The death of the classic album

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When a friend and I saw Megadeth and Slayer play Rust in Peace and Seasons in the Abyss, which are both 20 years old, live in their entirety, he posed a good question:

What albums will bands play live in their entirety 20 years from now?

In other words, what albums of today will be the classics of tomorrow?  Off the top of my head, I had only one answer: Kylesa’s Static Tensions. Interestingly, Kylesa has actually played Static Tensions in its entirety on tour. In this interview, guitarist/vocalist Phillip Cope says that the band did so because people requested every song from the album live. That’s a good sign. In an age of 160GB iPods, people can barely even remember album titles. The fact that all 10 songs of a record moved people to request them live indicates a degree of engagement rare today.

What creates that engagement? And what sustains it so that years later, an album attains “classic” status?

I believe that the former is due to the music itself, while the latter is due to factors beyond the music.

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The music itself

To an extent, the question of classic albums relates to the question of great bands. But great bands don’t always make classic albums, and not-great bands can make classic albums. So independent of the “X band rules, Y band sucks” fights into which these discussions inevitably devolve, I propose that classic albums – undisputed classics, not hidden ones or personal ones (though if an album is a personal classic to enough people, it becomes an undisputed classic; see below) – must have two qualities.

1. Each song must be distinct (and, of course, great).

This knocks out 99% of metal that favors style or sound over song, which includes most extreme metal (death, black, doom, grindcore). Many good metal albums are essentially variations on one song (hello, old-school death metal). But they don’t have what it takes, like Rust in Peace does, to make people mouth every word, air-drum every drum fill, and know every guitar solo by heart. Songs stick with people long after sounds and styles fade away.

2. The album must have singing (and, of course, great lyrics).

Songs are the fundamental units of popular music, and singing is the fundamental way in which people relate to songs. The human voice is the strongest sonic connection between people. Extreme metal’s innovation was to turn the human voice into something inhuman (growling, shrieking, etc.), which can be very cool. (Phil Freeman argues that this innovation has outlived its usefulness.) But it also creates a distance between the listener and the music. I doubt that even the most diehard Autopsy fan knows all the lyrics to any Autopsy album. That verbal connection, which manifests itself as singalongability, characterizes undisputed classics like Paranoid or Master of Puppets.

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Factors beyond the music

When people discuss what makes music “great”, they usually discuss qualities intrinsic to the music (see above). But “classic” has a component outside of intrinsic merit: popular perception. Basically, a work of art needs enough people to consider a classic for it to become an undisputed classic. Every undisputed classic starts out on the personal classic level. Master of Puppets comes out in 1986; a young Adrien Begrand buys it on cassette tape; it changes his life. Multiply his story by millions, and Master of Puppets becomes an undisputed classic.

But numbers aren’t the whole story. This discussion of “what makes a classic?” observes that just because Dan Brown has huge sales doesn’t mean he makes classic art. “Classic” status includes quality of effect and time components. Does the work of art make a significant statement, set the bar higher, or provide an influence for future generations? And how long does that effect last? This is where intrinsic merit connects with popular perception. Good art lasts in the public eye; bad art doesn’t. (To an extent, anyway – demand for reissues and new formats for old products comes not only organically from consumers but also artificially from industry forces.)

But not all good art lasts. Art does not exist in a vacuum. It depends on market factors to survive. Things like marketing, distribution, and sales matter. Many of metal’s undisputed classic albums had major label backing (Rust in Peace, Reign in Blood, Master of Puppets, all of Iron Maiden’s classics), which meant that every record store carried them, and every metal fan had a chance to buy them.

Just as importantly, metal’s data set was much smaller during its golden era (roughly the mid ’80s to the early ’90s). Back then, there weren’t thousands of bands and thousands of albums. (See statistical discussion here.) The bar was higher for releasing music, and the Internet revolution hadn’t occurred yet. So everyone heard the same albums. That’s crucial for albums to attain “classic” status. Now everyone has thousands of albums on their hard drives, and people hole up in subgenre niches. So the general metal consciousness is extremely splintered. People don’t come together now over new bands or albums.

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This multiplicity makes it impossible for any album now to attain “classic” status. There aren’t enough people paying attention to any one thing for opinion to aggregate around it. It’s not the fault of the music. I refuse to believe that music has “gotten worse”, especially since the number of practitioners has multiplied. (Mastering techniques, however, have certainly gotten worse and ruined countless albums.) More practitioners means more competition to be the best. But when I have hundreds of new albums in my queue, I’m bound to (a) give less attention to each one, and (b) miss a potential classic. There’s much less chance for the degree of engagement – rush home with a record, tear off its shrinkwap, listen to it end to end for days – that people need to have to consider albums classics.

So I wouldn’t mind if the record industry took a few body blows. It should release fewer albums. Not every band that can “shred hard” should get a record deal. Fans should raise their standards beyond “sounds decent while surfing the Internet”. Metal should not be a vast, indistinguishable soup of releases blanketing the earth. Winners should be able to emerge, and “classics” should be able to be recognized as such. Classics are what inspire young musicians to improve the artform, and what inspire fans to come together. I’m all for individual taste, but if you and I as metal fans don’t have Reign in Blood in common, what do we have?

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