For those of us who grew up with the option to listen to music
either on AM/FM radio, a vinyl long-player or an audiotape cassette, it's
pretty heady to realize how many options we have these days, even if most of us
never listen to anything other than our phones. I recently discovered a new
option, one I have been taking great advantage of: listening to entire albums
on YouTube.
The album as a
sequential art form is more or less dead at this point. If we don't shuffle
through them on our iPods, we stick a CD into the car's dashboard and pick
through the songs we want to hear. When I want to hear a record in its original
entirety, I generally have to make the necessary adjustments on my iPod, and
even then it's not foolproof. For some reason, the stupid thing seems to think
that "Baby Stop Crying" is the leadoff track on Street-Legal.
But when you
listen to a whole album on YouTube, you listen to the whole thing, straight
through, no picking up the needle and putting it down after "Wild Honey
Pie" is blessedly over. Your choice is to hear the whole record, as the
artist intended, or to stop listening altogether.
It doesn't seem natural
to me at all that people would post entire albums to YouTube, so I don't know
how the whole thing started. But there are quite a few of them out there now,
mostly of the classic rock variety. It sure is fun to listen to something
that you might have passed over for the subsequent greatest-hits package, or
something that somehow never made it onto your iPod. Or that you just haven’t
heard for a long time. Like After
the Gold Rush, maybe, or Music From Big Pink. Or Remain in Light, which
deserves to be heard in a single sitting.
And there's some
great obscurities out there, ones that I bet aren't in your collection. All
four of Brian Eno's ambient-music series are available, even though the first
one, Music for Airports,
is the only one you need. Eno and Fripp's Air Structures is also on
there, and well worth hearing. And that stuff sounds great when you're forced
to listen to it all the way through.
I don't pretend to
know how YouTube works, so I don't know why these things have waivers from the
traditional YouTube ten-minute limit. But that allows me to watch old-timey
football games on there, so I’m not complaining.
I encourage you to
give it a try, listen to What's
Going On all the way through - I'm sure you haven't done that in decades.
And tell me what else you find out there.
