Vintage Music Dos

Your indifference won't stop me from blogging more about this, so don't bother not bothering.

The transformation of music media has trended towards the song being the primary musical unit, over against the album/record. Consider this: you started with the first major music medium for the purpose of sales - the record. From the record, you move on to the 8-track, which is smaller and more portable, but like the record, you don't really have a choice which song you listen to or when. From the 8-track to the cassette tape, you really start to see how the medium influenced the way music was hawked. Not only do you have the choice (albeit now a somewhat ridiculous choice - why fast forward when you can skip... or shuffle?) to skip past songs, you also now have the ability to buy blank music media and record whatever song you want on the cassette. Ah yes, the mix tape. From the cassette tape to the CD, song preference becomes even easier, and the mix tape offers a light to the mix CD. From the CD, the MP3 was a New York subway train.

Concurrent with these developments was a significant change in the landscape of music. If we look specifically at the CD era of music, we can spot the pinnacle of this trend without tracing it through history. By the time the CD-form of music saturates the market, we have a thriving style of music widely embraced by the POPular masses. Pop music is not just a slice, it's the whipped cream on top of every slice. There's a pop form for just about every version and this pop music is driving the financial growth of the music industry, so much so that they start to figure out that if a band can put together two or three radio-worthy singles, then the record companies can sell whole albums based on just a couple of songs. Who cares if the rest of the music is horrible, bad, or passable? People will shell out $20 for the next big thing. Yeah, we used to pay $20 for CDs.

So, there are two movements, one towards pushing albums with only a few good songs and the other towards allowing listeners the freedom to have only the music they actually want to have. I find this fascinating, in an Emmett Brown kind of way. I think it's interesting to see how these two trends are now playing out. On one hand, pop music is going as strong as ever in the way it should - one song at a time. On the other hand, truly great music is carving out a niche of its own in this pop-crazy world - one album at a time.

Great Bands / Great Albums (in no particular order)

The Flaming Lips / Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Fleet Foxes / Fleet Foxes
Bon Iver / For Emma, Forever Ago
Band of Horses / Cease to Begin
Brandi Carlile / The Story
Cloud Cult / The Meaning of 8
Miracle Fortress / Five Roses
Sigur Ros / Takk
Blind Pilot / Three Rounds and a Sound

And for kicks, I really can't get enough of the song "Holes," by Mercury Rev.