Dusting off the Family Albums

Originally published in Gadfly.


I got lost again last weekend. GoogleMaps can only guide you so far when the sun goes down and the street lights get dimmer and dimmer. I always thought that my tremendous lack of direction might evaporate once I started driving all across town, like some mechanical part of my brain that I never knew existed would pop up in a flat-screen inside my mind and project a fully functional map of Saint Louis and all of its suburbs. But, as time has fluttered by on its winged whatchamacallit, I’ve realized that I’ll probably never get over this lack of directional and practical sense. I’ve often thought about living in New York when I grow up, not for the city’s great cultural or historical landmarks but for the simple and easy-to-use public transportation. People are often quick to acknowledge that we are all born with natural talents and skills in certain areas. What they don’t often mention is that we’re also born with horrible deficiencies in scores of other disciplines.

I think my trouble with direction has something to do with my horrible lack of foresight. I’ve never been one to look to the future. Instead I’ve found myself constantly looking backwards. Which is probably what I was doing that night last weekend when I got lost on my way to a friend’s house in the backwoods of Affton. While the roads twisted and turned into heavy thickets and I had to guess which street I wanted—was it Country Field Drive or Country Field Court?—I was also caught up in the old David Bowie record that I’d dusted out of my dad’s old collection and thrown into my car. It was Hunky Dory, and the album’s warm and friendly sounds made the lostness feel kind of exciting. There was no one on these back roads and I enjoyed the countless U-turns my poor judgments called for. And the Bowie, too—there’s an electricity to his voice on that album, and it doesn’t come through warm and muted like many of the other albums of the early 70s. Instead, it’s wiry and wild and relentlessly playful, and it made my small directional transgressions seem like amusing footnotes rather than major miscalculations. When I finally arrived at the party, I rushed inside with Hunky Dory and a few other CDs in hand—my friend had requested that I pick out some tunes for his party. Perhaps he was there the weekend before, for Halloween, when my Steely Dan album got scrapped in favor of Z 107.7 by some vociferous girls in capes, who apparently “couldn’t dance to that” and was acting out of pity. Whatever the case, I quickly threw on the Bowie and was delightfully surprised when people immediately began to sing the words to “Changes.” I heard a couple of satisfied grunts and even a muted but passionate “I love this song.” Things seemed to be going well so I had my friend place a couple more albums in the stereo system to save for later. I waltzed over to the snack table with eyebrows cocked and feelings assuaged and as I did so, I started to fill out a small self-confidence checklist in my head: 1) I made it without having to call my parents to ask which way direction to go on 270. Check. 2) I successfully avoided a situation that would require parallel parking. Check. 3) They appear to have a full cooler of Dr. Pepper at this house. Check. 4) These people like the Bowie. They really like the Bowie. Check.

“Changes” hopped toward its ending and I smiled as I weaved through the crowds to say hello to friends and acquaintances. Soon, though, I realized something was up. As “Changes” finished its last chorus, I suddenly heard the fuzzed-out chords of the Rolling Stones’s “Shattered.” How come Bowie and Jagger were mixing? Was that even allowed? And, moreover, how come it was “Shattered” that was playing? That song doesn’t come to the end of the Some Girls album. I ran and shook the shoulder of my friend to see what was going on. He informed me, quite casually, that he had put the albums on “shuffle.” I jumped back a bit, thinking about the terrifying possible combinations—Stevie Wonder leaking into Sonic Youth, Pavement blurring into the Allman Brothers. It was scary, and I had to make it stop.

Later though, as the night continued, I started to think about the thinking behind the “shuffle” button and why so many of us choose it on our iPods and stereo systems. Ideally, when an artist creates a record he does so with order and sound and pacing in mind. Essentially, the tracks are being shuffled for us to suggest the greatest depth of sound and meaning. Why then do we need randomizer to undo all that work for us? It seems that with the pressings of the digital age of iTunes and iPods, we’ve lost our interest in the album. Things in the technological world work too quickly for a piece of art to be consumed in an hour. Instead, we place our value on the song before the album.

In my four years writing for Gadfly I’ve tried to avoid slipping into generalization and writing one of those “state of the music world” pieces, but sometimes a piece just nabs at you and you get a little pissed off and you find yourself drinking Sprite at two a.m. the night before you have to print this magazine and you need something to comment on. It’s an interesting phenomenon to think about, though, in the world of rock and roll. How much emphasis do we put on the single these days? Has the song even eclipsed the singer?

One of my favorite parts of musical investigation is tracing a band in all its incarnations and phases. It’s fun, for instance, to track the Rolling Stones—from tinny sounding white boys to psychedelic sitar players to the grizzly blues players they are now. Even single albums, like Exile on Main Street for example, teem with variety. There’s the rock and roll side, and then the folk and country side, and then the gospel and soul side. It goes on and on. Today, though, it seems like bands and artists have constructed themselves and their ideas around the single song and that, unfortunately, means the single sound. Even some of the most talented groups of our generation seem guilty of this—where album after album seem like repetitions and layers of the same fundamental sound. This is true of the most recent Arcade Fire release, The Suburbs. I was waiting for the stripped-down soul Arcade Fire record, or the solo acoustic Arcade Fire record. Perhaps the artists might have recorded it, too, if there were any kind of market for an album instead of a collection of singles. Rather than getting one band that absorbs many different genres and ideas, we get many different bands each devoted to a specific genre or idea. In the current indie scene, this is painfully clear. There’s your synthesizer, hipster pop bands and your noise-rock bands and everything in between but nothing that attempts to tackle anything comprehensive.

It’s an interesting paradox of the internet age that we find our music becoming more and more stilted and niched. In one sense it’s a sensible response to the technological market, where a specialized product that can fully appeal to one group is more important than a broad one that can partly appeal to many. But, at the same time, sites like Facebook are committed to an idea of constant iteration, which is to say that they are constantly changing. Think about how much Facebook has changed in the last year (I’m thinking of the invention and then frequently adapting look of the “chat” feature) and compare that to how much Arcade Fire has changed in the last year. The Facebook age means constantly changing ideas and a variety of them too, but it also means presenting those ideas in the simplest, fastest way possible. This is not good news for artists, whose work is less concerned with ergonomics and more concerned with drama and tension in both the simple and the complex, the accessible and the difficult to understand. Rather than encourage us to find the subtlety and variety over artists’ careers, the digital age prefers us to find artists, enjoy their musical shtick for a little bit and then throw them aside for the next band that sounds a little bit different.

This is scary stuff for me to think about, as one who grow up along side the Beatles—hitting A Hard Days Night in third grade and working my way up to The White Album in the eighth, when I bought a corduroy jacket and grew my hair out. I saw John’s songs go from “She Loves You” to “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” all in a span of five years. That’s certainly rapid change, but it’s also growth—and that’s where the difference lies. I’ll always prefer some songs as singles contained outside their albums—songs like “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Born In The U.S.A.” come to mind, songs that are too wild and singular for inclusion in something grander. But, as far as I’m concerned, listening to “After the Gold Rush” is only part of listening to After the Gold Rush. There’s that feeling of extreme connectedness, a personal bond that exists between you and an album. You hear the opening lick of “Rocks Off” on Exile on Main Street and you know you’re in for an hour and a half of wild music. Over time, too, I find myself returning more to the albums that I love more than the songs I love. For me, “Like A Rolling Stone” will always exist outside of time, as some liquid flow of energy that can take no context. But when I pull out of my driveway with a warm piece of GoogleMaps paper and an uncertain mind, and I slide in Blood on the Tracks to the CD holder, I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up someplace special.