Today we hone in on the concept of a concept album. Now pay attention...
The Concept of Albums
I was listening to Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime today, wondering what makes a
great concept album.
Apparently many people don’t
know what a concept album is, judging from Wikipedia’s list
of purported concept albums. I’m unfamiliar with many of the names, but a
random sampling include Metallica’s ...And Justice For All and Load (wrong on
both counts and if Load, why not Reload?), the first four Blur albums (I mean
honestly) and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (this one I find the most baffling
of all).
What’s just as surprising here
is what’s missing, given these albums represent the criteria on which we are supposed
to judge what makes a concept album. Metallica but no Megadeth, several of
who’s album get nearer to approaching a unifying concept or theme. I’m not sure
that a jazz album can be a concept album, but if Maiden Voyage is a concept
album then I can think of several that have a better claim, including Hancock’s
own 1973 album, Head Hunters and certainly Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. As
for Blur, well to paraphrase a line from something the source of which escapes
me for the moment, stop it, now you’re just naming albums.
Most egregious in the Wikipedia
list is the inclusion of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the
most famous concept album that isn’t a concept album, the clue being in the
fact that The Beatles themselves said it isn’t a concept album. Abbey Road
might have a better claim, or at least the second side of Abbey Road, which is
broadly conceptual, like the second half of Queen II, an album which also
appears in the Wikipedia list.
For me, an album must have
something of the musical about it to be considered conceptual. It must be
almost operatic. Which is odd, given that I can’t stand musicals and I can only
listen to opera. Watching opera is like having teeth pulled. I do enjoy a good
concept album. However, a group or musician attempting a concept album is like
a footballer attempting a bicycle kick. Get it right and it’s spectacular. Get
it wrong and you look like an absolute dick.
Operation: Mindcrime is a fine
example of getting the concept album right. It contains all of the elements for
a good concept album. It has the structure of an hour long musical, including
talky acting bits in between songs. There are leitmotifs borrowed from
Wagnerian opera, which return to haunt the album at various points. It also has
a clear plot of revolutionaries, terrorism, murder and corrupt priests, which
is quite easy to follow. The narrative is circular, ending at the same point at
which it begins.
Operation: Mindcrime also
contains echoes of maybe the most famous actual
concept album yet recorded, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Especially near the end of
Mindcrime will you hear very deliberate musical strains referencing The Wall.
It’s a nice touch. You hear the same thing in Mastodon’s Leviathan, a concept
album built around Moby Dick, which tips its hat to Iron Maiden’s 1988 concept
album, Seventh Son of the Seventh Son, which is about... well, guess.
It’s perhaps a little kitsch to
admit this, but I love The Wall. A friend of mine used to say that rather than
watching horror films, he preferred sitting down to listen to a Slayer album with
the lyrics sheet in front of him. I used to do almost the same with Pink Floyd.
I would have a smoke or four, get into bed with all but my face wrapped in
sheets and listen to the whole of The Wall in the dark through a pair of
headphones. It beats the hell out of a emersion tank. The Wall’s musical
narrative tell the story of the rock star, Pink, and his slow decent into
madness. I love The Wall because it’s an album of eighty minutes of unrelenting
bleakness, punctuated by two minutes of light at the end of the tunnel. I also
love it because by accident or by design songs like The Trial contain many of
the same tropes as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
The Wall and Operation:
Mindcrime can perhaps be better described as rock operas than concept albums, the
same as The Who’s Tommy or The Kink’s Arthur. Yet this, in one sense, is
exactly what makes a concept album. There are many that describe Floyd’s
previous three albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals as
also being conceptual. I would submit only the last album of the three for
consideration. A concept album isn’t just one in which similar themes are
explored, there has to be an overarching, unifying theme, if not an actual
fictional narrative. If Dark Side of the Moon was a concept album, then so
would most other albums ever recorded. I’m sure every One Direction and Justin
Bieber album could be considered conceptual using this standard. Is that what
you want? Is it?
Sloppy categorising is exactly
the same thing that allows ...And Justice for All and Maiden Voyage to be
accepted into what should be a highly exclusive club. For instance, what about
the Alice in Chain album, Dirt? Is this a concept album? All but one of its
tracks can be argued to be about heroin addiction. I would say that no, it
isn’t, for exactly the reason that one track (Rooster) is about the experiences
of guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s father’s experiences in Vietnam. Yet Dirt
probably has a better claim than half of the albums in Wikipedia’s list.
As egregious as Sgt. Pepper’s
inclusion in this list is the exclusion of PJ Harvey’s Mercury Music Prize
winning album, Let England Shake, an album that is as conceptual as you can get
without actually crossing over into rock opera. I honestly don’t think that a
better album has been produced this side of the millennium, a record all about
Britain and its involvement in wars now and centuries past. I have waxed
lyrical about Let England Shake at length in my essay, The Sombrer Opacities of
the Gloom.
Curiously, you also won’t find
any Bob Dylan albums in the Wikipedia list. A convincing case can certainly be
made for John Wesley Harding, given that it was recorded when The Beatles were
recording Sgt. Pepper and The Rolling Stones were copying them with Their
Satanic Majesties. Dylan meanwhile recorded an album that is about as far from
psychedelia as it’s possible to go. An collection of songs that don’t contain
any choruses is certainly a concept. A argument could also be made for Blood on
the Tracks and Time Out of Mind, great divorce porn albums them both. Yet like
Alice in Chains Dirt, the concept doesn’t entirely track across either album. A better
case can be made for Jack White’s Blunderbuss, which is both divorce porn and
consistently conceptual.
Tom Waits has recorded a handful
of concept albums, but many of these were recorded for actual plays (The Black
Rider, Alice and Blood Money). Nighthawks at the Diner from 1975 though is that
rarest of breeds, a concept album recorded live, in which Wait’s channels the
spirit of Jack Kerouac’s beat poet performances. There is also the curious case
of the Easy Star All-Stars. The Easy Star All-Stars rerecord classic albums,
Dark Side of the Moon, Ok Computer, Sgt. Pepper, Thriller, etc. in reggae and
dub styles. That’s conceptual art for you. Meta Conceptual even. Easy Star
All-Stars’s version of Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky is one of my
favourite things ever.
Perhaps the most exciting artist
to be producing conceptual albums in recent years is Janelle Monae. Her debut
EP, Metropolis, and two albums, The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady continue
the same narrative, where Monae’s alter-ego, the android Cindi Mayweather, falls
in love with a human being in the future and travels back in time to the
present day to escape arrest. It’s high concept indeed, heavily influenced by
Fritz Lang’s science fiction silent film, Metropolis, as well as the robotic
stories of Isaac Asimov.
I’m not exactly a fan of modern
R&B, but genius comes in many forms and Monae is there or thereabouts,
taking her influence from artists as diverse as Michael Jackson and Prince, Outcast,
the B52s, David Bowie, Scissor Sisters, Rachmaninoff and George Gershwin. Like
Dylan, she had the foresight to write a polemic entitled Mr. President, without
mentioning the incumbent at the time (Dubya). My one criticism is that she
should spend more time singing the song during Obama’s administration and less
time hanging out at the White House. After all, Dylan continues to perform It’s
Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) whether the President who ‘must sometime have to
stand naked’ be Johnson, Nixon or one either of the Bushes.
So there you go. I hope we have
managed to establish the concept of a concept album. Or at least tightened our
definition. OK Computer, yes (just), Kid A and Amnesiac, no. The Kinks Are the
Village Green Preservation Society, yes, The Kink’s Muswell Hillbillies, no.
Any Frank Zappa album, yes, any Captain Beefheart album, no. Got it? Good, ‘cause
I don’t want have to run through this shit again (*winks*).
Get it done.
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