{"id":357,"date":"2011-01-27T20:41:42","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T20:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicurbanism\/?p=357"},"modified":"2012-11-11T04:49:45","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T04:49:45","slug":"are-you-really-going-to-listen-to-their-new-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/01\/27\/are-you-really-going-to-listen-to-their-new-album\/","title":{"rendered":"are you really going to listen to their new album?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll admit, I got excited after seeing the announcement that Echo & the Bunnymen are performing their first two albums,\u00a0Crocodiles<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Heaven Up Here<\/em>, in their entirety on an upcoming North American tour. \u00a0Ocean Rain<\/em>\u00a0is fine; they played that whole album on tour awhile ago anyway.\u00a0 For my money, though, the gloomy garage rock\u2014\u201cGoing Up,\u201d \u201cOver The Wall,\u201d etc.\u2014that I know and love the Bunnymen for is best found on those two albums.<\/p>\n

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More to the point, I\u2019m not above an album-in-its-entirety concert experience. Hardly. Sometimes this performance genre overlaps its close cousin, the reunite-the-original-band tour.\u00a0 I saw Killing Joke do that with their second album a couple of years back; it\u2019s not my favorite record of theirs, but it was the only chance I got to see the original line-up. More often, it seems a band uses the album-in-its-entirety concept to drum up interest in a tour featuring just one or two original musicians; thus, I went to see Richard and Tim Butler plus whoever is playing with them do the Psychedelic Furs\u2019Talk Talk Talk<\/em>\u00a0last year. It\u2019s astonishing to see how many bands are doing this now; just type \u201cperform album in its entirety\u201d into Google and see what comes up.
\nMany bands play all the songs off an album when they play live; that\u2019s often the modus operandi whenever a group \u201ctours the new album.\u201d\u00a0 What distinguishes the album-in-its-entirety performance genre is its focus on an\u00a0old<\/em>\u00a0album, one that audiences have come to love over the years, or that may be due a critical reappraisal after years of neglect. Some groups don\u2019t stop with one album; even an entire back catalogue can get a much-needed reappraisal. (Sparks probably holds the record: 21 albums in 21 shows. Man, I wish I could have been there!)<\/p>\n

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What makes for a good album-in-its-entirety concert? For some, the answer centers on the band\u2019s motivations.\u00a0 Is it to satisfy audience demand (i.e., for the money)?\u00a0 That seems to be the case for the Pixies, who\u2019ve been touring for the last 6 years and have recorded maybe one new original song in 20 years; not too many people seem to mind. In other cases it\u2019s the commercial payoff for having put out a new, unsolicited and frankly uninteresting album. Having apparently demonstrated their artistic integrity, they give their audiences what they really want (which certainly isn’t the new album) and get handsomely rewarded in the process. (By this criterion, I think Elvis Costello should give himself the license to play a series of concerts recreating his early, Nick Lowe-produced albums. Just nothing that ever had T-Bone Burnett on it, okay?)<\/p>\n

I’d never begrudge a band drawing on its old repertoire. It\u2019s exhilarating when they\u2019re able to rearrange the song or otherwise indicate that they too have reevaluated their own songs (again, search for \u201cSparks 21×21\u201d on YouTube for some remarkable reinventions of their back catalogue). In any case, a band\u2019s old music is rightfully theirs to return to. No one ever complains when Pete Seeger plays \u201cWaist Deep in the Big Muddy\u201d; why should it be different for a rock band?\u00a0 Still, the deliberate adherence to the structure of an old album is a different beast, a little too uncanny. By playing songs in the album\u2019s original sequence, these performances invariably refer to a musical experience that audiences know in a different context: listening to recorded music, often (and over time increasingly, unless there\u2019s been a rash ofPinkerton<\/em><\/a>\u00a0parties that I\u2019m not aware of) in solitary isolation. Like an unearthed outtake or maybe some really good drugs, an album-in-its-entirety concert recasts and reanimates an experience that\u2019s been frozen in time. That can be really exciting, but ultimately the album in your head demands your attention, distracting from the performance that\u2019s directly on stage in front of you.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a random association: Is there an urban counterpart to the album-in-its-entirety tour?\u00a0 Is it the historically preserved city that\u2019s been carefully themed and sustained by local policy: Venice with its canals, Bruges with its lace? Or the model New Urbanist community: Seaside, Celebration?\u00a0 Why is it so easy to accuse these places of bad faith, of trying to hold on to a moment of glory that has \u201crightfully\u201d passed into history, in the same way we might criticize a band for performing an old album in its entirety?<\/p>\n

What informs the implied, unspoken idea of authenticity that we adhere to in this criticism?\u00a0 Cities, we\u2019re told by urbanists of the classic persuasion, are social and economic centers of remarkable dynamism and change. \u00a0But from at least Max Weber\u2019s\u00a0The City<\/em>\u00a0on, we also know that cities are social constellations for and material expressions of elite interests. Granted, the neomarxian perspective tends to emphasize the destabilizing consequences of these interests (the \u201cgrowth machine,\u201d for example), but by this day and age not all urban elites promote the ceaseless transformation of urban environments. Why as urbanists should we necessarily impute that agenda and our criticism of it to cities? If city users come to local consensus, and if they have a realistic strategy to accommodate the tides of capitalist dynamism outside city limits \u2014 two big \u201cifs\u201d that go well beyond the scope of this post \u2014 then shouldn\u2019t we just say good luck and God bless to you guys?<\/p>\n

Of course this is a silly comparison.\u00a0 At worst, an album-in-its-entirety concert is just bad, lifeless art. No gentrification, no reneging on the promise of new jobs, no regressive redistribution of wealth ever comes about when an 80s band trots out an album for eager listeners. (Well\u2026 a young band looking to get signed and pass the extortion threshold of a Concert Nation contract might beg to differ.) Our judgment of music is aesthetic; however, our judgement of urban policy is ultimately made on moral grounds.\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n

Or, in the left criticism of historical preservation and New Urbanism, do we\u00a0also<\/em>sneak in a modernist aesthetic that obligates cities to continual innovation and the authentic expression of \u201cour times\u201d?\u00a0 Is that really appropriate?\u00a0Does that strike a blow for social justice, or just aesthetic snobbery?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll admit, I got excited after seeing the announcement that Echo & the Bunnymen are performing their first two albums,\u00a0Crocodiles\u00a0and\u00a0Heaven Up Here, in their entirety on an upcoming North American tour. \u00a0Ocean Rain\u00a0is fine; they played that whole album on tour awhile ago anyway.\u00a0 For my money, though, the gloomy garage rock\u2014\u201cGoing Up,\u201d \u201cOver The Wall,\u201d etc.\u2014that I know and love the Bunnymen for is best found on those two albums. More to the point, I\u2019m not above an album-in-its-entirety concert experience. Hardly. Sometimes this performance genre overlaps its close cousin, the reunite-the-original-band tour.\u00a0 I saw Killing Joke do that with their second album a couple of years back; it\u2019s not my favorite record of theirs, but it was the only chance I got to see the original line-up. More often, it seems a band uses the album-in-its-entirety concept to drum up interest in a tour featuring just one or two original musicians; thus, I went to see Richard and Tim Butler plus whoever is playing with them do the Psychedelic Furs\u2019Talk Talk Talk\u00a0last year. It\u2019s astonishing to see how many bands are doing this now; just type \u201cperform album in its entirety\u201d into Google and see what comes up. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43680,43701,43777,241,43661,43656],"class_list":["post-357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-historical-preservation","tag-new-urbanism","tag-nostalgia","tag-performance","tag-touring","tag-urban-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}