Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Slow Art In A Fast Culture

One of the hotly discussed cultural shifts in the past decade has been the resurgence of singles as the dominant musical format. In the early years of rock and roll, singles—sold as 45s—were the marquee format. From roughly the late 60s through the early 2000s, however, albums reigned supreme. The reasoning behind this, from the record labels' perspective, was of course monetary: records, and later CDs, generate bigger profits than singles. But for artists and fans desiring a more complete and complex statement than what three-minute songs typically embody, albums offered the possibility of a more sophisticated narrative—either thematically speaking, or literally, in the case of concept albums—to become immersed in. Today, though, due to several factors, including the ease of file sharing; the dominance of digital retail structured around per-song sales/downloads, most notably iTunes; and the multi-artist song-focused formats of the Spotify playlists and Pandora stations that monopolize how many of us listen to music today, the cultural pendulum at large has swung back toward experiencing music on a per-song basis, not 45-minute artistic statements.

And yet despite the discouraging techno-cultural environment, not only has the album not died, there's much evidence of a hunger for it. It's almost obligatory now for a certain type of trend-setting band, such as Death Cab for Cutie or The Flaming Lips, to release new long-play albums on vinyl. The format has seen a massive sales uptick, more than quadrupling from 2007 to 2012. Part of the vinyl sales can be chalked up to a faux-nostalgia of millennials seeking a perceived "authentic" format for their music, as well as to fidelity aficionados who seek vinyl for its believed sonic superiority, but these reasons hardly can account for sales growth charting at a 45-degree incline.

Alec Bourgeois, of the legendary D.C. independent label Dischord, talked about his label's exploding vinyl sales in an interview with the Washington City Paper, where it was suggested that there is a continuing allure of full albums for serious fans [emphasis mine]. In an article on vinyl's resurgence among millennials in The Daily Universe, a BYU college paper, Corey Fox, an owner of a live music venue and a fixture of the Provo music scene for decades, put it well: "Most bands have a purpose to what they're doing. I mean you're supposed to put [the album] in and listen from beginning to end and it takes you on a journey. Now, it's an industry of singles. I listen to music to get an emotional connection and I don't think you get that from the 'hot single.' It's fun to dance to, it's fun to drive to and if that's all you care about music for, that's one thing. But there's a lot of people in the music industry and fans of music that want more than that from their music."

Length in and of itself has virtue. Vinyl strongly encourages one to listen to a side at a time. When you put an album on a turntable you submit to a different experiential frame—one that positions you for a 20-plus-minute commitment to one artist's vision. The technology itself fundamentally changes how one experiences music. Often you listen to tracks you may not love because you're too lazy to get up to lift the needle to the next track. (Even with CDs, where it's easy to advance tracks, this can happen. There's something about knowing the song you're listening to is part of something larger that encourages one to take the format on its terms.) And an interesting thing happens—songs that at first were a bore or even objectionable, sometimes, magically, reveal themselves to be the best tracks. This approach to music listening offers an instructive corollary to the much-lamented dangers of our a la carte, personalized news consumption today. It's critical for both our spiritual and intellectual well-being to be exposed to stuff we don't immediately want to be exposed to. In the right circumstance, this is one of the virtues of slow art.

In this sense, your Spotify playlist or iTunes shuffle, in all their scattershot glory, fit under the umbrella of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, a treatise on how the interface and vastness of the Web encourages "shallow" rather than deep thinking. But something strange has been happening in the shallows of our Internet media consumption, as we restlessly click from blog post to charticle to HuffPo "quick read": long-form journalism is thriving. Interestingly, links to in-depth pieces, via sites like Longreads, are particularly popular on Twitter. It seems an engaged minority are harnessing the connective power of social media, that too often is so shallow and disjointing, to promote and celebrate in-depth writing. As BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith suggested in an AdWeek piece (one of a wave of articles covering the trend), "People like sharing things that reflect well on them, and there's a prestige attached to the longform hashtag." His point indicates there is an inherent acknowledgment that long-form pieces offer not just more quantity, but quality as well.

But it's not just about an intellectual putting on airs; people really are reading the pieces. In the AdWeekarticle, James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic, noted that Longform, a site that links to excellent current and old long-form articles, "has had a very powerful effect on our overall audience in the last year." In fact, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?", a nearly 10,000-word, 30-year-old article, regularly appears "at the top of TheAtlantic.com's traffic reports." In an interview on AllThingsD, New Yorker editor David Remnick talked about how there is still a "human hunger for deep information, real examination, and the kind of reporting that takes time." And, he mentioned, to that end, the Web has been a "godsend" for his magazine. The structure of the Web, so oft-noted for its bias toward brevity and encouraging users to flit around, also is proving to be a terrific platform for advancing in-depth writing. Clearly, readers are increasingly seeking a nutritious complement to all those sugar-pellet news bits.

by David Zweig, The Awl |  Read more:
Image: Almost Famous