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You could always count on Scotti Bros. Records for something appalling, but their release of a Fabio record may have reached lower even than Electric Light Orchestra II. I'm surprised they didn't do a Beatles II. This is what happens when a label leaves everything to the marketing department. And I must admit it somewhat undermines my previous argument that concept albums as a rule were moneymakers, because everything Scotti Bros. did was a concept album. But hey; they were right about Bat out of Hell II...
Oh; and did no one involved in recording this ever stop for a moment to recall Steve Martin's "European Lover"-voice from the SNL skits, which parodied this fifteen years before it was made?
I found this on a site that offered recitations of various poems; I can't remember what it was called. It definitely stood out.
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I picture him saying this with a very red face...and the veins in his neck all bulging.
I was once waiting for a friend in the lobby of an office building in New York while they were preparing to display a piece of Roy Lichtenstein's work. I don't know what its exact dimensions were, but what they were setting up was gargantuan. It had to be at least a hundred feet tall (the lobby was immense, and my suspicion was that the painting still wouldn't fit). I never saw the piece up and displayed, which I regret now.
I don't know how you would even go about looking at a painting that vast. Where would you study it it from to get a sense of it? Half a mile away or so?
But Lichtenstein's greatest talent lay in mockery, and he surely realized the painting could only be seen (at least by people inside the building) in separate, meaningless parts -- especially when you consider his style of painting, which calls attention to the limits of detail by mocking painting itself, rendering it in comic book ink dots. He was, I am now strongly inclined to believe, ridiculing the people who commissioned this preposterous art display and the men in suits who would be walking past it, no doubt thinking it might reflect a kind of classiness on them. Idiots.
It's all a question of scale.
Paintings tend to fall within a certain size, and there's a reason for that. They're flat surfaces, so beyond that size, the effects of perspective can distort the way the painting is seen. We (quite reasonably, I think) expect something that you can take in as a whole from about five or ten feet away, and that might perhaps reward a bit of closer examination of details. Artists are endlessly looking for rules to break, but this rule you can only break if you've already made a considerable success of your art career, and can impress people with your name. I'm sure Lichtenstein laughed himself silly over this gig.
Movies tend to run between ninety and a hundred and twenty minutes. There are no good movies over three hours long. I checked. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? Two hours, fifty-nine minutes. The Godfather is two hours, fifty-five minutes. Titanic clears three hours, but it's dreadful (sorry if you had your hand raised). But how is it I (and I'm not alone here; lots of other people I've spoken to have confessed to doing the same thing) can sit around entire weekends watching a full season box set of House or Entourage? It's not just because I can smoke during it or get up and grab a soda without standing in line (although those are considerable factors). It's because beyond a certain point, the irritation at having to sit still and follow a story and be quiet and be in the dark just reach critical. Film is illusion, and illusions can be tremendously entertaining, but boredom and annoyance are real, and they need only raise their heads and remind you of their presence to shatter the illusion, no matter how great the first two hours and fifty-nine minutes of it. Break it into separate, digestible parts, however, and we can go all day. That's why the same rules of scale don't apply to novels: we can put them down, and read only as much as suits us at a sitting.
Songs, like movies, are designed to be taken in as wholes, not parts. The longest song ever to reach the Billboard #1 spot was "American Pie" by Don McLean. Eight minutes, thirty-six seconds. And it's a great song, with intriguing lyrics, a marvelous singalong chorus. The second longest #1 Billboard hit is less than half its length ("Macarena" by Los del Rio, four minutes and thirteen seconds, if you're curious). We don't like our pop songs too long. An eight-and-a-half minute #1 song is a deviation from the pattern worth exploring, but for now, let's discard it as an anomaly. If we include it, the average length of a #1 pop hit, 1940-present, is three minutes and seven seconds. If we disregard it, the average length (impressively) drops an entire second. But we seem to have figured out roughly how long to make a pop song.
Albums, I am increasingly convinced, are out of scale. They're the wrong length, and they're broken into too many pieces (or songs, as some call them). I can't think of a single album I really sat down and listened to all the way through since... Hmm... Probably not since Green Day put out American Idiot. What's that, four years? Creating a truly great album just isn't in most musicians. But record companies sign artists by the album, and until that changes, most people who write and play songs for a living are going to spend more than ninety percent of their time, effort, money and skill creating filler. Bad songs they have to put out, quite possibly before they had a chance to percolate into the form of good songs. I have 3,549 songs on my iTunes, and not one single complete album. The album is a form imposed on us by a combination of past technological limitations, unimaginative businessmen and inertia. There are truly great ones, but I've yet to come across one that played straight through, beginning to end, without a song I'd take out (and do, thanks to iTunes) or a significant relaxation of quality standards on my part (which is impermissible). Sgt. Pepper's would have been better if they'd cut out "With a Little Help from My Friends." Abbey Road would have been better without "Octopus' Garden" and that "Quando obbligado" song, whose title escapes me at the moment.
Breaking creative works into certain sizes is sensible, but the album is due for rethinking, says I. An album should either be a complete artistic statement unto itself, or it shouldn't be there. Most musicians are lucky if they've got one single great song in them, and forcing them to create forty-five minute creative outbursts bracketed on either side by a year of imposed silence is a bad idea. These kids might have a hit in them; do you really want to force crap out of them just because the convention is to release pop music that way? It's bad for consumers (who have to pay, ultimately, for time wasted recording lesser material); it's bad for record companies, who have enough problems already; it's bad for musicians, who are (to my experience) a rather sensitive and insecure bunch, and don't like putting out anything they're not completely convinced is good. Which usually means something like 93% of an album.
They made me happy when I was a kid, too. I love albums, when I'm not busy arguing passionately for their elimination (or their existence only in the form of coherent works of art, anyway). But an album should be more than just a bunch of (ideally) good songs laid side-by-side. Songs add up; they create a collective momentum. A song is easy to manipulate and control; a group of songs isn't. Unpredictable things happen, unfortunate comparisons become inevitable, weaknesses are exposed that shouldn't be exposed. Let bands who write songs write songs. Let bands who make albums put out albums. The former is vastly easier than the latter, but has a lot of real merit to it. Let the concept of "filler" become an embarrassing memory. We love good albums, but we NEED good songs, in a wide variety of styles, constantly -- I wouldn't say quite like we need food, say, but perhaps the way we need... Sunlight. That's it.
Oh; and speaking of good songs, here's a bit of despair from the lovely Aimee Mann!
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I've been thinking, thinking about this album thing of yours.
I have been trying to think of albums I love in their entirety. Gotta say that's a short list.
Even still that list is odd for one reason. All the records I can think of are debut albums.
The Violent Femmes
Velvet Underground
B-52's
REM
and so on and so on.
Could it be artists get a sort of performance anxiety when it comes to dishing up new stuff if there is a second record?
I don't know.
I do know you may be on to something (or on something, I haven't figured that out yet).
Or maybe both, I.
But actually, there's really a pretty straightforward reason why bands' debut albums are so often their greatest work: they've had their whole lives to write those songs. After that, you get a year. That's why it's frequently an act's second album that gives you a real sense of what to expect.
I suppose mine is a fairly radical proposal, but then, the record industry might require something radical. To tell the honest truth, I did kind of go for the provocative when I first suggested it, but as I sat around thinking about it, I began to realize how numerous and sturdy were its underpinnings. Boy; I save the planet without even having to try, huh?
Oh; and R.E.M.'s first real album was called Murmur, not R.E.M. And their first release was an EP (Chronic Town). But each of your picks, as I pick them up and hold them to the light, comes damned close to beginning-to-end greatness.
And I appreciate your giving some thought to my idea. It's really not as crazy as it seems at first, is it...?
Well I forgot Devo in there.
Your right, the second comes after the band picks their barroom faves.
Not crazy just insane.
So, do you suggest putting out songs as they happen? Making a slightly longer than EP length disk?
I also thought about the consumer. Would you pay 15 bucks for a disk that cashes in at 24 minutes? Where is the value? Personally my value is in the physicality. I like to hold the music in my hand. While I am sitting on a largish collection of digital stuff, I still like to read the liner notes. What is the optimal size for an 'album'?
Hey next time you know your going to NYC you better get a hold of me.
MOGs That Trust Me (8 of 63)
MOG Meter
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Z, you just threw in ELO II to get me frothing at the mouth, I know you did. Bunch of wannabes.
Saw your MOG page with the quotes, reminded me of one from Churchill:
Lady Astor to Churchill: "Winston, if you were my husband I would flavour your coffee with poison"
Churchill: "Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it"
Hey, Konk!
What; like I said something nice about them?
Churchill also had:
Offended Lady at Table: "Sir you are drunk!"
Churchill: "Yes, madam, but you are ugly, and tomorrow morning I will be sober, but you will still be ugly."
Of course, Churchill was no looker himself. But it makes you wonder how many women he must have treated rudely at how many dinners for a man so stupid to have come up with two such great zingers...
Good to see you, mate.
What, ya didn't get the boxed set?