The compact disc has revolutionized the home-entertainment business, but revolutions aren’t always for the better. Just ask Gorbachev. What’s indisputable is that CD technology has not only changed how we hear music, but how artists make it and companies market it.
CDs have two advantages over vinyl: They don’t require much maintenance and they’re convenient to store and play (no need to wipe away dust, replace styluses or get up off the couch to flip the side over).
But that hardly seems to be worth nearly a 100 percent price increase.
The price of albums made it worthwhile to buy on a hunch and occasionally stumble across great music.
Now, with new CDs generally retailing for $11 to $15, consumers have to think twice before taking a chance on a new disc by an unknown band.
Audiophiles tout the sonic improvements of the CD, and some do sound spectacular. Digital recordings by studio perfectionists such as Joe Jackson and Peter Gabriel, as well as beautifully remastered older discs by David Bowie and the Beatles, are state of the art.
Yet all too often, consumers who bought CDs hoping not only to replace but improve upon their worn-down albums have come away disappointed. I found out the hard way that a $20 import CD of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” sounded worse than the vinyl version, and the same was true of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story” and “Led Zeppelin.”
Some of these problems have been addressed in recent years as record companies began making more of an effort to track down original master tapes for CD remastering and engineers became more savvy in using digital technology. It’s why recent box sets from Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd sound terrific, yet even these groups are competing against their own inferior earlier CDs, which inexplicably remain on the market.
Just as troubling is what digital technology has done to the art of making and sequencing records. In the days of vinyl, great albums had a symmetry, with each side beginning and ending with a terrific song. It was like reading a short novel with a riveting opening chapter, followed by two or three sections of explication and character development, and then finishing with a flourish. Think of the side openers and closers in great albums such as “Born to Run” (“Thunder Road,” Back Streets,” title track, “Jungleland”) or “Let it Bleed” (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” title track, “Gimme Shelter,” “Midnight Rambler”).
CDs don’t have such a built-in structure. In fact, they seem to have no structure at all. Increasingly, the strategy has been for artists to front-load a CD with their best songs as a hedge against fading attention spans.
Vinyl albums often held no more than 40 minutes of music, 20 per side, which enabled listeners to develop intimacy with a record in small doses. Now consumers are asked to absorb sometimes twice as much music in one sitting.
Ten good songs on a 35-minute CD (Helmet’s “Meantime” and Jesus Lizard’s “Liar” come to mind) would seem to be more satisfying than 70 minutes of mediocrity, but many artists seem more intent on filling the entire CD with music in a misguided effort to give the consumer his money’s worth.
The CD “bonus track” is often just a euphemism for bad music, a leftover song or songs that wouldn’t have been released if it weren’t for the extra space created by digital technology.
Increasingly, CDs are being marketed as a collection of potential hit singles or MTV video clips rather than as a coherent whole.
Even conceptually ambitious albums such as Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” are watered down by bonus tracks that detract from the overall theme and destroy the mood. (I wonder how Saul Bellow would feel if his publisher asked him to add a few chapters to his latest novel because it wasn’t long enough?)
So it would be premature to declare the latest step in recording technology an advance. As the compact disc enters its second decade, it remains an expensive vanity item with enormous potential, largely unfulfilled.
