The Discovery of Sub-Albumic Particles

Time was when the masters of Musicology practiced an archane and dark art. They wore flowing garments and charms, slept in subterranean quarters and ascended into the world of men only to bring blessings and tunes to house-parties and car tape-decks. They were melody-making medicine-men, Judas Priests if you will...Alright, they were the no-account longhair with the lazy eye at the Zeppelin concert; the roadie who could tune your Stratocaster pitch-perfect, but who couldn't play a lick himself; the guy in the garage with the headphones and the spliff; the Star Wars kid at the record store who could name all the David Bowie b-sides from the Ziggy Stardust to the foppish-fascist eras. They were the connoisseurs. They were the aficianados. They were the Tambourine Men---and they dealt exclusively in records.

Forgive me, I've just introduced a rather technical term of art without explicitly defining it. By record (record-album) will be meant, variously:

(a) A set of musical recordings stored together in jackets under one binding.
(b) The holder for such recordings.
(c) One or more 12-inch long-playing records in a slipcase.
(d) A phonograph record.
(e) A recording of different musical pieces.

There. Now, I'm sure even the most thorougly modern millie among you has come across one of these artifacts at one time or another. I remember my first find: It was at a waste disposal site about a hundred meters from from my basecamp. I stumbled upon 40 to 50 largely or fully intact specimens dating from the Late Acid-Lithic to the early Funktaceous. Most of the glyphics were too faded to be analyzed, but I conjectured from what was left of the markings on one sample that it was recorded by an artist formerly known (among contemporaries) as "Prince".

Needless to say my amateur musicological discoveries spurred me into investigating the archaeology of albums further. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a sort of faux-record shop in a local mall called "Tower Records". As it happens, "Tower Records" sells digitized plastic reproductions of record-albums, complete with replica dust jackets and liner notes! Who knew you could get mp3s for money??!?!

Since my awakening, I've become a bit of a reactionary vis-a-vis musicological theory. As those of you versed in the modern orthodoxies know, the at-the-time inconsequential discovery of sub-albumic particles ("singles"), as pioneered by the work of Casey Casem and Dick Clark in the 1950s and 1960s in particular, has led to the formulation of the radical "quantum" musicological mechanics, which explains musicological phenomena in terms of their "wave functions" (i.e. in terms of how often in a given time interval t they are broadcast over a given television or radio wave). The fundamental unit of analysis in quantum musicology (as opposed to the record-album of classical mechanics) is the "hook". The hook is not only sub-albumic, but sub-singular in nature (that is, it is smaller than a record single). Proponents of the hook mechanics claim that practical musicological systems (such as clubs, request shows, and even concerts) which at one time necessitated the time-consuming and tedious employment of singles or even entire albums, can now be recreated using only sub-albumic hooks (see the Usher World tour 2003-2004). These sympathizers further point to the tremendous explanatory power of the theory and its ability to accomodate the facts about teeny-boppers and metrosexual club-kids everywhere. Recent theoretical strides made by the collaborations of Aguilera and Daly (1998), Spears and Daly (1999), Nelly and Daly (2001) and Quddus and Kelis (2004) have only solidified Quantum Musicology's place as the dominant research paradigm of our generation.

As for me, I only wish that I didn't have to resort to such painfully overextended metaphors and third-rate wordplay to convince you troglodytes that you probably ought to listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Blonde on Blonde, or Ring of Fire, or Pet Sounds, or London Calling or Born in the motherfucking U.S.A. at least once before you die from lack of novelty.

-The Man in Black