One long record from this year that does justify its length is Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Every good band should be allowed a White Album, where everything is kind of tossed in there, but those should really only come every five albums or so, and it should really be when an artist is at the peak of their power.Īre your initial feelings usually confirmed when you actually do listen to these extra long albums? I think less in terms of indulgence and more in terms of editing and indecisiveness - there is something to be said for trimming things back and leaving the music with the most force. I get excited when I see an album that is 38 minutes or something, and I think, "They really pared it down to the best stuff." When I see 70 minutes, I start to wonder how often I will be hearing the back half.ĭo those albums seem to be a case of over-indulgence or indecisiveness? In general, my immediate response is skepticism, and I worry that it will be a chore. I tend to differentiate between hardcore music people, who follow music closely and really pay attention to music as a separate area of culture, and people who like music but mostly like to "have something on." That is one reason why things like Pandora have been so successful, because they fill the very real need for background music, for something where you can just hit play and enjoy it and not need to think about what is next.Īs an album oriented-listener - and beyond that, a very specialized listener who is evaluating the music as part of your job - when you get an album that has 70-minute or so running time, does that present itself as something exciting or a chore? But I am pretty album-focused person.ĭo you feel like that approach makes you an anomaly among modern music listeners? At home, when I listen to music for pleasure, I tend to listen to my records, which is generally older stuff. I keep a few playlists on my iPhone of just songs I love and pop that on regularly. I am in a somewhat unusual situation because I have to listen to a lot of albums for work. I spend a lot of time listening to albums, not necessarily start to finish, but jumping in at a point and letting them play a while. To baseline this conversation, how are you usually listening to music these days? To try to understand the motivation for artists to make these extra long releases and what expectations they put upon listeners, Ducker spoke with Mark Richardson, the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork. And sure it's great to have challenging and ambitious musical works to contend with, the reality is, do we really have time for this?
Over the past months, albums by Kendrick Lamar, Titus Andronicus, Tenement and Kamasi Washington have all run near or well over the 80-minute mark. Though the death of the album format has been talked up ever since digital files became the dominating medium for listening to music, recently there has been a proliferation full-length releases that are both critically acclaimed and super duper long. "A Rational Conversation" is a column by writer Eric Ducker in which he gets on instant messenger or the phone with a special guest to examine a music-related subject that's entered the pop culture consciousness. His most recent album, To Pimp A Butterfly, runs nearly 80 minutes over 16 songs.
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