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Had a good conversation about music on a private Slack channel a former coworker runs... like I'm always... if not defensive, at least willing to cede the moral high ground to people who appreciate whole albums, and believe that the tracks on a good album all support each other in the sequencing, vs my view that "damn, all my CDs are just two or three good songs plus some filler"...

But thinking about it... sitting and listening to an album is certainly a new and weird kind of thing. Like if you go to a live concert, it's pretty rare that you're gonna get songs in album-like grouping! And going back to the music humans have made, I think songs are about the typical unit, larger constructions like oratorios or multi-movement symphonies (or large song sequences) are the exception more than the rule.

So I might be making excuses for my shallow music sensibilities, but I think there really is something to accessible music, and that lends itself to songs being the basic unit.

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Was thinking about how things were technology driven - like you had single cd s vs LP albums, and then CDs (where singles were less common) and of course tapes that REALLY didn't lend themselves to being played out of order... and of course the mixtape, which for folks like me were just a brilliant way of cherry picking the good stuff for ourselves and to try and woo others.... thought of this line from the novel High Fidelity...

I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter--there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one, because...to be honest, because I hadn't met anyone as promising as Laura since I'd started the DJ-ing, and meeting promising women was partly what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You off My Mind," but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and...oh, there are loads of rules.

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Of course now it's amazing I can go tappa tappa tappa and immediately pull up the referenced song "Got to get you off of my mind"... I'm pretty sure I didn't have that option when I read the book in the 90s and wasn't quite enthused enough to seek it out...

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