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Blur, Fool's Day. Free Download.May 13 '10 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line CDs vs. Downloads. The battle has barely even begun.
This is going to be an essay on many topics. Firstly, the category I am posting under, will your children listen to CDs? The short answer, no. Secondly, the selected track, Fool's Day by Blur, released on 17th April 2010 on 7", then issued as a free digital download from the band's website, that is, here: http://www.blur.co.uk Thirdly, the sobering and embarrassing fact that I've only recently discovered I like Blur, so where better to start than the end. A short history of me and Blur. I picked up the best of Blur many a year ago while I was still at university, the collection with the amazing Julian Opie cover art, on exhibition at the London National Portrait Gallery no less. My then girlfriend, when I showed her my purchase, cleverly uttered "Bleurgh!" (get it?). Perhaps in part due to this reaction, I never quite got into it. Also, some bands just don't benefit from the best-of compilation treatment. Blur is one such band. Somehow that best-of is impenetrable where the albums are instantly engaging. Anyway, aside from obviously liking Song 2 and Coffee & Tv, and irrationally hating Parklife (I don't anymore), I got on with my life with only the occasional abortive spin of the album. Cut a long and really rather tedious story short, I bought all the albums and heard all about their free interweb only download new single, Fool's Day. Whilst the band are confirming and denying nothing, it appears there will be more new material but not necessarily a new album, because they're all rather busy: Damon Albarn with Gorillaz, Graham Coxon with his solo career, David Rowntree with standing for election as Member of Parliament for Cities Of London and Westminster Constituency Labour Party (he lost), and Alex James doing, uh, other stuff. The song. It's amazing. With Graham Coxon back after abandoning recording of Think Tank in 2003, guitars are front and centre again on this curiously both catchy and off-kilter pop-rocker. The jangled guitars switch into the rather more jagged bridges, while Albarn spins a suburban London yarn that for the most part seems to trace his daily travels around the city. Blur have always excelled at painting portraits of the city, brining it to life through the characters that inhabit their songs and albums, turning the city into another character. Here the jabbing rhythm changes in the guitars and vocal delivery go some way to suggesting the stop and start nature of life in the city, caught up in the traffic jams and queues of modern life. TV on, Of course caffeine and signs Of submission again Another day On this little island Just a bell hangs on The syncopated rhythms feel like the traffic, the pedestrian flows, the million and one tasks and habits of daily life fed back into the music. The self-referential TV and caffeine invocation turns directly into a first-person narrative as it becomes clear Albarn really is, simply, describing the world around him. The studio And a love of all sweet music We just can't let go The whole thing is couched in the description of a cold day in springtime, a day in April, fool's day. The track fades out on its electric guitar groove, like a wheel that can't quite stop spinning. Let's be honest, the whole daily grind modern life scenario has been done to death, this isn't a scorchingly original song, but it is undeniably clever and beautifully played. Obviously, there is yet life in Blur, even though the main focus of the individual band members seems to reside elsewhere. Since it's free, you may just as well go away, download it, and enjoy it. Which leads me back to the whole download thing. Clearly a much too massive topic which has already been flogged to death. But this is the case anytime there is a major format switch. We are clearly teetering on the edge of a format paradigm shift, but for some reason we all seem unwilling to jump. Sure, downloading the odd song here and there such as this one isn't exactly going to spell the end for CDs. In Blur's case, they are simply using the possibility afforded to them by the internet to disseminate material that they presumably weren't going to make much money from anyway (any money was already made by the 7" single, and that can't have been much either). They just want to let Blur fans know that a) they still exist, and b) this is what they're up to. This is particularly the case if it's true that there's no album in the pipeline. Also, officially, the song was released on 7" to celebrate Record Store Day. Although then turning around and issuing the song for free is precisely the sort of thing that might eventually sink record shops. Aside from the odd precariously surviving indie store, the large shops are already only stocking multi-million sellers, new releases and absolutely nothing even remotely obscure. But anyway. The internet experiment is still well underway. From the Radiohead pay-what-you-can approach of In Rainbows, to the free-download before CD-issue approach of Smashing Pumpkins to the pay for download, then pay for CD approach of Ash. Nobody quite knows how to exploit the medium, and most crucially nobody knows how to make it profitable. Radiohead, after all, eventually released a CD too. Billy Corgan is posting the songs for his unwieldy Teargarden project on the band website free of charge, and then issuing unwieldy expensive 4-track EP sets containing vinyl, CD and (for some reason) obelisks. And Ash claimed they would go all-digital and then go and release a CD anyway. And then of course there are the well-established download sites like i-tunes. They offer the comfort of instant gratification with the risk of irrecoverable data loss. Ultimately, a CD will last longer than any CD-R. And personal experience has taught me that the external hard-disk is no sure-fire solution either way. This isn't an uncertainty that's going to go away overnight. But just like the 1.44mb floppy disc has recently retired, so too the CD will eventually go the way of the Dodo. But in order for that transition to happen, we need a reliable format to replace the CD, and no one trusts hard-drives or computers which are temperamental at best, not conveniently portable and subject to viruses, faults and Microsoft software. It really would be a Fool's day to ditch CDs in the short term.  |
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