The Curse of the CD
I listened to an artist's debut album the other day. It was an artist I wanted to like; I'd heard a few songs off the album, and I liked them.
But when I finally listened to the whole thing, it was another story; there were three absolute classics, true, but of the rest maybe three songs were pretty cool, and the rest ranged from "filler" to complete dreck.
If that album would have been about 2/3 as long as it was, it might have been a classic. But it's not - and the album is, shall we say, "flawed" at the very best.
The artist, of course, is Springsteen. He's the best American songwriter of the past thirty years. And even so, his debut album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey", released when he was 23 years old, is a wildly uneven effort; it has "For You" and "Blinded By The Light" (in their original versions, before Manfred Mann butchered both) and "Growin' Up", all of which jump off the vinyl and say "Great stuff here!". There are also songs that would only be fully realized later, in live performances ("It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City", "Spirit In The Night") and some that should have been left on the cutting room floor ("Mary Queen of Arkansas"). Three fewer songs - or another few months to write and record a few better songs - and "Greetings..." might have been a classic.
Springsteen had two relative misfires ("Greetings..." and 1974's less uneven but still flawed"The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle") before he really found his voice on "Born to Run".
Thirty years later, it's a different world than when Springsteen got his start. Today, even an artist that gets some airplay and sells some records usually will only get one chance to generate knock 'em dead sales before being cut, shunted (if lucky) to the indy labels to languish in splendid obscurity. Yet it usually takes a songwriter an album or two or three to really find his or her voice. Quick - name the non-singles on the first two Beatles or Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan albums! Most of my favorite artists - Springsteen, U2, Richard Thompson, The Iron City Houserockers, even bands like REM that I don't like so much as respect - took a couple of albums to really hit their artistic strides.
The compact disc isn't helping things one bit.
Case in point: my favorite artist of the past year, Franky Perez; I've written about him a couple of times in the past four months. When I saw him at the Basilica Block Party, he was an amazing live performer - he reminded me of footage of a circa '74 Springsteen. He absolutely owned the stage. And his first video, "Cecilia" (not the Simon and Garfunkel one, either) was striking enough to etch his name in my memory for the six months it took to actually see him perform.
Remember when an album - meaning an LP or a cassette - held maybe eight or ten songs? Back then, Perez' debut album, "Poor Man's Son", would have been as solid a debut effort as a rocker could want - he's written more than eight solid songs!
- Two Lost Angels
- Cecilia
- Something Crazy
- Cry Freedom or Southwest Side, but not both. Both songs are similar, and either one would be better with a healthy dollop of the best parts of the other song
- Class Act
- Leave Me Alone
- Bella Maria
- Love and Hate
and as a bonus track, his acoustic version of...
- America (You Are A Part Of Me)
There. Nine songs, all of them excellent, three of them ("Cecilia", "Love And Hate" and "Leave Me Alone") just plain great.
Unfortunately, "Poor Man's Son" has 18 songs. And the other eight not listed above are the sort of thing a young songwriter used to crank out, maybe record as demos - and then leave them there. The producer would have known they weren't the sort of thing you put on a record, much less a debut album.
It's the CD's fault.
I never liked the compact disk; they're smaller than LPs and have fewer moving parts than cassettes, and that's about all they have going for them. The "all digital" sound always struck me as cold, fussy and teutonic, compared to the warmth of a well-mastered LP; their cost after about 1989 was obviously inflated (it has cost much less to make CDs than cassettes or LPs since the early nineties). And their supposed reliability was always a sham; I have many thirty-year-old LPs that still play wonderfully, while I routinely see CDs start skipping and fritzing out within the first year after buying them.
But worst of all is the dilution of music that the record companies force on the buying public via the CD; rather than writing music to fit some genuine artistic goal (which few songwriters in leagues below Dylan, Petty, Springsteen, Richard Thompson or Elvis Costello can consistently do anyway), the goal is to fill up space on a disk, to hit a goal in megabytes of product so that the customer will feel less ripped off by the inflated sticker price, at least in terms of song-count. It's forcing art to fit a medium, rather than the other way around.
People have been attacking the ethics of, and predicting the demise of the traditional record company for at least a decade. Maybe it'll happen, maybe not.
But I can't wait for the CD - or at least the artificial, top-down use of the CD as a de facto production quota - to go the way of the wax cylinder. Someday, when an artist can record a single, a four-song series, or a six-hour opus, and have them listened to and marketed on their own terms rather than shoehorned or diluted to fit an artificial, arbitrary volume limit, it'll be a great day for music.
UPDATE: Yes, I really DID first hear "Greetings from Asbury Park" about twenty years ago. It's called "suspension of disbelief", people. Sheesh. (Thanks to email correspondent DL. I think).
Posted by Mitch at
September 29, 2003 12:39 PM
