mash-up that always manages to feel like a train about to derail in performance.
What's the Story
Exploring the Spotify profiles of your friends isn’t just useful when assembling a party playlist or discovering hidden gems in their “recently played” log. Spotify can also tell us a lot about how music is consumed today. It isn’t hard to find playlists built around a particular mood, event, or state of mind—some examples I’ve come across include “Calm Down,” “twerk.,” and “I Just Had Sex Party.” Although many treat the concept of theme-based listening as a novel one (there are even entire websites like Songza devoted to this kind of thing), the truth is that artists started packaging their music thematically, in the form of the album, long before these recent developments. The difference with albums lies in their nuance in communicating complex emotions and events while still telling a story.
A look at some of the highest-grossing albums of all time shows that the story is an important component that goes into not only emotionally complex musical works but also successful ones.
Sounds, Blues, Ebbs, and Flows
As an a cappella singer and a student of harmony, two musical groups immediately come to mind as some of the most influential artists in my own musical experience: The Beach Boys and Fleet Foxes. If you don’t know Fleet Foxes, I understand—the indie-folk-rock group produced only two full-length LPs in their years together before their members faded into other musical projects. Still, they received critical acclaim and infiltrated the iTunes libraries of several new indie music listeners. If you don’t know The Beach Boys—well, I may be a little more concerned.
These two groups—differing in era, genre, fame, and longevity—provide a great starting point for part one of an in-depth look at the most important features that set albums apart from other forms of recorded music. Their shared emphasis on layering voices and instruments in innovative ways gives their work some simple points of comparison that don’t require tons of explanation for the untrained ear.
Zoom Out
For a long time, I have tried to stay away from writing about music. I love music, I make a lot of it, and I would like to think I have some handle on how it works. Its power lies in the emotional connections it creates—and that power can be diminished by any attempt to put pen to paper and talk about it in a meaningful way. It gets diluted in a slippery slope of harsh reviews, personal tastes, and comparison of artists. And yet, here I am, about to introduce you to my column on albums, leaving you feeling confused about my change of heart.
The fact is, music is changing. I have been consuming music ever since I bought my first CD at age six (Yes, it was a Baha Men CD. Yes, I am embarrassed. No, I do not still own it). I went through all of the phases of developing an appreciation for music: rummaging through old boxes of my dad’s classic rock vinyl, redeeming the iTunes gift cards that invariably came every Christmas and birthday, examining the first generation of mp3 players, mourning the loss of LimeWire, making the trip to Urban to buy a brand-new, old-fashioned record player for my dorm. I have conformed to many trends in music (as I write this, I am listening to my “Sundays” playlist on Spotify), and yet I have gone defiantly against the grain in other ways—my dad’s vinyls from the ’70s made the trek to Harvard with me.