Stop with the single already. Make me an ALBUM. Not 11 shit-songs and an earworm. I want art. I want flow. I want craft. And I WANT to pay for it.

Singles are for casual listeners… a watered-down, comehither billboard, intent on not only getting your attention but manipulating it.

Paraphrasing/quoting Oliver Sacks:

Science dictates that music (a.k.a. singles) specifically designed to hook you in — an “endless repetition” regardless of “the fact that the music in question may be irrelevant or trivial, not to one’s taste, or even hateful — suggests a coercive process,” where music “enter[s] and subvert[s] a part of the brain, forcing it to fire repetitively and autonomously (as may happen with a tic or a seizure).”

Is this what we now require of every song, a calculated brainwash of sound, a “defenseless engraving of music on the brain” (Sacks again) that we literally can’t get out of our minds?

Creepy. And the sure way to mass-produced homogeny.

Oh wait. Kind of like the way radio is now?

Lord knows the last thing I want to hear is a string of singles. Even of my favorite songs. Talk about mentally exhausting.

Think of it like this. The single is a teaser, an aperitif, a taste… a free sample. The ALBUM is the main event, the SUBSTANCE. And albums are for FANS — INVESTORS in music, who stick with you long after the single has wormed its way out. Can you imagine Tattoo You without “Slave?” “Start Me Up” may have gotten you to the table but “Little T & A,” “Black Limousine,” etc. that’s the meat. Yum.

And that’s the model I’m talking about. The model of making ART and selling it because it has VALUE. That’s the model that works because it works for FANS.

Fans GET the album… they embrace the collective idea that music is dynamic; its impact relies on time, place, emotion, mood, memory, presentation, etc., i.e. CONTEXT.

Just think about how many times when you first heard a song, you didn’t like it… but another time, you did. Not exactly accidental. Contextual. And not the kind of thing that happens if you simply play the same single over and over again on YouTube.

But if you put an entire album on replay… you spend time with the songs, you give them room to breathe, you grow to love them. They take on MEANING.

Music surrounded by music that informs it has MORE meaning… the kind of meaning that only a group of songs, purposely arranged and comprising a greater product can create: an all-encompassing audio art-form that is, by its very essence, the bare-bones magnificence of music: a wondrous, sonically shared experience — exactly the kind of thing that fans are willing to pay for.

Because in a world where singles are incessantly everywhere and also free (thereby, inherently valueless) true, artful albums are RARE (thereby, somewhat priceless). And I don’t know about you but I don’t want what everyone else has for free… kind of the same way I feel about extra large, logo-emblazoned T-shirts. Keep ‘em.

But a compendium of great, interesting songs… dead-ringer singles, sleeper hits, introspective soundscapes, covers turned inside-out, indulgent guitar solos (please, bring those back)… that’s what I want. I want to actually hold it in my hand, open up the liner notes and rub my nose in them, inhaling that new-ink-on-paper-smell.

Limited copies. Frame-worthy artwork.

Raise the standard.

Charge me double the price.

© Outlandos MusicTM 2008