January 27, 2008
even more albums of the year: five final paragaphs
If one were mandated to name a country album of the year, it would likely be Taylor Swift, but not without competition from, for example, Keith Urban's quite lovely if badly-titled Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing, which was on and off and not quite crazy enough, but had a slew of tremendous songs, including "Won't Let You Down," "Faster Car," "Raise the Roof," and the outsized "Stupid Boy," which sometimes seems to be the singer talking to himself, sometimes to the ex of his paramour, which is to say that the song is haunted by the specter of Tom Cruise, to whom the song's title could not possibly do justice.
Kelly Willis has sort of become the country's Jennifer Jason Leigh, who didn't win the Oscar when she shoulda, and has since wandered or been shouldered ever closer to the margins of the genre, of success, and of artistic viability — oscillating between brittle recapitulations and aimless experiments. Willis could've been a platinum Grammy factory in '93 or '99 and has drifted ever since; this year, with Translated From Love, she has has come up against the shoals of something sweetly eccentric and alluring and not that far from the American songbook's desolation row. The opener, "Nobody Wants to go to the Moon Anymore" is a little rockabilly and a lot Tin Pan Alley and much of the remainder — almost all of it quite a few paces slower — keeps its Tin ear. These are songs that deepen with frequent listening and cut more sharply late at night, especially the title track, "The More That I'm Around You," and the cruelly clear "Stone's Throw Away," arguably the prettiest and saddest song of the year.
But in some strange way, the album of the year was Google. We don't mean that at all, but we do mean something. The only artist who could compete with M.I.A. this year was Lil Wayne, and you could sort of squint and pretend he had an album this year, but that's dubious and even if it weren't, Da Drought 3 is no album of the year. All of this shows exactly how weak the concept of album has become; if you've been following the adventures of Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., you know that he's reveling in the album form's current volatility, which makes him seem somehow heroically don't-give-a-fuck in much the way that the the early days of Napster made Metallica and Dre look like narcs with saurian brains the size of cashews. Wayne's 2007 output of mix tapes, fake leaks, real leaks, radio drops, guest 16s and remixes may stabilize in '08, but that might be too bad, since the discrete moment-by-moment mode seems to allow his talents a chaotic creativity that trad albums tamp down. It's not just a production model, it's a way of thinking, a way of conceiving of one's art. And for Wayne at least, it's a better way.
It nonetheless begs what is basically a software question: shouldn't there be some program with which you can essentially scour the digiverse via some Boolean headhunting (Lil Wayne AND >100sec AND >192kbps AND 2007 BUT NOT Kanye: 70 minutes) and get all such tracks bundled together on your hard-drive an hour or two later? There sort of is. Seeqpod is not the sort of warez that survives, being balky and having limited, inexact targetability and, most significantly, sharing with imeem the fatal flaw of giving you only a stream. The days of every pop music listener having a 24/7 fast pipe are still too far off, and such streaming platforms are little more than fairly customizable radio stations that are neither as stable nor accessible as old-fashioned broadcast, and make the labels perfectly happy. No, we're talking about an aggregator program with fine-carving finesse that actually produces, oh, let's just call them "bundles," that you can play from a hard drive, a iPod, even burn to disc. This is probably the best near-future for the album.
Given that an iTunes Store search and a few clicks is the smoothest current bundling method, it does seem a bit silly that they shouldn't become the label (wth Jay-Z rumored at the head). But the genie isn't going back in the bottle, and paying Apple by the track for your bundle just makes you seem like a barney. The software closest to doing the superaggregating work of scouring the whole world of hard drives is obviously Google; they say they're not a content company, but so does Pirate's Bay. You could be listening to a GoogleBundle of Lil Wayne, accribitzed via a few keystrokes, within six months if Google so desired; it's hard to imagine this won't be explored. But it won't be explored by Google, since they won't find a business model that fast. So someone else will using similar tech, and then they'll be the new record label, and finally those'll be the new records for a little while.
Posted by jane at January 27, 2008 01:02 AM | TrackBack