*Disclaimer: I don't pretend to be either a music critic or a great interpreter of lyrics. Go figure I'm about to try both.*
I've long been fascinated with music. It's always seemed to me to be the most expressive of the art forms, coming far closer to allowing you to experience emotions rather than merely observing them. Plus, a bit less snobbily, I simply really like listening to it. I've been described as having a very eclectic taste in music - although, as has been proven by at least one of my close friends, not eclectic at all compared to some people - or at least, a wide-ranging scope of interests. To prove it to you, here are the first 12 songs to come up on iTunes when I hit Shuffle:
1) Thrill of It, Robert Randolph & the Family Band
2) Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, MVHS Vocal Ensemble (My high school music department made yearly CDs)
3) Graduation Day, Kanye West
4) Ch-Check It Out, Beastie Boys
5) Who Says, John Mayer
6) Toothbrush and My Table, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
7) Where the Streets Have No Name, U2
8) Where Is Love?, MVHS Vocal Ensemble (...yeah...)
9) Sideways, Citizen Cope
10) All I Hear, Train
11) Snow (Hey Oh), Red Hot Chili Peppers
12) Love, Reign O'er Me, Pearl Jam
So to recap, that's - in order - steel guitar-led funk, a high school chorus, rap, more rap, bluesy alt rock, roots rock, rock, the high school chorus again, alt rock, alt rock, rock and rock. Or something like that. If I ran it again, I'd most likely get a wildly different variety.
Anyway, all that is to say that music is kind of a big part of my life - and that's not even including the 12 years I played the trumpet in various bands, most notably the Marching and Pep Bands at BC. Thus it shouldn't come as a surprise that I ponder music-related things every so often. And one particular one has been kind of a thorn in my side for a while - what I'm going to call the abstract story concept album.
Concept albums are nothing new in the music world, but for the purposes of this post, I'm going to divide them into two separate categories - the story concept album, and the theme concept album. The story concept album was made famous by The Who's Tommy, and then copied every so often by big-name bands since. Off the top of my head, some that spring to mind are Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory, Green Day's American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown, and Pink Floyd's The Wall. Of course, there are others, but I don't want to list them all here. If the name didn't clue you in, a story concept album - also called a rock opera, at least when talking about some of the aforementioned albums - involves one coherent story told through the songs on the album.*
*This is not to say, however, that said stories are always obvious. The first time I listened to Scenes From a Memory, I thought the girl the main character kept talking about was his girlfriend in a past life. Whoops.*
The theme concept album, by comparison, is an album where all the songs are linked thematically. Of course, most albums are - or should be - linked by some thread that runs through them, otherwise it's just a collection of songs. But some have very specific themes that pervade the entire record's DNA. I'm thinking something like Adele's 21, which has no specific story, but is completely inspired by a break-up she went through. Or something like that.
My thought, however, is that some albums occupy the middle ground between those two - that they tell a story, but the story is not told through a series of events a la a story concept album. Rather, it's told through a series of themes that express themselves in roughly proper narrative order. Listening to 21 in the car with my mom the other day, I could discern no clear narrative in the songs, only emotion. Did they convey the same thing, in a roundabout way? Yes. But it wasn't told like a story.
Being an inquisitive person with some extra time on my hands, I wanted to find out if my thought was actually not a totally stupid one. Therefore, I'm going to take a critical - or at least, my version of it - look at some of the albums I've considered to be abstract story concept albums and find out if my idea holds any kind of weight.
But because this post is long enough already without getting into a prolonged and attempted exegesis of a 10+ song-album, I'll hold off on actually starting my little experiment for the moment. But in hopefully my next post and sporadic ones in the future, keep an eye out as I attempt to boldly go where few aspiring sportswriters have purposefully gone before.
And in the meantime, here's another 12 songs from a shuffled iTunes to A) prove my earlier point, and B) amuse myself.
1) Michelle Malkin, Prometheus Brown
2) Ain't No Sunshine, Bill Withers
3) Amazing Grace, Charlotte Church
4) Hollywood, Los Lonely Boys
5) Star Wars/The Revenge of the Sith, John Williams
6) The Gauntlet, Dropkick Murphys
7) Vultures, John Mayer
8) Isn't She Lovely, Stevie Wonder
9) Same Old Song and Dance, Aerosmith
10) Joey, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
11) Human Nature, Miles Davis
12) Good Riddance, Green Day
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