{"id":851,"date":"2007-08-21T10:50:53","date_gmt":"2007-08-21T16:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=851"},"modified":"2007-08-21T10:50:53","modified_gmt":"2007-08-21T16:50:53","slug":"long_player_bon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=851","title":{"rendered":"Long player: bonus track"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back, in the post Long player<\/a>, I disputed David Weinberger’s contention, in his book Everything Is Miscellaneous<\/a>, that the vinyl record album was a purely economic contrivance and that we purchased and listened to albums not “for artistic reasons,” as we had assumed, but only “because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs because there were fewer records to make, ship, shelve, categorize, alphabetize, and inventory.” The form of the album was actually created, I argued, to expand both the artistic canvas and the supply of recorded music, and, indeed, its arrival unleashed a remarkable flood of creativity in popular music while also vastly expanding the supply of recordings, to everyone’s benefit.<\/p>\n

In recently rereading Marshall McLuhan’s classic Understanding Media<\/a> – insanely brilliant, with an equal emphasis on both words – I came across a brief passage in which McLuhan describes how the LP album spurred a burst of creativity in jazz as well as pop:<\/p>\n

\n

… the l.p. record suddenly made the phonograph a means of access to all the music and speech of the world … With regard to jazz, l.p. brought many changes, such as the cult of “real cool drool,” because the greatly increased length of a single side of a disk meant that the jazz band could really have a long and casual chat among its instruments. The repertory of the 1920s was revived and given new depth and complexity by this new means.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McLuhan’s book was published in 1964, a couple of years before rock musicians would realize that the LP form allowed them a way to extend their creativity beyond the individual track. Well before what we now recognize as the golden age of the album, the LP was viewed as a liberating technology, for musician and listener alike, not as a means of constraining choice and oppressing music fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back, in the post Long player, I disputed David Weinberger’s contention, in his book Everything Is Miscellaneous, that the vinyl record album was a purely economic contrivance and that we purchased and listened to albums not “for artistic reasons,” as we had assumed, but only “because the economics of the physical world required […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}