Q:HOW DOES IT FEEL TO GET YO' ASS WHUPPED AT WORDS WITH FRIENDS BOYEEEEE - I mean, what's your top 10 albums shaping up like so far this year?

strictlyalright

I have never made a top 10 albums list and I don’t plan to change that this year.

The more music I listen to, the more it seems to me that the album — the LP, the CD, the mp3 bundle — was a temporary aberration, the result of first, huckstery greed (“make ’em buy it all again” did not start with the CD), and second, a failure of imagination, in 1948. If a song wasn’t good enough to be issued on one side of a 78, (or, fine, 45) it isn’t good enough to take up space between the actually good songs on a 33 1/3, and unless your album is through-composed and conceptualized as an album (in which case ugh, you’re boring, it’s not 1969), then what’s the point? If I’m going to listen to a single thing for more than half an hour, I could be listening to jazz or classical — music that made sense on LP — or to a DJ mix, which even at its most banal has more thought and care put into it (from a listener’s perspective, anyway) than the average album’s tracklisting. To fetishize the album as the primary mode of musical delivery is to buy into the music industry’s deluded sales pitch, to privilege a particular rock-oriented, historically-bound mode of music-making over every other mode, to insist that the only music that has value is that which has received the imprimatur of some mediating label, to shut one’s ears to variety and immensity in favor of repetition and narrowness. Every album is made up of songs: songs are what matter, and a top 10 albums list is a way of saying “these 100-to-180 songs by ten different artists are more important than all other music made this year.” My democratic soul revolts.


OH AND I COULD ASK YOU THE SAME QUESTION.

11 Notes/ Hide

  1. thevidsarealright said: I think the last 10 CDs I bought were all DJ mixes!
  2. imathers said: Does jazz and classical making sense on an LP change at all the notion that the album-as-primary-mode is involved with a mode that’s rock oriented?
  3. strictlyalright said: WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT. #neverendingWWFtournament
  4. jonathanbogart posted this

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