Harlepolis said:

really smart, if kind of annoying. I remember holding down that fast forward button in my car, and my hand would slip and skip tracks instead, staring the whole album over!

I like the occasional double album or long album, but most artists can't pull it off. Only the great ones and only once in a while.

superspaceboy said:

yup..

funkpill said:

maybe, but I'm glad that stuff like that is out there. too, along with shorter masterpieces.

The only cd that I can listen to that has segs in the before songs is Michael Franti & Spearheads Stay Human. The cd is set up like you were listening to the radio with djs.

lastdecember said:

I'm an artist and I have to disagree!

I just create when it comes to me, and hopefully a bunch of great stuff comes forth and I can put it all together into one cohesive package...

show me an album over 45 minutes and i'll show you some filler.



although, if it's a compilation, it better be crammed to the gills. even 75 minutes is too short. and if it's 2 discs, both discs should be full. none of this Crystal Ball shit where it's 3 discs that would easily fit on 2.
[Edited 10/30/06 23:29pm]

Looking back over music history prior to 1990, shows that even the greatest artists of the 20th Century rarely had enough primo material to deliver a high quality double album.

Now enter the CD format's dominance and suddenly almost everyone thinks they have a double album’s worth of material in them.

That’s where novelists really had an advantage not ever having to deal with arbitrary size constraints brought upon by technology. If an author had a 150-page story, then they had a 150-page story.

They didn’t have this artificial pressure of turning their story into 400 wordy pages just because some book technology came along that would allow that much storage and therefore the consumer came to expect that much for their money.

The LP format was really a dream come true for the evolution of the album experience. Had it only held 20 minutes, it would have been too short to get anything really cooking. And had it held 2 hours or more a lot fewer masterpieces would have likely been created.

Making the move up to releasing a whole other LP was such a monumental leap in terms of price, marketability, and how the album would ultimately be listened to, that it really was a perfect ceiling for forcing artists into making far more difficult editing decisions.

And to be fair, we probably also lost some great double albums when artists couldn't convince their record companies that their album was just naturally 65 or 70 minutes long.

In short, I blame the artist for feeling the need to fill the larger canvas, just because one was placed in front of them. And I blame the consumer for demanding longer albums so that they feel they’re getting their money’s worth.

Hopefully one of the positives about moving away from the CD format over the coming decades will be both the stronger single (like in the 50s and 60s) and the more naturally sized album.