During the Great Regasketing of the AMC360, I had the pleasure of deep discussion with the Dot regarding music. We were listening to the Awakening Compilation, Vol 2.
Some background here, the Dot has listened to the same album basically every night since her colic days. In order, too. She came out one night in traumatized tears because "Music not working! Texas barbecue song 'posed to be first!"
Oh, for the good old pre-diagnosis days.
The conversation turned to covers and singles, concepts which utterly shocked and horrified her young sensibilities. She was relieved to hear that her favorite songwriter was at least getting paid well by all the people covering his songs, but the idea of a person recording a song they haven't written (or at least co-written) offended her.
Which is, of course, an interesting reaction. I have mixed feelings on the topic. On the one hand, I thoroughly reject the notion that Jimi Hendrix's recording of "All Along the Watchtower" is the definitive cut, whatever Dylan's opinion may be. On the other hand, I agree with Reznor (and most people) that Johnny Cash's "Hurt" is a far richer version than Nine Inch Nails'. I tend to like musicians who write at least half of the songs they record, but then Cash only wrote 54 of the 1500+ songs he recorded. Of course, those 54 include "Folsom Prison Blues," "The Big Battle," "The Man Comes Around," "Give My Love to Rose," and "Man in Black." Perhaps I just like to know that any artist I listen to is capable of deep reflection and expression.
More baffling to her, though, was the idea that anyone would ever listen to a song without getting the greater context of the album. She's already learned the ebb and flow that is present on well-crafted albums; how each song builds on the previous, weaving themes throughout.
Again, I have mixed feelings. Let him who has never burned a mix CD cast the first stone. I do enjoy mixing songs of different artist--or for that matter, the same artist from different albums--into new works. I recently ran across one of my old study mix CDs, where I mixed slow songs conducive to concentration together with more upbeat numbers to keep me awake.
Of course, this is a case of Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message." While most people who read Neil Postman tend to concentrate on the way TV with its 10 minutes between commercial breaks made political discourse basically ADHD and prone to soundbite philosophy (if any) and inflammatory affirmative slogans, I think a more interesting and personally relevant example is talk radio, which was popular among blue-collar workers, because--as I can attest from my childhood--it can be listened to while framing, plumbing, roofing, and wiring. Did talk radio hosts shape the blue collar culture, or did blue collar culture shape the talk radio hosts? Well, that's probably a chicken or egg question.
Back to the question at hand, radio stations do not play whole albums, and while streaming services--with the capacity to listen to a whole album straight--have largely supplanted radio (and physical albums, for that matter), in order to listen to an album straight, you usually to pay for premium service to get the album without ads (YouTube music) or to have access to the album instead of a curated random playlist (Pandora).
Granted, this is sort of what the public wants. In college, I had the great opportunity to take Late American History from Dr. Birdwell. One of the assigned books was Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 by James Miller. It's one of the few books from college that still has a place on my shelf. In it, he tells the genesis story of the Top 40. Two radio DJs were talking shop in a diner. The patrons kept playing the most popular radio hits. They talked until past closing time. They noticed when the diner employee starting to clean up, she first went to the jukebox. They expected after listening to the same songs for the last 8 hours solid, she's be sick of them and choose something else, but she still chose the same songs the patrons were listening to.
Of course, much like disjointed political tirades, one might think that the reason people listen to singles is because they want disjointed background music they can largely ignore while doing their job. The woman in this example was engaging in manual labor cleaning the diner. That is not the time to listen to a thoughtful, well-crafted album. It's rather like my study mix CDs, or the fact that my preferred work music is one of Pandora's classical channels (preferably strings or piano). I certainly don't listen to Andrew Peterson or Fernando Ortega albums. And J Lind is right out, along with The Antlers' Hospice.
This also explains the content of the songs themselves. The Beloved has introduced some of her friends to our favorite songwriters, including the Dot's favorite, Andrew Peterson. Universally, they observe that they cannot listen to those artists while doing housework, driving, or anything else that requires concentration. Not only must the arc of the song conclude by the last note, you really have to have relatively mindless fluff to make background music. Certainly nothing deeper than your girlfriend or boyfriend running off or vowing vengeance therefore.
While I do listen to thoughtful podcasts while I work, I also have been doing essentially the same motions for almost four years now, so I can usually coast through instrument maintenance on muscle memory. Plus, once there's an exception to my task, I pause the podcast to give full attention to the new job at hand.
Podcasts, though, bring up an interesting trend that many have noticed in recent years, which is the switch from ADHD media consumption to long-format. Podcasts start at around half an hour discussing a single topic, and many go into the multiple hours territory. Narrative fiction has likewise changed with weekly, designed-for-syndication episodic shows losing ground to sweeping epics that most people binge all at once. I credit Harry Potter. Those books taught an entire generation in their formative years to appreciate stories that build and characters that age, rather than the previous generations' childhood books about perpetual adolescents by author stables like Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, et al.
Maybe, just maybe, if we continue this trend of reversing our nation's collective ADHD, we'll even see a decline in the popularity of basketball and football in favor of soccer.
At any rate, I am glad for my daughter's ability to enjoy well-crafted albums. And her preference for long-format books like the Redwall series (and Harry Potter, for that matter). I think the capacity to thoughtfully follow a story arc--in any format--will serve her well throughout life. And perhaps she will be in good company, too.
