Monday, March 19, 2012
Monday, May 19, 2008
Freddie Mercury is DJing My Ipod From the Beyond
The past two days my Ipod had "randomly" selected no less then five tracks off of "News of the World" by Queen. Now there is nothing very remarkable about this, but it has lead me on a little walk down nogtalgia lane, and led me down to Ponder Street.
"News of the World" came out when I was six years old. That is roughly the time (perhaps add a year, or two) that I remember sitting up stairs in my bedroom with my "portable" turntable going through my parents albums. Again, none of this is very remarkable, but I do recall that it was this album where I started threading the songs together in to a story, or as it's more commonly know now, in to a concept album.
It's not that at that young age that I suddenly was able to decipher the artists poetic musings, and start seeing the hidden meaning of the songs. It was that damn robot's eyes, and the drops of blood on his finger tip. In other words, the album's cover and sleeve art work played a very central part in my personal scripting of the albums "story."
Music has always been a very important part of my life, and now as a father of a four-year old, I struggle with how best to foster that love in him as well. Now, with the specter of Freddie Mercury apparently controlling the shuffle on my Ipod, I've come to realize that one of the major influences on me, the album artwork, has all but been lost.
I know that every generation feels that the one after them has lost something compared to their own, but in this instance I truly feel this is the case. It would only be a short time after my sojourns to my room that those albums would be replaced by CD's, so the next generation would have been less able to make that visual connection to the music then I would have. CD booklets were great for additional stories, or paragraphs of what brands the band members wanted to endorse, but there is something to be said for a picture being worth a thousand words. A near poster size piece of album artwork could say more about the musical vision of the album then a whole CD booklet could, and that was being lost.
In the days of digital downloads, the liner notes and album covers are still there, but minimized to Ipod screen size, it is more used for identifying what's playing rather than any kind of artistic stimulation. I personally no longer "need" visual cues to come up with my interpretation of the artistic vision for a piece of music (assuming there is one of course,) but I wonder how much those crazy kids today might be missing out on without a little nudge here and there. Perhaps this could explain why 2007's best selling album was "High School Musical 2." Music videos might help out here these days, but then again who really makes, broadcasts, or watches those anymore?
I'm not sure if they had this problem back in Mozart's day, and perhaps I am being just a bit to nostalgic, but when "All Dead, All Dead," came on the computer, and my son asked what the song was about (at least I've got him thinking that way already) I told him I'd show him. I found a picture of the album cover and immediately he started getting that boo-boo lip face. Just like his dad thirty years ago, he was feeling sorry for that robot. The meaning of the song was no longer important; he had made his own connection, and I became certain that I was right.
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