Far Out Magazine - From Kate Bush to Paul McCartney: how the CD made rock history
From the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s to Radiohead’s Kid A, the history of rock is fixated with the long-play record. Superseding 78s at the end of the 1950s, the album era of the 60s saw artists conceptualize their work within the expanded parameters of the new medium. Typically twenty minutes per side, broken down into four to six tracks, LPs were a hit with music producers and consumers alike. The Beatles’ Revolver and Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds are both definitive of the genre and period, elevating pop to a level previously occupied by Art music and classical forms. As rock moved into the 1970s, the double LP gained popularity, particularly for live recordings, as concept albums like Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Pink Floyd’s The Wall began to proliferate.
While punk reminded audiences of the excitement of the 7-inch single and 12-inch mixes were central to disco, the vinyl LP continued to be the key format on which new music was consumed well into the 1980s. The launch of the CD did little to change this. Beginning with Abba’s The Visitors in 1982, the next few years saw a slow trickle of releases that included Billy Joel’s 52nd Street and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. Aside from the limitations of the catalogue, the cost was also a prohibitive factor in attracting consumers to the new medium. In its early years, the CD was far more successful at gaining a foothold in the audiophile community of classical music fans, where its superior sound fidelity was a unique selling point.
All this changed in the second half of the 1980s, as the cost of the new technology settled down, and the original Baby Boomer teenagers of the 1960s found themselves in a position of middle-aged affluence. Much is made of the release of Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms as the album that kickstarted the CD revolution. Concurrent to Live Aid, it was a fully digital recording and the first release to sell more than a million copies on the new format. However, it was the re-release of the Beatles’ back catalogue in 1987 that made the CD the first choice for hi-fi aficionados. When Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band peaked at number 3 in the summer of 1987, the concept of the ‘classic album’ was born.
In the aftermath, came a deluge of CD releases by contemporaries to The Beatles, including The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Kinks, and Jimmy Hendrix. Look at the 80s cover stars of the newly launched Q magazine and it is clear that the legacy of artists from the 60s and 70s was being repositioned as a heritage product. The CD had become a consumer event around which the history of rock was being constructed, a history that was, coincidentally, very white, male, and guitar-orientated. While the Beatles’ cache was sufficient to justify the extra investment in an individual album, Sgt. Pepper’s was the only ‘classic album’ to actually make the Top 10. Far more popular was the compilation album re-release, or ‘greatest hits’ as they were often stylized.
Between 1986 and 1996 the greatest hits was a tour de force, peaking in 1992 with twenty-nine compilations making the Top 10, and forty-seven percent of the end of year Top 30 comprised of re-releases and anthologies. Big selling greatest hits of that era included Eurythmics, Queen, Tina Turner, Madonna, Paul Young, Cher, and Simple Minds. In part, this was because the greatest hits album represented excellent value for money. At a time when CDs were approximately a third more expensive than vinyl and cassette editions, the greatest hits offered a sure return on a relatively high investment. The success of the greatest hits album was also about the generational shift. The nostalgia of middle-aged Baby Boomers had outmaneuvered the diminished cultural prerogative of Generation X. It is here, we also encounter the first generation Y teenagers, who would go on to become the Millennial consumers of pop-history in the 21st Century.
The success of the greatest hits also represented a very liminal time in British pop, coinciding with both the end of the 1980s and an anticipation of the 21st Century. It was a moment of cultural retrospection, apprehensive about the future and sentimental about the past. The CD encapsulated this. Fixing the legacy of popular music stars for future generations. The format also marked a full-stop for several key artists including Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, Spandau Ballet, etc. For some, like Sting, Paul Weller, and Annie Lennox, they were the springboard to solo superstardom. While for others, they were a curse, reframing a contemporary brand as a heritage product, and curating back catalogues as artifacts in an imaginary museum. Like snakes and ladders, a blockbuster greatest hits had the potential to derail solo careers, induce writer’s block, or conclude an imperial phase. Here we take a look at ten killer best-ofs that changed the way audiences thought about rock history, pigeon-holing individuals as “album artists”, placing some on a pedestal, while serving to fix others in a particular time window or identity.
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Far Out Magazine - From Kate Bush to Paul McCartney: how the CD made rock history
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