Hump Day Hitslist: iTunes and the Death and Life of Great Albums

Apple Computer Inc. made a big stink this week by posting a teaser on their homepage suggesting their iTunes service would add something new and exciting on Tuesday morning. Well, it's been a long and winding road, but finally The Beatles' catalogue is now available for digital download on the music service. It took until 2009 for The Beatles' catalogue to be digitally remastered from its original stereo analogue recordings, leaving fans salivating and yearning for nearly two decades longer than they had to wait for the remasters of other contemporaneous rock acts.

While it is inevitable that these canonical tomes of modern popular music eventually become reduced to a floating binary of kilobytical ephemera, there are those that pine the loss of sound quality, aural fidelity, and visceral connection that came with unwrapping a 12 inch disc of weighty vinyl from illustrious spans of cover art and dropping the kinetic needle on the groove. There is something to be said, as well, for the way in which digital downloads have facilitated the hyperactive hashing and repackaging of music to the point where a song in a tiny .mp3 file is completely severed from any notion of the album to which it was once intended to be a part. That said, there is a bit of revisionist history in this view, given the entire music industry of the 1950s was premised on the 45 rpm single. Of course, even The Beatles owe their great fortunes to that rapid wave of early singles, before they dabbled in their more ambitious projects suited only for long playing records.

While I believe that the current paranoia suggesting "The Album" has met its death as an artform is rather premature, there is no denying there was a Golden Age for the self-contained LP, of which this era only retains a flaxen patina. Yes, that Golden Age was borne of the Progressive Rock movement of the late-60s and early-70s that attempted to elevate rock music to the credible and immortal station of classical symphonies and arias. Popularized by the likes of King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Deep Purple, there is no group that has left its mark so indelibly upon this movement as Pink Floyd. It is nigh impossible to breath the words "concept album" without hanging your hat on the Floyd's 1973 opus The Dark Side of the Moon. In wanting to protect the integrity of their music as part of a larger whole, Pink Floyd brought a law suit against its longtime record label EMI in 2010, attempting to block the sale of the group's songs individually on services like iTunes. A High Court in the U.K. agreed with the Floyd that the band could "preserve the artistic integrity" of whole albums by not breaking them up into individual song sales.

With the entire Fab Four catalogue being released this week for your splicing and dicing pleasure, it seems an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the argument made by Pink Floyd's legal victory. It is not to say that what works for a Prog Rock band is what's best for everybody, but there is some value in taking stock of the fact that music is capable of grander statements when its part of a cohesive whole than when it is severed into one-off snacks of pop delight. And with that, this week's finger on the steam Hump Day Hitslist will not present an assortment of 5 tracks from various artists, across multiple albums. Instead, we feature a full five song, 42 minute LP from Pink Floyd entitled Animals, without breaks or track separation.

Pink Floyd - Animals

Side One
1. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 1"
2. "Dogs"

Side Two
3. "Pigs, Three Different Ones"
4. "Sheep"
5. "Pigs on the Wing, pt. 2"







Released in 1977, Animals was a concept album loosely based on George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, with lyrical depictions of various social classes as different kinds of animals: the political dogs that wage war, the ruthless pigs who devour in the name of wealth, and the mindless and unquestioning populism that reduced the masses to a herd of sheep. This concept was developed by Pink Floyd's bassist and co-vocalist, Roger Waters, who felt great disdain at the social and political conditions of 1970s Britain. In a sense, this was Waters' response to the U.K. punk movement that had risen in the previous two years, by demonstrating that Progressive Rock bands who filled stadiums and sold millions of records for their labels could be equally as political as anti-establishment punk rock acts.

Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, famously wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words "I hate" scrawled above to demonstrate his contempt for the arena rock giants. Rotten wasn't wrong in pinning the Floyd as a bloated behemoth that far transcended the four members of the group; the Floyd had indeed become large to the point of nation-state status. The live shows for the Animals album were part of the massive In the Flesh tour that saw the Floyd playing to crowds nearing 100,000 strong in vacuous stadiums. David Gilmour would later intimate that by the end of the tour he realized the band had finally achieved all of the success he could have dreamed of and that there was nothing left to do; a feeling that saddened, rather than pleased him. Similarly, Waters would feel increasingly alienated by the large crowds, leading to his famously erupting on stage in Montreal and spitting on a fan that had annoyed him. These depressive and estranged feelings would become Waters' source of inspiration for writing the Floyd's subsequent album The Wall, that was symbolically represented in later theatric concerts by the building of a great white brick wall between the band and its audiences.