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What a concept: Going to digital extremes(Newsday (Melville, NY) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jun. 3--Talk to any rock fan about The Beatles' 1967 masterpiece "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and you'll likely end up speaking in cliches: It's the greatest album ever made, it pushed the boundaries of studio recording, it set a new standard of artistic achievement for generations of rockers to come. And then, inevitably, you'll come to a question: Will anyone ever make another album as great, as important, as innovative, as this one? As the album turns 40 this month, the answer seems clearer than ever, and it's a resounding no. Since the days of "Sgt. Pepper's," the music industry, and the way we listen to music, has changed dramatically. In an age of digital downloads, cell-phone content, YouTube and podcasts, the physical album seems verging on extinction. Already, pop artists are dabbling in multimedia, the Web and other types of technology, looking for new ways to make grand statements and push music forward. Whether it's packaging videos into a music CD, allowing listeners to remix their own tracks or using the Web as a way of delivering music, unprecedented shifts are already taking place. For the moment, the "concept album" still is with us, and it still serves the same purpose: to establish an artist as "ambitious" and "serious." The onetime party-band Red Hot Chili Peppers earned a Grammy for best rock album for last year's double-disc "Stadium Arcadium." Christina Aguilera, once on a par with Britney Spears, now earns comparisons to Madonna thanks to her two-disc "Back to Basics." System of a Down, the quirky metal group, released two separate albums in 2005, "Mezmerize" and "Hypnotize." (In a nod to the "gatefold" packaging of yore, the two sleeves fit together to create a single unit. How quaint!) And Green Day's 2004 "American Idiot" successfully transformed the band from whiny pop-punks into message-oriented rockers. But how much longer before artists stop bothering with albums of any kind? Last year, the number of physical CDs shipped to stores dropped 12.8 percent from 2005, while the amount of digital sales soared by 63.2 percent according to the Recording Industry Association of America. And listeners, whose attention spans seem to be growing shorter by the day, are more interested in singles than albums: They downloaded 586.4 million of them in 2006, compared to just 27.6 million digital albums. No wonder musicians are exploring new avenues in music and other media. Take R. Kelly's recent "Trapped in the Closet" singles: Ten years ago, Kelly might have released this complicated hip-hop-opera as a self-contained album like The Who's "Tommy." Instead, he took advantage of the nonstop nature of the mass media, leaking out his material bit by bit in various formats. The first chapters were released as radio singles with cliffhanger endings; Kelly's 2005 album, "TP.3 Reloaded," completed the story with a total of five chapters; videos appeared on MTV and BET. Eventually he released a 12-chapter minimovie on DVD. Essentially, Kelly stretched a potential concept album into a year-long multimedia bonanza. (He has said he wants to put out more chapters and may turn the whole thing into a play.) But even that seems fairly old-fashioned compared to what other artists are doing. Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Paleo recently completed a project called "The Song Diary" that probably wouldn't have been possible in the days before the Internet. Over the course of a year, Paleo (born David Andrew Strackany) toured the country with a guitar and a laptop, writing and recording one song a day. He posted each track on his Web site, sharing his ever-growing repertoire with fans. "The Song Diary" became a real-time experience in which a single tour -- usually the same show repeated in each city -- morphed as it went along. It might make for a cumbersome album (365 songs?), but thanks to the limitless expanse of the Web, the entire "Diary" is posted in one place, at paleo.ws. One of the more intriguing new ideas came from a somewhat traditional folksinger, Suzanne Vega. Last year, at age 47, Vega became the first artist to hold a "concert" in the online role-playing game Second Life, where folks interact as on-screen alter egos. As a virtual audience gathered in a virtual amphitheater, a computer-generated Vega played old favorites such as "Tom's Diner" and "The Queen and the Soldier." The event was subdued, but imagine the possibilities: computer-generated costumes, stage sets, effects that someone like Marilyn Manson can only dream of. Perhaps, just as "Sgt. Pepper's" pushed the boundaries of the recording studio, Vega's online gig might open up new notions of "performance." To older music fans who still cherish their vinyl, these ideas may seem trivial or even silly. They may be novelties that ultimately lead nowhere. Or, we may someday look back on them as rudimentary experiments that led toward a greater shift in the way we listen to (or "experience") music. One thing seems clear: When the next big "concept" in music arrives, it won't look anything like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." To see more of Newsday, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsday.com Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |