Several months ago, I stumbled into the basement of a record store I hadn’t been to before. Vinyl overflowed the recycled milk crates, labelled “A-C,” “Icelandic,” “80s African.” Craving an escape, I pulled out several records, placed one in an empty turntable, and sat and listened. It was an Icelandic band called My Summer as a Salvation Soldier. The sun peeked through the basement windows until the shadows no longer shifted shapes on the chaos of vinyl. This ritual continued all afternoon—switch the record, sit and listen—and I felt transported. I wrote in my journal the lyric, “I don’t have the guts to question myself.” Absorbing the thoughts, melodies, and desires of my strange new friend was cathartic. Leaving my white noise behind, I found solace in feeling lost.
My purpose here is not to exalt vinyl, criticize the many music-sharing platforms that exist, or to declare the DEATH of appreciating ART!! I don’t want to declare the death of anything—quite the opposite (how can these ancient concepts continue to be declared futile when we millennials seek out anything that connects us to, well, anything?). The full-length album is sacred. Listening to a full album, from start to finish, is a process that requires patience, commitment, perception, and empathy. Individual songs can complete your thoughts, but strung together in narrative they can be truly transformative.
Albums as Artifacts
Artifacts are objects modified by humans, often a long time ago. The ancient quality that we attribute to them is, in essence, a modern-day projection: part imagination, part historiography. Your mother’s silk wedding dress, your grandparents’ photographs from their honeymoon to Atlantic City—holding these relics, smelling the dust, feels like time travel. Interacting with ancient objects enlivens them. They begin to tell stories and generate memories or sensations within you that are truly only ghosts.
Like artifacts, albums have function, value, and memory, which are ephemeral and ever-changing. Burnt ceramic bowls that were used a thousand years ago in domestic settings are now preserved in glass cases at museums. The artifact-quality of albums is cultivated through the re-animation and re-attribution of meaning, like the substance of a ceramic bowl. The intangibility of an album allows for cyclical engendering of new meaning. My Jagged Little Pill, Acid Rap, Abbey Road, whatever, is not the same as yours—it is not even the same as mine three years ago. In this sense, albums, when experienced from beginning to end, become a part of a musical geology. While songs can take on the same transformative quality, the process of an album generates a larger metamorphosis. This geology, patterned through layers of experiences, is constructed through the durability of engagement—superimposed activity that carries implications of discourse and cycles of histories.
Albums become artifacts when we prescribe them with agency. They signify different cosmologies, thus carrying brute implications within the stories they tell. The first Beatles album, Please Please Me, is not merely a series of sappy love songs; the congruence of the album recalls a time past which contextualizes the contemporary suggestiveness of lyrics (“Please please me, ooh yeah, like I please you!”). It takes time to engage a world where all that remains is intangible remainders of memory—conscious time, immersive time. Albums provide connectivity to a life I will never live. Marcel Proust said that “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” When I carefully absorb an album and allow it to swim in my skin, I have become connected to ancient or imaginary worlds that, through this medium, become alive.
Albums and the Artist
A song expresses a statement, mood, or feeling: an album explores the multi-faceted ways that these can be interpreted. The Frank Ocean album Channel Orange is an exploration of fallen angels, the heartbroken and the unreconciled: the song “Pyramids” investigates these themes using images of ancient Egypt and a modern strip club. The potential for expansion gives musicians the ability to holistically probe the complexity of experiences: an album can stand alone as one cohesive narrative that reflects a particular spatial and generational mentality. Josh Tillman has utilized his guise as Father John Misty to embody strangely subverted experiences. In his first album, Fear Fun, FJM is a sort of drugged out debauchery-seeking space cowboy (“I ran down on the road, pants down to my knees, screamin’ please come help me, that Canadian shaman gave a little too much to me!”). In his second album, I Love You, Honeybear, FJM is a self-loathing asshole who has found love and attempts to reconcile his worthiness of it (“I barely know how long a moment is, unless we’re naked getting high on the mattress, while the global market crashes”). The process of album listening realizes mental imagination and embodies subjective intuitions.
Albums allow artists to facilitate social commentary. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly probably exemplifies this best today. I cannot begin to discern the importance of listening to this album—you should go do it right now. The individual songs are masterpieces, but when strung together, Kendrick has created a complex narrative that grapples with complicity, challenges socially embedded racism, and attempts to internalize self-worth despite living in a system that wants to deny him of it. At the Justice or Else march in Washington, D.C. on October 10, thousands of people chanted the words to “Alright.” But the chant “we gonna be alright” holds so much weight because of the other truths Kendrick disseminates. In “The Blacker the Berry,” he professes, “I mean, it’s evident that I’m irrelevant to society/That’s what you’re telling me, penitentiary would only hire me” and in “i” declares, “It shouldn’t be shit for us to come out here and appreciate the little bit of life we got left.” Kendrick highlights the paradox between celebrating life and being fearful of it. I cannot know his experiences, but paying attention to what he has to say allows me to try to understand.
Albums and Memory
In the film High Fidelity, protagonist Rob Gordon (John Cusack) does not order his vinyl collection alphabetically or chronologically—he organizes them autobiographically. As douchey as this might seem, albums do regenerate eternal memories. Memories, unreliable as they are, change every time we access them. I want to pretend that I foresaw a relationship ending. I want to pretend that I felt ambivalent about something I was passionate about. I want to pretend that my political views were as progressive as they are now (I never bought Jian’s story, I swear). I can narcissistically recreate my past selves, because I can colour my memory with ownership of experiences.
Perhaps I can rationalize my thoughts and actions. But I cannot lie to my visceral sentiments, and I know that because every album that has ever meant something to me brings me right back to face the sometimes unpleasant, often cathartic truth of a moment in an honest version of my past. My mind instinctively turns to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. “A Case of You” was one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar. I was 17 and devastatingly heartbroken. Blue cocooned me in blankets of emotive release and I still often turn to it, trusting it will carry me through battlefields as it has before. The album plays, and I listen. I can feel the pain in my teenage heart, how astronomically small I felt when Joni suggested to me, “Just before our love got lost, he said, ‘I am as constant as a northern star,’ and I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness? Where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” It amazes me how something I know so dearly can still move me, heavily, every single time.
I think of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends. Traveling on my own for the first time, wondering if my wandering soul might satisfy its hunger. “Cathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.” Taylor Swift’s 1989. Living alone in a new city, reminiscing on past relationships, how I wouldn’t be broken down again. David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues. Led Zeppelin’s Zeppelin III. Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There. It goes on.
What is the private history of all those who have wept, rejoiced, revelled in the weight of these albums?
Albums and Discovery
The algorithm of information access ensures that we renew the vocabulary of the conversation that engulfs us. Social media platforms target the information you want to hear and reinforce universal limitations. There is a paradox in having access to unfathomably diverse mediums, yet feeding ourselves familiarity. When is the last time that you engulfed your entire being in the unknown?
Dip your toes in an album. Take a step and let your body float. Stare up at the sky. Then plunge, feel your weight sinking, and rise to the surface. Take a breath. This is an experience that nobody can tell you how to feel about. “The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities). Distancing yourself from white noise might grant you access to unembellished sounds of your own soul. It feels good to wander.
I think I’ll go listen to one right now! : – )