Sunday, February 19, 2006
Artists' intentions lost in the shuffle
Ralph Berrier
Riffs, the regional music scene as heard by The Roanoke Times reporter Ralph Berrier, will appear weekly on Sundays.
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My wife bought herself a cute little MP3 player for Christmas, which would have been a lovely gift from me had I only thought of it. I gave her sweat pants.
Ruth likes her MP3 player, which isn't one of those trendy iPods that you see carried by dancing shadowy figures in TV commercials. The player is smaller than a Zippo and it holds zillions of bytes ... or megabytes ... or kilowatts. Whatever. You can store a lot of stuff on it.
She listens to the diminutive device when she works out at the local gym while wearing the cool sweat pants she got when she returned the ones I gave her. One recent morning while perspiring to the Beatles, she got really irked when the little player refused to play the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album in order. Shuffling songs is fine when you're in "shuffle" mode, but it's entirely inappropriate when you want to listen to a classic album from start to finish in the order the artist intended.
After all, the Beatles had a reason for starting with "Sgt. Pepper," then melding into "With a Little Help from My Friends." They didn't get to "A Day in the Life" then follow it with "Lovely Rita." There was a method to it, an art in the design. Real drama comes through the album's song sequence.
Ruth's malfunctioning MP3 player had toyed with that design and the results were maddening. After the player shuffled the chapters of a Larry McMurtry novel, rendering it as incomprehensible as an avant garde French film, she figured out what was wrong and fixed it.
But how many people would have bothered? If you want to listen to a book, sure, you want the chapters in proper order. But what if it was -- I shudder to say it -- only songs playing out of order? What if it was just an album?
The art of album sequencing is lost on many people in this digital age. Songs aren't merely played, they're put through a gauntlet of awful actions that sound more appropriate for sausage-making, only less appetizing. Songs are downloaded, burned and shuffled. They're converted, mixed and sampled. Sliced, diced and spliced! Yum!
As a result, the listener wrests creative control from the artist. It all seems very egalitarian, unless you're the artist who spent months making a record only to see it treated with the respect usually reserved for pinatas.
Certainly, songs and albums have been manipulated as long as people have been able to make tapes of their favorite songs. The computer age has only made it easier to create your own soundtrack from other people's work.
The album concept seems so 20th century. For years, musicians struggled to find the proper flow for their albums. Records followed their own narrative arcs, like chapters in a book or scenes from a movie. They started with the ear-catching opener, then weaved through a series of moods and sounds that played off one another like well-written dialogue until reaching a natural conclusion.
In those crazy pre-CD days of vinyl records and cassettes, albums even followed patterns for each side. The last song on side one sort of marked the end of scene, a break in the drama that led to a brief intermission (while you flipped the record) before side two began with another epic song that paved the way to an inevitable conclusion.
Nearly every album recorded during the LP heyday of the mid-1960s until the late 1990s followed this pattern. The narrative storytelling could be overt (think Pink Floyd's "The Wall") or subtle (even punk records like "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" had natural flow, even if they weren't rock operas).
Having myself been in a band that recorded albums, I know that song sequencing can ignite furious debate. ("We CAN'T end with 'Beer Then Liquor Never Sicker'! The last song HAS TO BE 'Hold the Pickle, Baby, 'Cause I've Got a Dill for You'! Don't you people know ANYTHING about making records?!")
Songs are an album's load-bearing features. On the best albums, they fit together naturally and support an album's main idea. "With a Little Help from My Friends" can only be followed by "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." The "Sgt. Pepper" reprise fits tongue-in-groove with the opening riff of "A Day in the Life." The 45-second piano chord at song's end hammers the album to a close.
Now, however, you can cherry-pick any songs you want from iTunes and put them in any order you want on your iPod. Be forewarned, though. With this power comes great responsibility. When you start messing with the work of the Beatles, Neil Young, U2 and other giants, you're playing with the big boys. They know how to construct an album. Rearranging their songs is like ignoring the measurements on a blueprint for a house. Shuffle too much and it will all fall apart like a house of cards.
Ralph Berrier's column appears Sundays in Extra.
