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— by Karl Heitmueller
An ex-girlfriend of mine thought that when I (or anyone) called a band's new release a "record," it sounded pretentious. To her, the term was an anachronism used by music snobs to separate themselves from the younger, presumably less-informed music-buying public.
Pretension was never my intent. When I started buying music, I bought it on vinyl LPs, or records. I still use the term. But it does raise the question: With so many different ways to acquire and listen to music in 2005, what exactly are we supposed to call that which contains music?
The so-called "Big Four" music conglomerates — the EMI Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group and — have ditched the term from their corporate titles, although most of their affiliated labels, as well as the majority of indies, still attach "Records" to their names. Since the etymology of the word is a shortening of the term "recording," it's technically still correct usage, but we've come to think of records as those fragile, scratchy vinyl beauties or beasts (depending on your perspective).
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John Coltrane
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Many also cling to the word "album," a term that seems to be generally more accepted by non-audiophiles even though it's actually more anachronistic than "record." The word "album," in the context of recorded music, originally referred to bound collections of 78-rpm records. The fast-playing shellac could only hold a few minutes of music per side, so complete (usually classical) recordings had to be stretched out over up to a half a dozen discs. The pasteboard-covered collections with embossed bindings resembled photo albums, and the name stuck. When the vinyl LP was introduced by Columbia in the late 1940s, single-sleeved jackets became the standard, so the term "album" became a misnomer, but it had by then achieved a whole other meaning.
I always liked the Beat-era term "side," as in "Hey, Daddy-O, are you hep to that new Coltrane side?" (Jazz hipsters have always had the best slang.) The term — which originally referred to a song, reflecting the one-sided vinyl acetates that just-recorded music was pressed onto in the days before mass-produced audio tape — has faded, for the most part, although since CDs only have music on one "side," it would seem to fit that format even better than a two-sided LP.
(One catch-all term that never, ever sounded right to me was "tape," as in "I shoplifted that Judas Priest tape from the mall the other day," a sentence fraught with so many wrongs I don't even know where to begin. If there's anyone still out there who uses that word as their primary demarcation, they're just not to be taken seriously.)
I worked in the music business in the late '90s, and it would always rankle me to hear industry wonks refer to albums as "product" or "units." I never used those words; I worked for a record label, not a unit factory. But to the salespeople or radio promoters who would sit in presentation meetings and reflexively nod their heads to music being played while actually paying no attention (earning the pejorative term, "woodpeckers"), nomenclature wasn't an issue — they might as well have been selling shoes.
"Record" can be synonymous with both album and single, as can the more modern "disc," but for some reason, neither that term nor "CD" ever caught on with music geeks as a catch-all, perhaps because they conjure the cold sterility of digital technology. Still, "disc" sounds poetic compared to "MP3" or "AIFF."
For music fans who listen via computer or MP3 player, "albums" are rarely listened to in the sequence intended by the artist. Random playlists usually dictate iPod listening (especially if it's via the Mini, where that's the only option). So what's the alternative? "The new Sleater-Kinney file" sounds like an FBI security check, "Playlist" indicates a personal sequencing rather than the album's track listing, and just leaving it hanging with "The new Sleater-Kinney" feels incomplete. Do we need to come up with a new word, a new catch-all that can be used when referring to records, CDs, tapes, MP3s, whatever? Or in this era of single-driven downloads, is the concept of a full album becoming a thing of the past?
I'm old (school) enough to continue purchasing hard copies of music that I want, and I'll continue to call them "records." If and when the day comes where nobody knows what I'm talking about, maybe then I'll start calling collections of recorded music something else. Like ... um ...
OK, I'll stick with records — no matter what any potential girlfriend might think.
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Illustration: Karl Heitmueller
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