1719: Album for the Young

I made myself a music playlist the other day. Contained therein was a selection of music from my teenage years, which is when I started actually buying CD albums and singles for myself — beginning, as I believe I’ve said before, with Oasis’ Definitely Maybe just a day before (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out.

Like most playlists I make, I was putting full albums rather than individual tracks in there, as I like to have a full selection of music from favourite artists available. Hitting the “Next Track” button is simple enough if you happen to be served up a stinker of an album track, so it is, for me, a case of better to have too much than too little.

Now, here’s where I did things a little differently. Normally, when I put music on these days, as many people do, I believe, I choose a playlist, hit Play, then hit the Shuffle button so I get a random selection of tracks from those that I’ve picked. I could make the time or effort to curate playlists a little more carefully and not have to rely on Shuffle, of course, but I rarely do that these days; the only exceptions have been when I need a particular amount of music, or when I want to choose some very specific tracks to, say, take to the gym or something.

When I selected this playlist and started playing it in the car the other morning, though, I decided that I wasn’t going to follow my usual pattern, and was instead going to listen to the tracks contained therein a full album at a time. If it was good enough for my fifteen year-old self, I’m sure it’s still good enough for me now — and I don’t like to think that the 21st century has given me such an attention span deficit that I can no longer deal with more than one track by the same artist in succession.

I used to enjoy listening to albums when I was younger. True, I rarely did it as an activity by itself — I would usually put an album on while doing homework, or reading, or something like that — but I would usually listen to a whole album once I put it on. This was at least partly due to the fact that the age of music on physical media meant that you had to get up and change a disc (or even cassette, a medium which even made it difficult to listen to a specific song) if you wanted to hear something by a different artist — but it was also due to the fact that even then, I was conscious of most albums — good albums, anyway — being designed as coherent works in and of themselves. Sure, it was the individual tracks you’d tend to hear played on the radio or the television, but a well-designed album had a beginning, middle and end: it took you on a musical journey, and sometimes even told a story.

Listening to these albums this way for the first time in a very long while has reminded me what a good experience it can be to settle down and immerse yourself in just one album; just one artist’s work, the tracks presented in the order they believed that was best, rather than some arbitrary random picker thingy.

Particular highlights of drives this week have included the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go, a favourite of my teenage years that I primarily picked up in the first place because a girl I fancied was totally into it; Propellerheads’ decksanddrumsandrockandroll, an album I never actually owned but always enjoyed listening to; and Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, which remains, to date, a wonderfully “industrial”-sounding album filled with fire, energy and not a small degree of filth. (Not in a sexy way, either; I’m talking the kind of smoky, dusty, grimy filth that belches forth from a factory chimney.)

The latter in particular has been a pleasure to rediscover, at least in part because there’s really nothing quite like it getting mainstream airplay these days; it remains a product uniquely of its time, and listening to it takes me back to the first time I heard Breathe on a school bus, courtesy of my classmate Peter Miles (a noteworthy acquaintance during my school life for being someone who challenged me to a fight that neither of us showed up for, and who was good enough to lend me a long leather coat so I could dress up as a Gestapo agent for a murder-mystery party just a couple of years ago), and discovered that an artist I’d previously written off on the grounds of the fact I didn’t really like their previous single Firestarter was actually rather thrilling to listen to.

So while I’m not sure I’m going to start just sitting down and doing nothing but listening to an album — something that I’ve never really done, even back when iTunes was something we could only dream of — I’m certainly going to be making an effort to use the Shuffle facility a whole lot less when I’m listening to music in the future. There’s an artistry in the construction of a good album, just as there is (arguably more obvious) artistry in the composition and production of an individual track; it’s something that not many people take the time to appreciate these days, so it’s something that I fully intend to (re-)explore a little more in the coming days.