The week in your words: The barking mad watchdog

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Posted on 28 Nov 2008 at 17:14

Is there any other kind?

"Those of you who think that Apple Stores already look sinister need only add a few extra disturbing points to get what I mean."

We're envisaging Steve Jobs effigies, and a polo neck and ripped jeans dress code (shiver).

Playlists killed the classic album

And we finish on the blogs, where everyone's favourite human-keyring, the 4ft 8in peripherals editor David Bayon, was having a moan about modern music, and those kids kicking the ball against his gate, and the price of slippers and such. Everything cost a threepenny bit in his day, don't you know.

His ire was directed at iTunes, and its desire to separate songs from the whole album, the musical equivalent of clubbing a baby seal to death. He wasn't alone though.

"Classical music suffers in the same way," says David. "I've heard Classic FM announce that they are playing Beethoven's 9th symphony, when in fact they are only playing the well-known 4th movement; it works so much better coming after the three movements which precede it, but is rarely heard on air in its entirety."

Erm... yes, we agree. Movements. Crucial. We like the one that's always used in the Die Hard movies.

"I think the death of the album has been a long and particularly slow one," says yehudi menuhin. "It's only now that everyone's begun to strop about it, however. The 60/70 minute playing time of CDs long exceeded the average person's attention span and was, in my opinion, the herald of inexorable demise for the album."

Surely, that accolade belongs to the Cheeky Girls, who are to good music what the four horsemen of the apocalypse are to a package holiday in the Med.

"Generally I only have time to listen to one or two tracks, or I only like one or two tracks from an album. Likewise, if you are at a party, in a club, listening to the radio most people don't want to listen to an hour of music from one artist," adds David W, who never explains why he listens to the radio while in a club at a party.

Speaking of parties, we're off to gaze in the windows at all the ones we weren't invited to. See you all next week.

Author: Stuart Turton