Fade Outs Fading Out

About three months ago, I decided to try an experiment. Having had an mp3 player for all of ten months, I discovered that I actually had so much stuff on there that I now couldn’t remember what I actually had on there. This isn’t because I am some sort of profligate nitwit who buys music, loads it onto his mp3 player and then forgets it is there (I confess to being a profligate nitwit, just not that sort of profligate nitwit). The problem is more that my brother in law very kindly loaded huge chunks of his very extensive collection onto it when I bought it and I’ve never quite worked out what he did put there, other than that it used up 90% of the 30GB memory.

My experiment, therefore, was to see how long it would take to play every album that is on there, in alphabetical order. On average, I get about 30 minutes of listening time a day, Monday to Friday. That’s about 7 songs a day, or 2/3 of an album. Three months in and I’ve not even got to the end of ‘B’ yet – although I have listened to all of the albums whose titles begin with brackets and numbers, before you start getting worried about how much I have on there. It has been a voyage of discovery, with some forgotten gems, some utter rubbish (which I deleted) and some interesting juxtapositions; for example, I’ve recently listened to Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’, followed by 10,000 Maniacs’ ‘Blind Man’s Zoo’ and then The Cure’s ‘Bloodflowers’.

It was whilst listening to the first of those albums that I made an interesting – at least to me – discovery. As ‘Negative Creep’ faded out, it suddenly dawned on me that album tracks simply don’t do that any more. The fade out has, literally, been faded out. Nowadays, every track on every album either has a neat, crisp ending, or runs directly into the next song.

I always thought that the fade out was a bit of a cop out anyway. If a band plays a song live, you don’t expect them to end it by getting quieter and quieter until you can’t hear it any more. You expect songs to have clearly defined endings. OK, every now and then the band might segue one into another, but you can’t do that for a whole show. Not unless you’re Tangerine Dream, anyway.

Despite this, I’m kind of sad that the fade out is no more. It guess this is how I would feel if politicians became extinct, in that I don’t much like them and would take a while to notice they had gone, but at the same time it feels vaguely wrong not to have them there any more.