Chiming back to my commentary on last week’s audio accessions, it’s yer man Robin Sloan, listening to a tape of a band who wrote a song about his olive press:

What happened (and this always presages a good expe­ri­ence with art) was that I surrendered to the strangeness, and the strange­ness started to make sense. I entered OOF’s world, rather than insisting the band fit into mine, which is, of course, the demand of the Spotify playlist.

Now, I’m not about to start listening to tapes again any time soon (though I did rescue a rather handsome wood-cheeked Akai tape deck from the miljörum a couple years back)… and there ain’t no one writing songs about my olive press, either. But I feel like Sloan nails here the difference between on the one hand “streaming some songs” and on the other hand “putting on an album”.

It might well be that this is something to do with being an albums person over a singles person. I never bought singles as a kid, and acquired albums only very slowly, because I had neither the disposable income nor the access to record shops. When I did acquire albums, I treated them like movies or books, I guess: less a loose collection of songs, and more a narrative sequence made of songs, an environment with a through-line.

(That the second album I ever bought for myself was De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising may well have shaped that approach a lot, as that album is not only full of stories about the storytellers themselves—many of which I took laughably literally, but never mind that—but also stitched together with little skits. It was, in short, a work of worldbuilding—though that’s never really occurred to me before my typing it just now.)

To privilege the album over the single is, as I understand it, among the original sins of rockism… though, as noted previously, I think I’m pretty much done with taking my moral marching orders from poptimism, which has proven itself just as capable of hidebound self-parody and dogmatism as that which it claimed to be dethroning.

But if we think about music in terms of worldbuilding, we can get away from the ossified duality or rock/pop, and into a different discussion, perhaps? This isn’t really my department, but I know that Jay Springett’s got some good gear in the pipe on this sort of thing.

(Not at all unrelatedly, the latest epic Sam Kriss joint, recounting his experience of seeing Taylor Swift play Paris, not only makes an implicit case for Swift as worldbuilder, but may prove with time to be a document of the moment at which a world begins to collapse under the weight of its audience’s expectations.)

All this reminds me a great deal of the notion of the media cyborg, which I have been meaning for a very long time to develop further… and which, appropriately enough, originated with none other than Robin Sloan.