Alas, Poor Single…
The sad death of the pop single
I’d love to go on about this but I’ve got to get back to my paper. I’ll try and give my thoughts tomorrow evening, but, until then, what are yours?The single is now over. Not the pop song, of course, which blasts over everything from car ads to party political broadcasts, but the single record, which has now gone the way of the tape-to-tape. Just before Christmas, it was announced that more songs were downloaded from the internet than were bought as CDs or records in shops, and, this week, it emerged that sales of new songs were being outstripped by their sales as mobile phone ringtones. Downloading means no physical record, no sleeve, no artwork of any kind, just a piece of sound that will most often be deployed now by young people as a way of alerting them to another sound they like much more: the sound of each other talking. When the song becomes tired, consumers will simply press “delete”.
…
The art of the single was never really about the song. It was about the trouble you took to find it, the walk to the record shop and the effort involved in copying the lead singer’s hairstyle.
It’s difficult for me to explain to the children that everything wasn’t always available. They think I’m trying to give them a sob story, but really its a story about character, and a story about how the search for culture forms your character. We lived thinking there were certain things we’d missed records we might never find or foreign movies that might never come to the local cinema. We grew up imagining that the pop cultural past was someone else’s story; I remember grieving about someone throwing out my aunt’s old records, thinking I’d never hear those songs again. In fact I am listening to one of them now I Apologise, sung by Billy Eckstine, downloaded a minute ago but I still miss the beauty of my aunt’s old sleeve, the pencil markings I made on it as a child, and, most of all, the sense I used to have of the same record having been played in the days of my mother’s youth.
