Skip to My Lou, but Never Any Tracks on a Good Album
Prompt Twitter asks for an album that has no skips once a month. I examine what that means.
I’m not sure I qualify as an audiophile. Sure, I listen to a lot of music, but it’s mostly confined do the annals of rock ‘n roll. It feels like you should listen to more than one supergenre to consider yourself a connoisseur of sound. It won’t stop me from releasing an Album of the Year list (on this newsletter!!!) at the end of the year, but I mean, maybe I should make an attempt to listen to more hip-hop or EDM or jazz. Still, when I listen to music, I curate my library to have albums I want to listen to all the way through. Some albums have the odd track that doesn’t mesh, like Radiohead’s OK Computer with “Fitter, Happier,” or Stone Temple Pilots’ Core with “Wet My Bed.” There are some artists who have singular tracks I like on mediocre albums, but generally, most of the artists I listen to have albums that are at least tolerable listens all the way through.
Every month on Twitter, someone goes engagement hunting by posting the question “What album for you has no skips?” The question always vexes me, not because of the answers. Everyone has their own zen with music, their own center. There are some universal choices, obviously, but I don’t judge people for their choice of music unless that music happens to have, well, questionable messaging in the lyrics. You’d be surprised how many Nazis are still making propagandist music in 2021. Well, after the last six years in American politics, it’s not that surprising. But I digress.
What shocks me is that people can narrow it down to anywhere between one and a handful of answers. In a year when I have access to a streaming service and time to listen, I can rattle off 50 or more albums that have no skips. I imagine if I had the same capabilities in the time of my musical awakening in the early-to-mid ‘90s, I’d have an exponentially greater number of albums in that wheelhouse. It’s not to say that I have 50 albums that I consider among my favorite ever, but there’s such a wide gap between the lowest rung of “no skips” and “best ever” to me that engagement hunting on that question so many times in a given year feels baffling. Wouldn’t the more precise question be “what is your favorite album ever?” but people hate asking questions with those absolutes. They’re always plumbing the depths in areas between “best” and “worst” for reasons I can’t understand.
The same issue comes in with discussing anything else, or music in a different way. It’s just in a slightly different package with the idea of discussing what’s “overrated” or “underrated” rather than what’s good or not. The discussion is always half-baked, lukewarm. No one wants to commit to making a proclamation as strong as “good” or “bad,” so proxy terms are inserted to prevent against said proclamations aging poorly. It’s one part cowardice and one part “people never learning how to disagree with each other on unimportant topics without getting heated.” A generation raised first on message boards then on social media where it’s harder to keep an isolated consensus without attracting people to your defense without needing them in person was able to get out of pocket without the threat of taking a punch to the nose if your tone got a little too personal. I’m a huge fan of the Internet and social media, don’t get me wrong, but the threat of physical violence, though not ideal, was always a great way to make sure you didn’t get too flippant. I don’t want to laud it too much lest I sound like a dinosaur boomer though.
Rather than saying “this album is one of the best ever,” the debate now gets couched in much less “confrontational” language. Oh, this album is “good enough not to skip a single song.” It feels mealy-mouthed, especially to me, someone who considers normal music listening with respect to albums not skipping them. If an album has one-to-four good songs outside of the rest of the unlistenable trash, then you put it on a playlist and be done with it. But then I realized that I’m probably not a “normal” consumer of music. I claim not to be an audiophile, sure, but the more I realize how people interact with music, the more I feel like I’m apart from the crowd. It’s neither a good or a bad thing, just a different thing.
I would venture to guess most people do not listen to several albums a day in one sitting. Terrestrial radio is sputtering, but people still sub to satellite radio or let algorithms generate playlists for them. The A&R men Tom Petty sang about with such scorn still work at record companies, and streaming services have not diminished their jobs one single bit. They still work to find the catchiest, widest-ranging, most profitable songs from an artist’s recording session to release them as singles. People still are exposed to those singles more. I can’t blame folks for not taking a whole-hog approach to music that I do, mainly because everyone has their own areas of interest. Some people are more in tune with movies. Some watch sports film to know enough things to get hired by a franchise. Some people get really into video games. Not everyone goes deeper than the singles.
Are you a full-album music fan, or do you make playlists with the singles? No shame, leave a comment!
So for them, the idea of listening to a whole album probably is tied to the quality. They don’t have time to listen to every album of which their playlist or radio sampling opens for them, but man, if their favorite artist comes out with a new LP, they are all over it. Perhaps my initial read on “no skips” isn’t that it’s an arm of the “over/underrated” malaise infecting online discussion. Perhaps it’s a way for people to prioritize what they want to listen to most, the things that make them feel best inside.
Twitter is full of accounts, most egregiously Rex Chapman and Eric Alper, inundating timelines with engagement bait. It can be overwhelming to get through your entire follow list engaging them, especially when the people who pose the questions recycle them so often. I guess there are worse things on social media than rote engagement churning. I mean, I already noted that somehow, America has a Nazi problem in 2021 when an entire war was fought not even a century ago on how wrong that ideology was. It’s easy to get annoyed when you look at some of those questions from a point of view that is off kilter. The key is perspective, and if that fails, maybe you just have to realize not everything that gets put out is for your consumption.