(c) Tidal
In 2009, when shutter shades were still cool and you downloaded all your music through LimeWire, The Black Eyed Peas released their fifth album, The E.N.D. The record hasn’t aged particularly well; it represents that awkward transitional period between 2000s EDM and the more polished electropop of today.
The reason I begin with this lukewarm, time-capsule of an album has less to do with its content than with its vision. will.i.am described The E.N.D. as “a diary [...] of music that at any given time, depending on the inspiration, you can add to it. I'm trying to break away from the concept of an album. What is an album when you put 12 songs on iTunes and people can pick at it like scabs? That's not an album. There is no album anymore.”
Though The E.N.D. was a huge commercial success, it failed to make the slightest deviation from the static, structured format it aimed to derail. It followed the typical pop album trajectory; recorded, promoted, and eventually forgotten. Nothing was ever added or revised, nothing about it seemed groundbreaking or innovative. Indeed, the only thing will came through with was that The E.N.D. had 15 songs instead of 12.
But will.i.am’s concept trickled into the murky depths of the pop cultural subconscious, faintly surviving as a residual idea and emerging much later as a formidable one. It may have seemed pretentious or even laughable at the time, but will.i.am latched onto something when he spoke of albums that grew even after they were released, of sound that was dynamic and infinite.
"But one thing I am not annoyed by, and in fact welcome, is the idea that The Life of Pablo will never actually be finished."
- Winston Cook-Wilson
The idea of adding to an existing record, editing it, polishing it, and allowing consumers to experience it immediately was a feat most notably pulled off 7 years later when Kanye West uploaded revisions of The Life of Pablo to several streaming services. He called it a “living, breathing, changing, creative expression.” Winston Cook-Wilson of Inverse praised it as “evidence of Kanye’s particular, thoroughly contemporary genius […] Everyone is paying attention, and engaging with this album—over time rather than all at once—thanks to the rapper’s disruption of the ephemeral hype cycle.” Jayson Greene of Pitchfork, however, warned that “If The Life of Pablo continues to drag on indefinitely, it seems likely that the magic will start to drain away.” Love it or hate it, Kanye actualized an exciting concept: the idea of sound evolving, mutating, and refining itself, coming into its own and creating a self-contained universe.
But do we really need to look solely at album formats and marketing tactics to find examples of a sound that is boundlessly sprawling and privy to incessant alteration? Of course not.
The notion of a sound that is alive and self-reflexive is present today more than ever in popular music. It is what Frank Ocean does when he modulates, reproduces, and alters his voice, turning it into its own instrument. In his most recent release, a you-didn’t-know-it-would-work-until-you-heard-it cover of Moon River, Ocean utilizes the effect he discovered in Blonde and turns his voice into a soundscape that stretches towards infinity. With one voice, one note even, Ocean can create a discordant choir of Oceans, which dialogue with one another.
DJ Shadow knows what it's like to wander through that basement, find some buried treasure and resurrect it for millions of listeners, like an irrational God on beats 'n breaks Judgment Day.
- Chris Dahlen
Sampling is an older, even better example of a sound that echoes without becoming myopic. The genre of hip-hop was built upon it, from Chic’s borrowed riff in Rapper’s Delight to Kendrick Lamar’s backmasking of 24k Magic in Loyalty. In sampling a previously released song and allowing it to live again, artists liberate that sound from its predetermined confines, permitting it to breathe anew. The selection doesn’t even have to make sense—look at how SZA turns Justin Timberlake’s Set the Mood into a hauntingly melodic refrain in The Weekend, or how Drake got a sleepy one-hit-wonder song from 1972 (Timmy Thomas’ Why Can’t We Live Together) and cooked up Hotline Bling. Sampling confirms what we knew all along about sound: that it bore infinite capacity. In her gushing appraisal of Darren Aronofsky’s polarizing horror film mother!, performance artist Marina Abramović said that “a good work of art has many lives.” The music sample embodies this brilliant insight, its lifespan is endless so long as DJs and producers continue reshaping those records.
The effect of sampling is, to appropriate a term used by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, heteroglossic. Several voices are invited to interact on a track that lives and breathes. What does it say about the current state of music when sound is treated as something unfixed and malleable, when it is allowed to transcend its own boundaries and inhabit new territories? It means that technology has enabled everything to be recorded and stored, ready for repeated use, never wearing out. It means that we have fully realized that sound is not easily killed, and that when it does die, it is reincarnated over and over.
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