I’m mostly glad to see the album go the way of the buggy whip. It’s rare that a band can get two or three decent songs together, much less eleven or twelve sequenced in a thoughtful way. Not everything that gets released is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I’m relieved to be able to cherry-pick.
I’m still happy to pay for a real album if it’s more than just singles plus filler. The album of 2010 was The Archandroid by Janelle Monae. Several the songs flow seamlessly together to form suites, and the overall album has a shape and arch to it that makes it greater than the sum of its parts. That said, the tracks also stand up just fine alone; Ms Monae talks about the influence of iPod shuffle on her writing and she’s conscious that her work will be mostly heard in that context.
Technology has definitely dealt the album a heavy blow, but it’s been great for mixtapes. Between my friends and all the bloggers and Twitterers I follow, I’ve never been exposed to more or better mixtapes than in the past year or three. While it’s a rare that I feel compelled to listen to a new album from top to bottom, I have a bunch of mixtapes that I like to hear in their entirety. Everybody else in music has a lot to learn from DJ culture.