Recently, I have returned to listening to vinyl again and for one main reason, to appreciate an album's quality from the first track to the last without skipping the dodgy ones or the so-called 'fillers'. Often when the lack of free memory on my computer starts causing it to stutter, I have a look at what I can delete and come across hoarded album files that I never listen to, some of them are a complete mystery to me. Basically, there is too much there and not enough time to really listen to it and appreciate it.
When I listen to music on my computer, it is common for a song to not survive until the end before it is skipped. If there is a visitor around, this form of skipping becomes more extreme and irritating. 'Wait for this part', 'Hang on, the next bit is great' are repeated alongside this as a running commentary of a very low attention span.
I think this form of impatience and lack of commitment to a piece of music is common and becoming even more so. Are we really losing track (pun intended) of what magic there is in the beauty of a well-crafted collection of music that has been well thought out from the first audible sounds to the fade out at the end, from the title, the carefully chosen names of songs to the whole packaging that goes with it? There are still regular surveys in music magazines on what is the best album of all time with regulars always up there from bands like 'The Beatles', 'U2', 'The Beach Boys' alongside contemporary classic albums by 'Radiohead' and ...'Catatonia', well maybe not the last one.
The point is that for me, when I used to hear singles on the radio, I would anticipate the album with great impatience and would lose respect for the band if they couldn't match the quality of their singles with other great album tracks.
Nowadays it is a very rare occasion when I pay for music, which is bad in itself, but when I do and it is usually in vinyl form (having a really noisy disk drive discourages me from listening to CD's as well as the fact that the packaging not to mention the sound is inferior) I really do try to go back to the feelings I used to have when I had to appreciate the limited number of cassettes I owned and therefore would play them repeatedly until they became ingrained into me. For me the album is not dead and can't die.
Time to turn over to side B.
