Save the Album (As though it ever existed)!

But we're not selling anybody anything for ninety nine cents. And we're not breaking up the album.

- InSound, from SavetheAlbum.com

This discussion starts with Sophie and Ives. At work (I know, it's hard to believe this superhero needs an alter-ego, but even though we know my opinions are worth their weight and gold I've yet to find a buyer) I listen to Groove Salad on SOMAFM and honestly there's not enough fresh electronica music to sustain even a seven hour work day, so I hear a lot of the same music over and over again. One of the songs that caught my ear was Awaken by Sophie and Ives. I was intrigued enough to explore the idea of buying it, and stumbling over Ova Remixed I discovered that a bunch of remixes of that very song had just been released electronically! Well I rushed out and purchased them, and by rushed out and purchased them I mean sat on my ass and alt+tabbed over to iTunes and purchased it there.

The thing that got me thought was the album art. It's catchy in a restrained, elegant way; the leanings of Modernism that I'm always enchanted with. No pictures, just word-pictures. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought "skeuomorph", taking me all the way back to my senior year in college when a TA introduced me to Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson and N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman I managed to penetrate only about 30 pages or so into. Nonetheless, I have carried my hard-won gains with me for a long time, pointing out skeuomorphs like monkeys point out bananas. And moment that I saw the album art for Sophie and Ives' Awaken was the moment that album art became a skeuomorph, and that the concept of the album itself came into question.

With this in mindI was happy to surf over to Save the Album when I saw their ad in a suitably hip/alternative/indy magazine that I might purchase but be caught not reading any given afternoon. Their site contrasts the "traditional" idea of the album against the music industry's "destruction" of the album via its electronic dissection into MP3s and its shameful auctioning off of albums piece by piece rather than with the dignity that the holistic musical experience it was crafted to be deserves. The ugly implications here and subliminal finger-pointing embodied in this argument immediately crowd forward in my mind, having divided themselves into two distinct groups each shouting epithets at the other. On one side of my imagination is the "industry" backed by the RIAA and led by Fergie and Avril Lavigne, who curse the shoddy product that the indies produce. Said indies on the other side of my head are led by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome malign the shoddy product that the industry produces. Somewhere in between Mike Doughty and Ani DiFranco share a cigarette and watch in bemusement.

In this case, I think industry is closer to right than the indies are. For one thing, Save the Album is just an insulting attempt to sell albums by capitalizing on a false conservativism that exists only because InSound said it does. By creating an ironically hip faux-movement around the whole concept of album-hood in order to congratulate themselves for not giving in corporate greed the way iTunes has InSound proves itself incredibly arrogant in a way that only hipsters could appreciate, which proves only that their ad campaign is right on. But I personally believe that the industry, as embodied by iTunes, is merely the culmination of something that happened a long time ago. The destruction of the album starts with the moment the album is invented, with Thomas Edison's phonograph, the popularity of the vinyl LP and most recently with the introduction of the compact disc and the invention of something called random play, embodied today in the iPod shuffle.

The moment that the possibility of nonlinear reproduction of music became possible was the death knell of the album, because InSound is right about one thing: the album is more than just a collection of songs, though that might well have been what it started out as. Listening to August and Everything After the other day, I was too lazy to turn shuffle off on my iPod and so I listened to the songs out of order, and realized exactly how trite the album could have been if the songs were ordered differently. But the album is more than song order too; it's also the album art, the materials the album holder is composed of. A thousand little things that have nothing to do with the songs themselves. The heart of the album, the heart of the music, the warm, fuzzy center of art is the artist, and only when the artist is in control, at a show or at a reading, can the vision really be said to be pure; all other reproductions are merely imitations of the moment of clarity we are drawn to in art.

Which is where InSound got it wrong (and why their self-aggrandizing manifesto makes them look like schmucks), because the purist knows that any recording of music is inherently compromised; the vision of the artist is only as strong as the will of the audience. The author knows her book is only as good as the reader who savors the words; the skimmer, the chapter-skipper, the end-reader all compromise the vision of the author, but no author ever suggested making sure the pages were glued together to stigmatize the skipper and open them to public ridicule. Any artist who decides to record (and I mean that in the most literal sense, from writing to painting to vector design) their work relinquishes her right to complain about a vision compromised by the audience, both because the vision is independent of the audience and because the vision is the fiction of the artist, just as InSound used the fiction of the album to capitalize on the anti-establishment tendencies of its target demographic.

How does this relate the future of album art? Well, it means the book is wide open. The end is far from near, because music and art will always go well together, but it is certainly the death knell for album art as we know it. No longer will it be limited to a 5.5" by 5.5" square, but is nearly limitless in capacity. Perhaps 1024 x 768 pixels for now, but who knows? I don't, but someone does, even if they don't know it yet.

Bibliography

How We Became Posthuman - Hayles, N. Katherine, Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1999.