Thursday, February 10, 2005
(10:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Pop Music and Temporality
For several months, I have been unable to "get into" Wilco's A Ghost is Born. I listened to it several times when it first came out, then basically set it aside. Now, however, it is going through a renaissance, and I think I've figured out why: A Ghost is Born is a morning album. It works best from around 9 to 11 in the morning -- something with the precise angle of the sunlight, the relative emptiness of my apartment building as everyone else goes to work, the abject laziness of the whole affair. Radiohead's Kid A, by contrast, is definitely a study album, but it's a studying at night album. It doesn't work right in the morning. The same goes for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.A prime example of an afternoon album is In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel -- that one hits its sweet spot somewhere right between 2:30 and 4. Lou Reed's Transformer fits into the same general time slot, but it's especially effective on weekends, whereas Neutral Milk Hotel is very much a weekday band.
Albums sometimes have seasons associated with them as well. For instance, Adore by Smashing Pumpkins (brutally underrated, by the way) is definitely a summer album -- and none of this early June, walk around with a t-shirt and get a slight chill kind of thing. We're talking mid-July to full-out August. Every Weezer album is also a summer album, except for Pinkerton, which is a fall album. REM's New Adventures in Hi-Fi (also underrated, but universally acknowledged as such) is a winter album.
AN UNRELATED ADDITION: I decided to try giving something up for Lent this year, since my piety levels have declined to near-record lows. So I'm giving up coffee. If I were you, I'd buy stock in tea manufacturers, because their profits will be soaring for the next 40 days or so.
