The LP is soon to be extinct in all its forms, be it vinyl, tape, or CD. The very concept of an "album", never mind the concept of a concept album, will be foreign far too soon.
This eulogy came to mind today because I'm ear-deep in Only Built For Cuban Linx II. It's an album, not a collection of songs one might download and eventually hear the entirety of after months of shuffling about on the mp3 player. (And for any Wu-Tang fans, I am shocked to inform you that OB4CL pt. II was worth a 14 year wait)
Recorded music available for the masses to own is a very new phenomenon, and the LP has been the medium throughout. Singles have always had their place, but they have more often than not been appetizers for LPs, rather than works in their own right.
Baby-boomers know Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as an album, not as a collection of singles. Indeed, one of the reasons Sgt. Pepper is considered the quintessential album of all time is that each song bleeds into the next, so that to listen to the "singles" is akin to staring at amputated limbs, which lose all grace and symmetry when cleaved from the body. Sgt. Pepper may have 12 tracks, but the music does not stop once in its 40 minutes, so it plays as one song.
As a son of the golden age of rap (1993-1998), there are albums I and my peers learned front to back which would simply never have worked as elements of a shuffle list on an mp3 player.
Here is a by-no-means comprehensive list of hip-hop LP's whose greatness would wither and die were they shuffled about as singles. So, since the LP is dead, here are the purest hip hop LP's in my library. There are dozens of brilliant songs which are not part of this list, but here are the best hip-hop albums I have ever heard:
1992 The Predator Ice Cube
1993 Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan
1994 Illmatic Nas
1995 Me Against the Word Tupac
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Raekwon
Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Verson Ol' Dirty Bastard
Liquid Swords Genius / GZA
1996 Ironman Ghostface Killah
Reasonable Doubt Jay-Z
1997 Wu-Tang Forever Wu-Tang Clan
The Carnival Wyclef Jean
1998 It's Dark and Hell is Hot DMX
Aquemini Outkast
2001 The Blueprint Jay-Z
Stillmatic Nas
2004 The New Danger Mos Def
2006 Idlewild Outkast
2007 The Carnival II: Memoirs of an Immigrant Wyclef Jean
2008 Nigger Nas
2 comments:
How do you feel about The Black Album? I'm more familiar with it than I am The Blueprint, but I consider it a masterpiece.
Also - point of information. "Albums" as such really didn't coalesce until the early 60s. Johnny Cash & a few others starting turning in thematically-cohesive works (e.g. "Ride This Train," etc.), but, for the most part, the LP really was just a random assortment of released singles & filler. The exception would be masterfully compiled anthologies and maybe jazz records. But, by my count, I'd say that the album's reign was still shorter than the period of pre-album-oriented recorded music.
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