The death of the Album Side

When I was a wee young lad, the local FM station in town did something called an “Album Side” every Wednesday night at 8 pm.  It was a great way to hear half of an album before plunking down five hard-earned dollars at the record store.  It was also a way to sometimes get a recording of half of the songs on the album using the trusty stereo cassette deck.

Technics SL-1200 turntable
Technics SL-1200 Turntabe

By way of these unauthorized recordings, I accumulated a bunch of cassette tapes that had bands like Aerosmith on one side and Foreigner on the other.  Often, the last 8-10 minutes of a cassette tape side would be silent.  This, coupled with the auto-reverse mechanism on the cassette deck often lead to confusion with my high school sweetheart… the music ends, then while we were otherwise distracted, and several minutes later, the music begins again at high volume.

I grew up in much simpler times than these.

In any case, the advent of the CD pretty much ruined the concept of album sides.  It means much less to somebody to have a show where one would play “half the songs on a CD, one after another, without commercials or liners.”  When CDs became the norm for music playback somewhere in the late 1980’s early 1990s so went the album side.  These days, with computers, MP3, and all the other music storage mediums, most people wouldn’t even know what an album side was.  The shame of it is, it was a great selling tool for the record industry.  Even though I owned those bootleg cassette tapes, later on, I went out and bought almost all of the albums that I had illegally recorded off of the radio.  To get the other side.

Oh. My. God. Becky, look at her butt…

This is The Stairway to Heaven for a different decade.

It is so big. She looks like, one of those rap guys’ girlfriends. But, you know, who understands those rap guys?
They only talk to her, because, she looks like a total prostitute, ‘kay?

Ordinarily, I don’t much go in for such things as rap music.  But this is entertaining and somewhat universal.

Hard to believe that it was almost twenty years ago. Almost every lyric in that song is innuendo for some sex act. Like it. Dislike it. No rules were broken when making this song. It went to number 1 on the Billboard chart in the summer of 1992 and no radio station anywhere ever received a fine for playing it.  It was quite scandalous at the time, of course, we were young and naive then.   Things have changed.

To the beanpole dames in the magazines: You ain’t it, Miss Thing!

It occurs to me that part of the reason that the radio industry sucks is that the music industry sucks.  The radio and music industry used to have a symbiotic relationship, each benefiting greatly from the existence of the other.  Of course, the greed and poor business practices of the last decade have driven every fun and thus entertaining element away from both industries.   Leave it to the bean counters, who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Sadly, no hit that I have heard on the top 40 stations these days even comes close to the entertainment value of this 18-year-old song.