Too Little Of A Good Thing?

Everything is cyclical, trends come and go, and music is no different. For the longest time, you could point to a period of time and be able to draw some decent conclusions about what you would hear from any random record you pulled out of mothballs. Trends might have less power than they used to, but culture doesn't allow us to completely forget we are subject to the whims of collective psychology.

What you might call the 'Tik-Tok-ification' of music has become one of those trends. On the pop charts, it is easy to see the influence, as hit songs now barely break two minutes at some points, with barely two verses and choruses serving as the entire structure. The shorter format of the platform has changed the way people are writing songs, and if we in the less popular areas of the music world think we are immune from that, we've got our heads in the sand. It isn't exactly the same, but the shorter attention spans of the listeners is impacting us as well.

I have noticed this year that so many of the albums I've been listening to are getting shorter and shorter. Sure, there have always been your "Reign In Blood" or "Green Album" that treated half an hour as a hard cap, but they were exceptions to the rule. Albums were distinct from EPs for the most part, which is getting harder to say in the here and now.

It used to be that 40 minutes was the rough guideline that divided the two, with anything less feeling incomplete to count as a full-length. Today, though, almost half of the records I've reviewed clock in on the lower end. Albums that are only 35 minutes is so normal, I hardly notice anymore that I have more open time at the end of a listening session to fill with the next thing.

Here's the rub; short albums are an art form unto themselves, and I'm not sure the artists of today quite know what to do with them.

While there is certainly a law of diminishing returns in which an album gets too long for its own good, there is also a law of inadequate supply in which albums don't linger long enough for them to make the impact they want. The shorter an album is, the better is has to be. That might sound counter-intuitive, but it's because of what we would consider the 'grace period'. If you're listening to a 45 minute album and there's song you don't like, there's still a full album's worth of other music to make up for it. When that same song is on a record that's 33 minutes long, all of a sudden a clunker means the remainder feels like it's an EP, not an album.

It's something that ruined Ghost for me. "Prequelle" made such an impact when it landed those hit singles, and I really enjoyed the album, at least until I did the math. Minus the instrumental songs, I counted only 28 minutes of true songs that were winning me over. No matter how great they were, it couldn't feel like a complete album with so little to offer.

What I'm wondering is whether this is entirely due to bands playing into the shorter attention spans of listeners, or if there is also a calculation that it means they can get away with writing less songs. Yes, the argument could be made that we're merely returning to the pre-CD days where albums were routinely shorter. That was a necessity of the vinyl age, but it also meant that bands were making albums more often. Releases would often come every year, sometimes two before you would turn the calendar. Today, though, these short albums are still coming with the three-to-five year wait, which feels like an equation getting unbalanced.

All throughout culture, we seem to be seeing an attitude that the old ways are impossible. Bands can no longer make albums within a one-to-two year span with regularity, just like TV shows talk about what a struggle it is to make 22 episodes for a season. We even have some of the 'premium' shows that need well over a year to produce 10 episodes or less. In the classic days, shows used to make 30 episodes per year, and plenty of those are classics that will be remembered far longer than the latest boring artistic drivel. The same thing is true of old albums. We still talk about Beatles and Led Zeppelin records, and look at how quickly they were coming out.

For all the talk about how our attention spans are shorter, and how things come and go in a flash, the opposite is also true wherein we are taking longer and longer to make the things we enjoy. It's difficult to reconcile the two thoughts, and I'm not going to try.

The only point I'm trying to make is that we're in an odd time where I'm not sure we know which direction we are trying to go as a culture. Are we focused on artistry, and letting ideas brew as long as necessary for them to be at full-strength? Are we focused on speed, and feeding our insatiable need for something new each and every day?

We're caught in-between, and I don't think it's helping anyone.