The Tris McCall Report

Critics Poll 2006 -- The Singles

Radio won't even play her jam.

The first End of the Album comments started dribbling in during Critics Polls 1999 and 2000. The assassin back then was Napster; this was the dawn of the era of online downloading, ripping, and make-your-own compilation CDs. How was the album supposed to survive that?

It was a version of a much older argument. Cassette-dubbing was supposed to finish the album, as was MTV, dance music remixing, do-it-yourself home-recording technology, and college radio. Instead, all of those things only strengthened the album, and further reinforced its status as the prime organizing feature of music consumption. These days, if you listen to techno-frontiersmen (all of whom lately seem to be turning into techno-conformists), the album isn't supposed to be able to survive Apple, Inc. and their dorky multicolored handsets. I used to believe that the MP3 and the social-networking site were the heralds of a new, album-less age, too, and I saw the pop press's continued attachment to record album reviews and album "best of" lists as charmingly atavistic. I'm changing my tune on this. The album made it through the Eighties, when pop stars stuffed the tail ends of their LPs with crummy remixes of their "hits", and the Nineties, when major-label rappers used the CD as a slush pile for every half-baked idea that came out of their basement studios. The album will make it through this decade, too, and the next, and surely the one after that. The album isn't going anywhere.

In theory, the album was conceived as a response to a problem of scarcity: instead of driving all over Lubbock looking to track down every Buddy Holly 45, or waiting all week for the Saturday night broadcast of the only rock and roll show in the county, you just went and bought Twelve Chirping Crickets, or whatever the hell they called it. And there was good margin in this, because you could sell a 33 for more than a 45, and you didn't really have to pour all that much more vinyl. Most discourse about the album takes as its premise that nothing has changed -- that the reasons people continue to buy and make them are entirely economic. But at least in this one regard, everything has changed. I've never felt a scarcity of music in my life, and unless you're considerably older than I am, you haven't either. Since I came to cultural consciousness in the Eighties, people around me have always claimed that there's too much music available; i.e, everybody's in a band, you turn on the TV and take your pick of seven hundred schlocky channels, you can't go to the grocery store without getting slapped upside the head with Kelly Clarkson's latest, Limewire makes pop MP3s cheaper than a dime a dozen. In a climate like this, there's no call for a ward against sonic famine.

But there is a call for the opposite. And that's what the real function of the album has always been, at least as long as I can remember: it's there to tidy up some of the sprawl for listeners. Instead of a nonstop stream of disaggregated songs, it allows listeners to group their experience of popular music into some readily available and easily-remembered categories -- year recorded, place recorded, artist, genre, prevailing concept. As more and more music is digitized and made available via download -- as the polar ice caps melt and the sea of recorded song gets wider and deeper -- the album keeps dropping little wayposts on to the surface of the ocean. Or, to take another metaphor for a spin, it sorts the free electrons into atoms.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing that the CD is here to stay. The album preceded the CD and the cassette and probably even the 33rpm vinyl LP, and it's going to continue to exist after all those formats have been forgotten. Just because albums have always had accompanying art (what better mnemonic for organizing sound than a picture that all you synaesthetes can correlate with the music?) doesn't mean that you need a piece of plastic to hang the drawing on. The next time you see a hipster listening to one of those new iPods, look over her shoulder: chances are, there'll be a digitized scan of the album art on the screen. The album cover exists independently of the format, just as the music does.

I can't tell you for sure what the future of music distribution and delivery is going to look like, but it's easy enough to hazard a guess. As I discussed in the Organ entry on this year's Pop Music Abstract, processor-speed will soon be fast enough to create a hand-held device with enough flash memory to store every piece of music ever recorded. At that moment, businessmen being who they are, some Richard Branson-type is going to wake up in the morning determined to do just that: to shoehorn the entire history of recorded music on a chip inside the iWhatever. In a way, Steve Jobs has already created something like this with iTunes -- he just doesn't have the technology to stick it all inside the handset, so he still has to rely on an outside server. He's also playing nice (for the time being) with the record labels, though I suspect he realizes that he's got the dog by the balls. Because once it's possible to retrieve any song ever recorded at any time for a subscription price to a phone/internet/wireless service, that's the end: the music industry as we know it will cease to exist. Oh, the imprints will all still be there in name, and so will the superstars, but they will all be working to feed the hungry database, and the consumer expectation that any given song will be available at any given time. The tastemakers and gatekeepers will no longer be A&R men: they'll be the grid operators and categorizers who impose order, give recommendation, and program the machines to draw the correlations between past purchases and future interests. You don't need every song ever made. You just want the library to be there for you, and to have a good guide through it; one who understands your tastes and proclivities, and who can give direction to whatever inchoate entertainment desires you might happen to have, or just think you happen to have.

In part, that's what the album is there for. The album is the first crutch for the documentarian, the first rung on the ladder to classification, and the most important entry into any database. Go look up an artist on VH1.com or the AllMusicGuide or even Wikipedia, and what you'll get is a story told in albums; i.e., the first album was a breath of fresh air, the second introduced the dobro pieces and the kazoo work, the third was a commercial flop, the fourth was when he moved to Canada and came out of the closet, and the fifth was the Masterpiece. We slap stars on them and push through a critical consensus, and try to get everybody to walk in lockstep -- of course Astral Weeks is the finest Van Morrison album!, anybody who thinks otherwise must be wrong, or a contrarian, or just uninformed. As the music industry deteriorates, the fetishization of the album accelerates: there are Top 100s of everything, TV specials monumentalizing the making of Dark Side Of The Moon and The Joshua Tree, and rabid websites reviewing, ranking, and assigning ratings, ratings, and more ratings. This is your future, music listener: you're going to be inundated by assessments and guides; you won't be able to flick on your MP3 device without being confronted by a dozen different rankings and classifications of what you're listening to. Some of them will be your own: one of the first things I noticed about iTunes was that it actively encourages users to grade their record collections. By 2020, I expect we'll all be so thoroughly interpolated into this logic that assessing music and listening to it will be thoroughly conflated: we'll all be hooked up to the 'net, all the time, of course, and each positive evaluation of an album, artist, or track will be recorded and chronicled, and used to fine-tune the database.

If what I'm describing sounds like a surveillance nightmare to you, there's hope for you yet -- if by "hope", you understand that I mean that you'll get some sympathy from me. I doubt you'll get sympathy anywhere else. Everywhere you look, American society is busy with the labor of monumentalization and canon-formation: you see it at the university level, where cultural relativism and social determinism is being moved out to make room for evolutionary-psychological ideas about proclivities and preferences "hard-wired" into the brain, and you see it on lowbrow television, which seems to have become all about Panels of Experts praising those who've shown they've got the talent to sing or dance or cook or cut a business deal, and berating and humiliating those who don't. New technologies were supposed to tear down the prestige networks and the grand classification systems -- instead, they've been solidified, made easier to track, and turned into spectator sports. Performance review has become entertainment. What we've all learned is that the physical institutions are the easy ones to yank down; it turns out that it's our imaginative institutions that won't budge. Industries come and go, but it's hard to lay a glove on conventional wisdom, or just a generally-accepted concept. So when the walls of the temple finally crash to the earth, and Warner Brothers and Atlantic Records and Columbia and Arista and BMG all lie in ruins, and the heads of the corporations are tethered to Steve Jobs's triumphal sledge, the album will still be standing above the wreckage. The album will outlive the industry that created it.

For further evidence of what I'm talking about, consider the persistence of the single. For what has seemed like forever, the music industry has effectively defined "the single" as the song on the album that the suits deem worthy of a hit radio and video promotions campaign. We all know about the fat man smoking the cigar behind his desk in the city, saying "boys, I don't hear a single", and thus sending the group of aspiring pop stars back to bar-band purgatory until they write one. iTunes was supposed to have taken that desk away: now, songs are all supposed to be equivalent, and you and your last.fm profile get to smoke the cigar, so to speak. But all that's really happened is that the same song that would have been a radio single is now the one leaked to MP3 weblogs and social-networking sites. This year (and for the first time ever), Critics Poll voters tapped a song that got no commercial radio airplay at all, but was nevertheless received as a classic "single" in the Sixties style. "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" was composed and performed according to the logic of the radio single; it's a song that could have been written in 1965 with the programmers at BBC1 as the target demographic. You did not need to hear Jenny Lewis on Z100 in order to understand "Rise Up With Fists!!" as the intended single from Rabbit Fur Coat. "We Share Our Mother's Health" conforms to every expectation of ours about what a single ought to be. Just as the album will survive the collapse of the music industry, the single is going to make it through the demise of commercial radio unscathed.

My point is not that this is all a liberation from the tyranny of the suits, or that, as Time Magazine so stupidly put it, "you are now in control". It's that technology is never as psychologically or culturally transformative as we think it's going to be. Technological advances give us tools to act out our fantasies. But tools are all they are; until those fantasies change, we're just going to use those tools to continually recapitulate the forms and structures we're already comfortable with. It also pains me to say this, since I'm basically a hippie in a nerd costume, but I've come to the realization that the institutions and the corporations aren't automatically the enemy. They, too, are just expressions of particular collective desires: they exist to fulfill the wants of an operational majority, and their hegemony is never close to complete. What's happening right now is that we're exchanging one set of gatekeepers for another set of organizers and classifiers: the automated database and the scientific algorithm are moving out the man behind the desk with the cigar. But we're demanding the same things of the database and the algorithm that we used to demand of Seymour Stein. Seymour Stein was a human being and subject to human error, but as a living person, he also had the capacity to follow whims and play hunches, and periodically surprise us. Whim and hunch and surprise may eventually be built into the algorithm, but for now, all the machine is going to tell you is that if you like this album by Franz Ferdinand, you should also buy that album by Bloc Party. If it's a revolution you're looking for, we're still decades away -- and drifting in the wrong direction.

Your singles:

1. Camera Obscura -- "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" (281)
2. Gnarls Barkley -- "Crazy" (258)
3. Lil Wayne & Robin Thicke -- "Shooter" (184)
4. Justin Timberlake & Timbaland -- "My Love" (177)
5. Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins -- "Rise Up With Fists!!" (173)
6. Arctic Monkeys -- "I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor" (165)
7. Chamillionaire -- "Ridin'" (160)
8. Belle & Sebastian -- "The Blues Are Still Blue" (141)
9. The Knife -- "We Share Our Mother's Health" (135)
10. Nelly Furtado -- "Promiscuous" (119)
11. Matisyahu -- "King Without A Crown" (115)
12. Nas -- "Hip-Hop Is Dead" (114)
13. Regina Spektor -- "Fidelity" (111)
14. CSS -- "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above" (102)
15. The Game -- "One Blood" (94)
16. The Killers -- "When You Were Young" (90)
17. Lupe Fiasco -- "Kick Push" (89)
17. Justin Timberlake -- "SexyBack" (89)
19. Christina Aguilera -- "Ain't No Other Man" (81)
20. The Raconteurs -- "Steady As She Goes" (77)
21. Killer Mike -- "That's Life" (75)
22. Hot Chip -- "Over And Over" (72)
23. The Streets -- "When You Wasn't Famous" (70)
23. Oppenheimer -- "Breakfast In NYC" (70)
25. Clipse -- "Mr. Me Too" (70)
26. Danielson -- "Did I Step On Your Trumpet?" (67)
27. Kanye West -- "Touch The Sky" (66)
28. Prince -- "Black Sweat" (64)
29. Amy Winehouse -- "Rehab" (62)
29. Maximo Park -- "Apply Some Pressure" (62)

Singles lists from 2005, 2004, and 2003:

If it was Monday, I must have done the albums list:

Tomorrow never comes, but if it does, you'll see the miscellany:

Thursday means my own ballot goes live:

On Friday, I make my final justifications:

 

I can't see further than my own e-mail at this moment.