Great review today in the New York Times on the Beatles’ Capitol reissues. The issue at hand: all of the Beatles albums have based their CD release on the British Parlophone version. While more definitive, they’re quite different, with different songs and track orders. As the All Music Guide explains,
The Beatles were hardly the only British rock & roll band to have their LPs released in different incarnations in the US. During the height of the British Invasion in the mid-’60s, it was standard practice for US record labels to shuffle songs between records, either to help promote singles or squeeze out as much product as they could out of a limited number of songs, and since LPs were released in both mono and stereo mixes, there several different variations on the basic album on the marketplace. This was done without the artist’s consent, and the Beatles protested the issue with the notorious "butcher" cover of the US album Yesterday and Today, where the Fab Four dressed up in butchers coats surrounded by decapitated baby dolls and raw meat — not a subtle criticism, but not an inaccurate one, either. After Sgt. Pepper ushered in the album-rock era, this practice faded away.
Of course, the story of the Beatles wasn’t the story of just the Beatles. Rather their repackaging was an index of a broad shift, as the rapid evolution of rock (as a distinct entity from rock-and-roll or pop) was intimately bound with the industrial evolution from a singles market to an album market. The single didn’t die, of course (nor did pop music), but eventually rock was able to establish an expressive voice in dialectical relationship to its commercial origins: championing the mass reproducible form of the vinyl LP yet resisting the logic of product interchangeability that the more Fordist minds of the culture industry wanted. The Beatles weren’t the only ones militating for album integrity (Kinks Kontroversy marks the beginning of a parallel struggle), but they were instrumental in shifting the industry’s recognition of the album as coherent unit.
Mind you, the directives of faceless corporate repackaging themselves could produce brilliant results. I have to agree with the Times article’s conclusion that
maybe it’s time to give Capitol’s production staff a measure of belated respect and to recognize, however heretical it may seem, that in some cases their sequences work better than the Beatles’ own. In its American incarnation, “Rubber Soul” (an album that will presumably be included in "The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2" along with "Beatles VI" and "The Early Beatles") begins with "I’ve Just Seen a Face," an acoustic track that starts with an assertive, beautifully detailed, fingerpicked guitar figure. In Britain, the song was virtually a throwaway, lost on Side 2 of the "Help!" album, released a few months earlier. But it thrives on "Rubber Soul," and given that the album is largely acoustic, it makes a better opener than the electric, bluesy "Drive My Car," which kicks off the British version.
In general, though the American Rubber Soul is the exception, cohering much better than the British. The US Revolver, for instance, is flat-out inferior, missing crucial tracks like "I’m Only Sleeping" and "Dr. Roberts."
As an afterthought, it’s worth asking if rock today is losing the album as a unit of expression. After all, while the post-Strokes, retro-postpunk rock revival is probably no more singles-driven than 90s alternative radio rock, there seems to be no counterpart fetishizing the album, no Slanted and Enchanted or Guyville or Alien Lanes. Even the singles-heavy Britpop movement produced some fine albums qua albums.
It’s likely the iPodization will encourage a single- and mix-driven consumption of music, but I’m not sure empirically how and when we’ll know this has happened. Similarly, a younger generation will come to rock without layers of expectations of what an album means - though they’re perfectly capable of retroactively learning it. After all, at some point I dug up Beatles and Velvet Underground records and learned the joys of wholes greater than their parts.
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