 This video is brought to you by Nebula. If you head over to the link in the description, you can check out an exclusive episode of Cover Stories where I talk about the cover of Rage Against the Machine's self-titled debut album. Ever since the birth of the MP3, there's been a pervasive line of thought that keeps rearing its ugly head in music circles. It goes something like this. With all this new technology, nobody's going to listen to albums anymore. Music is devolving into short attention spans that only care about single songs. Time and time again, these doomsayers wail that the album is a dying art. In 2008, at the beginning of the iPod era, Billy Corgan told the Chicago Tribune that there would be no point in the Smashing Pumpkins releasing more albums. He complained, listeners put it on their iPod, they drag over the two singles, and skip over the rest. And yet, the 2010s saw the release of countless classic albums. The panic set in again in 2019 as streaming was taking over the world. When Taylor Swift, the last major holdout of physical-only releases, put Lover on streaming services in 2019, Quartz Magazine announced it would be the last CD they'd ever buy. People called this yet another death knell of the album. But over the next three years, Taylor Swift would release three albums that had an aesthetic vision and sequencing with the exact same ethos as releases from the golden age of the album in the 1970s. In fact, not only has Taylor Swift been releasing albums, she's been releasing concept albums, something even more rooted in the bygone era of the 70s. And in September 2022, 14 years after Billy Corgan proclaimed that there would be no point in releasing albums anymore, the Smashing Pumpkins announced not just a new album, but an ambitious three-part concept album. The concept album is the logical conclusion and extension of the album as a medium. One might think that if the album was an irrelevant medium because of short attention spans and easier access to single songs, then the concept album would be just as dead, if not more so. And yet the early 20s have seen concept album releases from many of the biggest names in the music world. Artists like The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, and BTS have all released ambitious concept albums since the decade turned. So not only is the album as a medium not dying, but its most extreme form, the concept album, is flourishing. There's a decent argument to be made that in modern music, nearly every new release is a concept album. But why is that? Why are we so drawn to concept albums? Where did they come from in the first place? And how have they grown to be so pervasive in the modern music scene? Let's take a closer look. There's no universally accepted definition of a concept album. While the term conjures images of 70s rock stars doing sprawling space themed operas, the reality is that a concept album encompasses so much more. A concept album is a loose term for a set of tracks which hold a larger meaning when together than apart, usually achieved through adherence to a central theme. What consists of a central theme is kind of up for debate. The most clear examples of these are albums that are narrative like the Who's Tommy, but themes can also be more open and broad like dark side of the moon's take on the modern human experience. Themes can even be instrumental like the electric versus acoustic sides of Bob Dylan's bringing it all back home. These examples are all born from a specific era, but people have been trying to create thematically linked songs for centuries. Some of the earliest examples of proto concept albums are song cycles. Predating the album as we know it by over 700 years, some song cycles have been identified as early as the 13th century. But it was in 18th century Germany that the practice began to shape western musical tradition. As Germany's middle class became the main patron of the arts, popular song compositions shifted from accessible folk songs into more art focused, small scale lyrical poetry set to music called Lieder. Early adopters of Lieder were famous composers like Beethoven and Schubert. While these precursors would go on to inform the concept albums of today, a written collection of songs is not necessarily an album. You see an album is not just an aesthetic medium, it's also a technological form linked closely to the history of recorded music. When we take into account the technological aspects, the earliest concept album might be Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Balance. That's a collection of 11 tracks telling the story of the Dust Bowl and how it impacted people across America. But Guthrie was visionary. His concept predated the technology that defined albums as we think of them today. It needed to be released across two 78rpm three disc sets. Even then Guthrie had to cut two tracks for length and split Tom Joed into a two part song. More than a decade later, Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours suffered a similar fate. Sinatra conceived the project as a cohesive 12 inch LP, but producers didn't think it would work. They originally released In The Wee Small Hours as a two volume set with each disc containing eight songs. Both In The Wee Small Hours and Dust Bowl Ballads would eventually get re-released as singular LPs that conform closer to our understanding of an album. The first concept album to be released like that out of the gate might be Marty Robbins' Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs which came out to Universal Acclaim in 1959. The narrative nature of country music made the genre a natural fit for concept albums. Around the same time, Johnny Cash was experimenting with his own thematic releases. Songs of Our Soil is a morbid concept album linked by songs around death, while Ride This Train is a musical travelog. Country can lay claim to many of the earliest concept albums, but the medium really started to define itself with The Rock Revolution in the 1960s. In 1964, the instrumental rock band The Ventures released The Ventures in Space, an instrumental album defined by otherworldly sci-fi inspired songs. Over the next few years, the psychedelic revolution hit America and Britain, bringing with it a number of pseudo concept albums that explored psychedelic soundscapes. This vision was pushed by two of the biggest bands on earth, The Beatles and The Beach Boys. By this point, the LP had caught on as the default format for musical releases, allowing musicians to have more scope and vision for their album. It's easy to assume that the counter-cultural revolution was the sole catalyst for this era of concept albums, but it was actually a small piece of packaging technology that really helped the concept album soar. That piece of technology was called The Gatefold. Gatefold records opened up like books, which meant they had double the space to convey information. These gatefolds could include liner notes and photographs that helped to explain esoteric thematic concepts. Additionally, bands started to include inserts in their albums, enabling deeper listener immersion. In 1967, The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, complete with a gatefold depiction of the band as their Sergeant Pepper alter egos, and inserts with cutouts and lapel badges that let fans pretend to be in the band. To this day, many celebrate Sergeant Pepper's as the first proper concept album, but the concept behind Sergeant Pepper's isn't really clear or tight. The Beatles introduced themselves as this alternate band and then play a bunch of Beatles songs. In an interview with Playboy, John Lennon himself denied that Sergeant Pepper's could truly be counted as a concept album. But some of the Beatles' contemporaries were really exploring the concept album at the same time. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were releasing surreal, experimental albums connected by cohesive themes. 1966's Freak Out is a satire on American pop culture and the LA Freak scene, while Absolutely Free released the very same day as Sergeant Pepper's extends this satire into American politics. By the late 60s, a new flavor of concept album was beginning to emerge, the Rock Opera. Combining rock music with the narrative practices of opera and musical theater, these albums were much more direct and clear in their concepts. The Pretty Things 1968 album, SF Sorrow, is often credited as the first Rock Opera. It follows a single character through his entire life from birth to death. A year later, the Who would up the ante for rock operas with Tommy, a sprawling and surreal double album that told the story of a deaf, mute blind boy who injures trauma after trauma before becoming a pinball savant and rising to lead a cult movement. Look, the 60s were weird. The success of Tommy helped to lead an explosion of rock operas across the 70s. The Who released another in Quadrophenia. David Bowie invented his Ziggy Stardust character. Frank Zappa released the three actor Joe's Garage and Genesis created their masterpiece, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. These rock operas explored alternate realities and divergent timelines and epic sagas. They were often accompanied by elaborate stage productions during live shows. This style of rock opera reached its zenith in 1979, when Pink Floyd released The Wall, an enormously successful album that spawned a movie and one of the most elaborate live tours that had ever been staged to date. But not every artist was interested in the fantastic. While rock was indulging itself in elaborate concept albums, soul music was taking a more grounded approach. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On is written from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran who comes home from the war to witness hatred, suffering, and injustice. Sly and the Family Stone responded to that with There's a Riot going on, while Curtis Mayfield's Superfly served as a film soundtrack but also addressed many of the social ills of the time. Meanwhile, Stevie Wonder released his all-encompassing Songs in the Key of Life. Of course, not all of the funk was grounded. Parliament Funkadelic released a number of concept albums that were strange in the way that only P-Funk could ever be. The most notable of these is Mothership Connection, which framed its concept around FM radio. This sort of imaginary radio station conceit would go on to appear in all sorts of concept albums in the decades to come. The 70s were a golden age for the concept album. It was a time when musicians had the space and budget to experiment, and when new technologies were pushing music into entirely unexpected places. This technology saw the emergence of electronic music, a genre that's heavy on concept. In 74, Kraftwerk released the Proto-EDM Autobahn, which was a concept album that tried to emulate the feelings of a long drive. In Disco, Giorgio Moroder worked with Donna Summer to make the smash hit concept album I Remember Yesterday. These two albums are some of the progenitors of EDM, a genre that wholeheartedly embraces concept albums. EDM artists will sequence tracks to create a feeling and emotional journey, often imagining the work as the soundtrack to some film. Some of these films are real, like Daft Punk's work on Tron Legacy, or Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the social network, but others, like Carpenter Brute's Leather Teeth, are wholly imagined. Through the 1980s, Prog Rock and Metal picked up the concept album Baton, with groups like Iron Maiden, Queensrice, and Sticks releasing concept album after concept album. But by the time the 90s came around, punk rock scenes were lashing out against this sort of musical indulgence. Grunge stripped away any attempt at concept albums, making a point of doing simple, loud music. But while Rock was getting back to its roots, hip hop was diving head first into the concept album. Cool Keith's Dr. Octagonicologist was a strange psychedelic hip hopper, and Daile Soule started linking albums together with comedic skits between songs. When the new millennium hit, Deltron 3030 released their self-titled debut, a masterful Afrofuturist concept album that harkened back to the works of P-Funk. In the prog and metal scenes, artists like Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater were pushing concept albums to more and more ambitious places. Meanwhile, the pop punk and emo movements started to bring the concept album back to rock. Blink 182's 2003 untitled album tells the story of a dying relationship. NoFX's War on Errorism is a protest album against American imperialism, and Green Day's American Idiot is a sprawling rock opera about a politically disillusioned Jesus of Suburbia. This movement culminated with 2006's The Black Parade, a seminal rock opera by My Chemical Romance. That album was an homage to the great rock operas of generations past, and even featured the band going full circle with an emo take on the Sgt. Pepper's band attire. Together, the emo and prog scenes gave birth to Cohed and Cambria, a band whose entire vision takes the concept album to the next level with an ongoing storyline called The Emery Wars, told through a series of concept albums and comic books. By the 2010s, concept albums were everywhere. Basically, every release Kanye West has ever done can be seen as a concept album, and indie rock groups like Arcade Fire were winning acclaim with high concept art rock pieces. Janelle Monet picked up the Afrofuturist torch with her Ark Android sagas, and clipping executed musical fiction with hitherto unseen cohesion on Splendor and Misery. Meanwhile, some of hip hop's greatest auteurs were using the concept album to tell grounded stories of human struggle. Atrocity Exhibition is a harrowing portrait of addiction, while Good Kid Mad City is a cinematic portrayal of life in America's ghettoized slums. In the modern era, there's such a wealth of concept albums that it's honestly hard to keep up, and I'm sure that I've missed some of your favorites. Despite the constant shift of technology and cultural trends, concept albums have prevailed, and I think the reason for that is simple, human beings love story. Storytelling is built into our DNA, and the concept album lets us explore all the joys of narrative or thematic story with the sort of abstract emotional depth that only music can create. Concept albums also give an outlet for artists to express their multi-disciplinary ambitions. Album artwork, music videos, live performances, and liner notes all play integral roles in many of the greatest concept albums, allowing the form to expand beyond music. The technologies that we listen to music on might be changing, but I don't think that means any death of the concept album is imminent. In fact, the online world makes it easier than ever for artists to create multimedia projects that encourage fans to engage with their concepts. From Taylor Swift's moody lyric videos to Arcade Fire's interactive web experiences to 21Pilot's AR worldbuilding, the digital age is rife, with new avenues for concept albums to expand their vision. 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