Why I Mourn the Decline of the Album

So Bodrell Spicer, the Contradictator, has been silent for several months now. There are several explanations for my absence. The first is that it's hard to be a Contradictator when there are so many real dictators out there, operating with the complicity of the sheep that elected them. I've felt out-dictatored, as though nothing I write matters in the fight against Herr Bush and his many, mewing, miserable minions. Even when I channel the spirit of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, like in that last sentence, my words are less powerful than the idiocies that come from W's mealy mouth. Like his famous Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream. Or, I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity. That presidential poetry seems to actually be inspirational to his nationalistic, bigoted, anti-freedom, Christian-soldier base. The ones that think Tom DeLay was sent to defend the faith against the evil Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other assorted godless pagans.

So that's the first reason for my disappearing act--feeling overwhelmed by all the dictatorial shit with its stench so powerful that it never diminishes in magnitude. I hope that left a nice image in your mind.

Reason two is simple: laziness. Consumptive activities are always easier than productive ones. I've spent too much time in front of the good ol' cathode ray tube. The TV used to be a CRT, but since it's been replaced with an LCD TV, the only CRT left in my tube is my reliable Hitachi monitor. Still going strong after about eight years, I believe. It would be easy to go into a long digression about cathode ray tubes, especially because I'm interested in building an old-school vacuum-tube amplifier, but let's save that for another time. I'll have to overcome lots of laziness before anything remotely resembling a functioning tube amp arrives in my living room.

The third reason I've not been around, not been writing, is a perfectionist streak. I don't want to put out half-assed thoughts, as I've mentioned before, so I've gone to the opposite extreme: I haven't been writing anything at all, for fear of it not being good enough. That's ending now. I'm going to let this website get a little chaotic. Especially regarding the length and forethought of each entry, as well as details that hardly anyone else with a website has to deal with, such as editing Python and shell scripts to change the date information each month. I would reach the end of the month without having written anything, and then either hastily throw together a last-minute entry or let it slide until the next month, leaving myself with more website back-end maintenance, effectively keeping me from writing.

Last, my company recently (a few months ago) starting increasing the security of their firewall. What this means, in concrete terms, is that port 22 is blocked, preventing me from SECURELY accessing my website to make changes to the code. So I've been having technical difficulties.

phew. Now I can lament the decline of the album. I'm sad that albums are disappearing. This phenomenon has been happening for years, but it's worse now that people can legally download single tracks from albums. Some people might think I would be happy about being able to download music using this newfangled internet thing. But no, I'm not. I may not be a vinyl junkie, or an audiophile in the strictest sense, but I can sure as hell tell the difference between a 128 kbps MP3 and a CD. When I rip CDs to MP3 format, I use 256 kbps: 128 kbps each for left and right channels. On my current stereo equipment, that sounds about the same as a CD to my poorly-trained ear. But guess what? No one is selling CD-quality audio over the internet. Or even what I would consider decent quality audio. They're selling music for mass consumption, which means they're selling total shit.

Even if audio tracks were available for download at or better than CD-quality, there would still be reasons to lament the absence of actual albums. Ever heard a single on the radio, then bought the album to discover the radio track was the worst of the lot? It's certainly happened to me. Not only that, I believe the best music often takes some getting used to. An acquired taste. The Pixies' first full-length album, Surfer Rosa, turned out to be my favorite after I listened to it several times. I wasn't such a fan at first. A lot has to do with expectations--I'd heard another Pixies album, Doolittle, which was much less noisy and raw. I learned to love the noisy, raw, Steve Albini-produced Surfer Rosa sound, but not immediately.

This is just one example of how a singles-oriented music market would deprive listeners of the depth of music we find on albums--those experimental tracks that the bands' producers might not have wanted included on the album, let alone released to the public in single format. Some really good songs are weird, and are over the 3-minute mark of a radio single. The German band, CAN, have 18-minute and 17-minute songs on their album Tago Mago, which are almost never played on the radio anywhere. I think I once heard a CAN song on the University of Oregon student radio station (KWVA), but college radio plays many, many tracks that the record industry shuns.

We need to place a bit more trust in the musicians. Already they have to whore themselves a bit, making at least one radio-friendly track per album if they've signed with a major label. The rest of the album, the "filler," is where the artists get to really be artists, instead of whores. With the exception of a legendary Van Morrison album of throwaway, nonsense songs, which he recorded to fulfill a contractual obligation with his record company, most musicians don't put songs on their albums that they consider crap. The album format gives creative slack which would disappear if artists had to crank out nothing but singles. If the regime of the most recent George Bush has taught us anything, it's that winning a popularity contest requires not an ounce of intelligence, creativity, or merit. The front-runner is often a big loser, while the less popular are often the most interesting.

That's all I've got for now. But I hope to be writing more soon. Give me some feedback, readers.

Fooling Half the People, All the Time

I have long complained of the idiocy of women's clothing sizes. Whereas men's pants have numbers with units associated with them (waist and inseam in inches), women's apparel come in these arbitrary units that go down to zero, and even below. I don't understand how "zero" can be a size, since by definition it is nothing, but such is the logic behind female fashion. It would be bad enough having to find clothes based on dimensionless numbers even if those numbers were consistent, but in fact a size 4 is not the same from store-to-store, or even year-to-year. Just as grades have been inflated in the past few decades, so that a "C" now means "borderline retarded" instead of "average," women's clothing sizes have shrunk so that someone who used to wear a size 8 might now find size 0 too large for her. That was the case for Wendy Chao, in an article in the Boston Globe that I found on fark.

The article refers to this deceptive practice as "vanity sizing," something that would only ever work on women or gay men. The fast food industry has also tried using misleading sizes. Everyone knows the three default sizes for anything are small, medium, and large. But at most hamburger joints, it's large, extra-large, and "Biggie," "Grande," or something similar. To be fair, the smallest servings available today are probably bigger than the large servings of twenty years ago, but the labeling is still intended to fool the customer. Just like every item that costs $19.99 is really $20, and a gallon of gas that is $3.099 is really $3.10. The difference is that $19.99 and $3.099 are both real numbers, which allows a mechanism to correct for any marketing propaganda. Even food items can be easily quantified. You could count the number of French fries in a combo-meal, or weigh the burger. But clothing? Women's clothing? I wouldn't try making any measurements unless I were a tailor.

And for all you fellow conspiracy-theorist out there? Here's a teaser:

So there used to be a uniform sizing system until 1983. It may have been dimensionless, but at least it was uniform. And what did they do? Rather than fix the system by attaching units to those dimensionless sizes, they just scrapped the system altogether. What do you think are the odds that that decision was made after someone got a fat campaign contribution? I'll bet the first retailers to start changing their sizes got some hefty sales boosts.