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IN DEFENSE OF THE ALBUM

Reading the pros and cons of the “single v album” debate here on  MIL, I was reminded of a quote by Roberto Bolaño, the renegade author/poet du jour (whose "Savage Detectives" I’m now reading).

“The novel is an imperfect art,” Bolaño once said. “The more pages you write, the more possibility there is of revealing imperfections. It isn’t the same to build a house as to build a skyscraper. Often a house is cosier, but to build a skyscraper you have to be very good. It may be the most important of all literary arts.”

Could this idea be extended to music? If the pop song is the sonic equivalent of the short story, then the long player must be the musical version of the novel. The pop song is more suitable to our fussy, distracted times and short attention spans, but this doesn't render the long player irrelevant or obsolete. It just makes it slightly unfashionable. So albums are also an “imperfect art”–and all the more important for it.

When executed properly, the pop song and the short story are wonderful art-forms. They fulfil some inner desire for coherent and consummately “perfect” experiences. Yet for that same reason they’re not really such great metaphors for that messy old thing we call “life”. Novels and albums, in contrast, are more akin to our everyday experience. They can be coherent but their sweep is much broader, their messages more complex and varied and so often more meaningful, or at least comprehensive.

Would a single from Lou Reed's Berlin be enough to conjure up the post-Wall atmosphere of the city in the bleak, amorphous way the album did? Would Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue be such a masterpiece if its essence were distilled to four minutes? Could Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder have gotten across their complex socio-political messages in just one 'hit'?

No. To those who say the golden era of the “perfect” album is gone, it is important to remember that truly great albums have always been few and far between. In any case, imperfection is often more revealing, inspiring and human than perfection (just think of all those wonderful imperfectly perfect albums by Joy Division, Talking Heads and David Bowie, among others).

There is more music around than ever before, and 2009 has seen plenty of superlative albums from a bewildering range of scenes: Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear; XX by The XX; The Crying Light by Antony & The Johnsons; Everything That Happens Will Happen Today by David Byrne & Brian Eno; Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective; The Ecstatic by Mos Def; Manafon by David Sylvian; and Monoliths and Dimensions by Sunn O))), to name a few. Time will tell whether these become bonafide classics or not, but it is safe to say our musical universe would be poorer without them.

If Radiohead doesn't want to make long players any more, fine. But there will always be a space in my collection for artists who feel the need to express something more ambitious than a perfect soundbite.

~ PAUL SULLIVAN

Picture credit: kevindooley (via Flickr)