Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

Digital music distribution is the best thing to happen to music since wax records, but it has had one unfortunate consequence: the slow sundering of the notion of an album. Or the redefinition of that notion, at any rate. As far as iTunes, or any mp3 player, is concerned, an album is nothing more than a collection of songs, loosely bound together by metadata. It’s easy, and tempting, to just pick a single track out of that mass of music and walk away from the rest.¹ And why not? If someone hands you a jumbled bag of songs, and you pluck one out of the jumble, you’re not worried about compromising the integrity of the bag. There’s no integrity to compromise. It’s a bag.

But the bag metaphor is a bad metaphor. I mean, it certainly holds for a lot of albums, maybe even most albums, whose contents are linked by nothing more than similar styles and reliably sequential track numbers. But there are some albums that cohere; that are more than the sum of their parts. I wish I could put my finger on how that happens, but my critical faculties are far too primitive for those kinds of fine-grained assessments. My opinions about music are essentially bi-modal: Me Like or Me No Like. There’s sometimes a third mode, called Me Not Sure, but, given the steady waning in my attention span lately, it’s functionally equivalent to Me No Like.

And a great album is more than a solid string of Me Like songs. It transcends those kinds of individual assessments, because all of its songs glom together into a kind of uber-me-like, using a mysterious eldritch glue whose nature eludes me. I’m not talking about concept albums, necessarily, or Tommy-ish rock operas. It’s something else.

Some albums that fall into this category:

• Life’s Rich Pageant, REM
• Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
• Doolittle, The Pixies
• Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
• Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case
• Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, From Montreal
• I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Bright Eyes
• The Midnight Organ Fight, Frightened Rabbit
• OK Computer, Radiohead
• Person Pitch, Panda Bear
• Bitter Tea, The Fiery Furnaces
• Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim
• Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco

Life’s Rich Pageant is an especially good example of this phenomenon, I think, because none of the tracks on that album really stand out, individually. If someone were to ask me what my favorite REM song was — or even what my top 5 REM songs were — I’m pretty confident none of them would come from Life’s Rich Pageant. But, as a single entity, I think it’s their best album.

My favorite album of all time, though, has to be Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It’s not a collection of songs: it’s a mood, put to music. It slips behind the busy maelstrom of my thinking brain and touches something central and primeval — a part of my mind, I’d wager, that predates thought, and language, and certainly supersedes them both. I have no idea how it does that. And, frankly, I hope I never figure it out.

For better or worse, sundering is something society craves, and manufacturers are eager to facilitate. Navigating the vinyl disc was manual and abrasive, like taking a Conestoga wagon across the great plains. The cassette was the super highway, where you could fast forward toward your destination. Some manufacturers even developed “technology” that was able, depending on how much time you left between songs when you made that mix tape, to find the gaps as you sped. The CD gave you teleportation – the instant freedom to be anywhere you wanted at any time. With digital music distribution, now you can fold space itself and just leave out the parts we don’t want.

Tim – nicely said. But you left out 8-tracks. Edsels overturned in a ditch on the side of the road?