Concept Album Research Articles

Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From The Beatles to Beyoncé

Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From The Beatles to Beyoncé

Postmodernism in Lord Of The Lost’s Judas: The apocryphal The Gospel of Judas, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the role of the stars

Lord Of The Lost’s Judas (2021) is a thematic concept album exploring different aspects of the Judas reception without a straightforward narrative or interpretation, but covering varying viewpoints on betrayal and salvation. It hereby pushes the boundaries of heavy metal as a genre by combining different texts. The band explicitly points out their first source of inspiration, the apocryphal The Gospel of Judas (~100–80 ad), and adds that the album also features the literary theme of impossible (here: brotherly) love. I argue that the album references a specific text implementing this theme, namely William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597), most prominently implied by ‘star-crossed’. These two texts are as different as they could be, contrasting, e.g. religious enlightenment and entertainment. Still, they have one thing in common: they both rely heavily on Christian astrology. By investigating how the album makes use of this shared motif to create its own version of star-induced fate, I show how both texts overlap and intermingle on the album. The result is a kaleidoscope that is a prime example of postmodernism. By refusing a fixed depiction of Christian imagery and even adding another text, Judas demonstrates that art does not have to be linear or limiting, and opens heavy metal to new, postmodern ways.

A second of structured chaos: Kosmos/chaos dialectic in Meshuggah’s Catch 33

Among the most frequent features of the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah’s music, there is an omni-presence of minor-second intervals and distorted eight-string guitars, a remarkable amount of odd time signatures, aggressive vocals and an endless attempt to thwart the listener’s expectations. In this case study I analyse the many contradictions present in Meshuggah’s album Catch 33 (2005), which I interpret as a concept album about paradox or a long single song (constituted by thirteen individual tracks not separated by breaks) that seeks to balance the variety, complexity, ‘imperfection’ of its starting material – the chaos side of the album’s style – with elements that promote order, intelligibility and ‘perfection’ – its kosmos side. By which musical means does the band represent contradiction and paradox in this album, and their style in general? I argue that there are specific musical (but also conceptual, lyrical, structural and contextual) reasons that make the album representative of the band’s discography and style, to the point of being possibly considered their quintessential work (despite often being labelled as an experimental entry in the band’s output), and one of the most coherent incarnations of (proto-)djent stylistic features. The kosmos/chaos dialectic is the idea I choose to describe the ongoing struggle for stability at work in this music, capable of magnifying the beauty of imperfection and the paradoxical truth behind the sentiment, expressed in the lyrics, that we are ‘sentenced to a lifetime | a second of structured chaos’.

Remixing Multimovement Works, Classical Music Concept Albums, and Twenty-First-Century Pianists’ Interpretations of the Canon

Nineteenth-century pianists routinely treated multimovement works—sonatas, suites, and character-piece sets—not as integral cycles but as sources of movements to excerpt, interpolate, and recombine. Exploring how five twenty-first-century pianists have adapted this practice illuminates the broader history of piano performance and the creative agency of performers invested in canonic works and ideals of Werktreue. Víkingur Ólafsson, Inon Barnatan, Alice Sara Ott, Khatia Buniatishvili, and Hélène Grimaud recombine multimovement works within the context of the concept album genre, a fixture of popular music largely unexplored within classical music. Within their opus-mixing concept albums, these pianists reinterpret the effect in performance and imagined cultural meaning of canonic repertoire. By determining an album’s track-to-track unfolding, they create original tonal, motivic, textural, and topical interrelationships and trajectories. The pianists, liner-note writers, and promoters also frame these albums with rich verbal discourses in which they assert this repertoire’s relevance and even contemporaneity for twenty-first-century listeners. Exploring these albums offers a glimpse of how performers of the classical canon navigate a twenty-first-century, digitally mediated media ecosystem. More broadly, it turns our attention to how this largely unexplored aspect of classical performance and recording shapes the way audiences encounter musical works and performers create public personae.

Koncept album – między teorią a praktyką i literaturą a muzyką. Próba wyostrzenia definicji i propozycja metody badania mechanizmów spójności

In its title, this article indicates two purposes. The first is to attempt to give a precise description of the category of the concept album, whose specificity (also in the opinion of foreign researchers) is usually described in a blurred, intuitive and rather imprecise way. This attempt is made through reference to the literary side of this kind of album. Based on these reflections, the author also attempts to create a typology of concept albums, which constitutes a fluent transition to the second purpose of the article, namely to propose (in terms of this field of knowledge, which we call linguistics of text and discourse) a method for analysing the coherence mechanisms seen in lyrics of this sort of album. Although it is not a theory in the strict sense, the author’s intention was to lend it a practical usability: it is an operation whose purpose is to support the interpretation of concept albums.

The rhetoric of recovery in Social Distortion’s White Light, White Heat, White Trash

Social Distortion’s 1996 album White Light, White Heat, White Trash is a concept album reflecting the recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) of lead singer and songwriter Mike Ness: twelve songs, with each of the songs describing Ness’s experience of the corresponding step in AA’s twelve-step programme. The rhetoric of recovery in the song lyrics has an intertextual relationship to Alcoholics Anonymous (the ‘Big Book’), with Ness’s lyrics quoting directly from the programme of recovery outlined in the basic text of AA. Though the rhetoric of recovery in the album reflects Ness’s own experience, it also demonstrates how individual authentic experience is constructed interdiscursively through broader cultural trends, both within the Lou Reed-inflected rockist history of guitars, drugs and confessional authenticity and, more broadly, how the rhetoric of recovery has permeated other genres of American popular music and culture.

“Appalachian Pride”

This article explores the ways in which sentimentality, self-reflexivity, and identity intersect with the rural settings of Dolly Parton’s concept album My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973) and June Carter Cash’s pivotal solo work Appalachian Pride (1975). The works of pioneering country music artists Carter Cash and Parton illustrate a recurrent tension within the genre, representing a reconciliation between the traditional lyrical and sonic identifiers of country music and the increasingly modern approach of the wider popular music industry. The creation of emotive and personal musical works, notably at the height of Carter Cash’s and Parton’s respective careers within the mainstream country music industry, enables a presentation of their experiences as both dichotomously aligned with the conventions of rural music of the United States and distinct from the mythology surrounding the Appalachia region and constructions of Southern femininities. Further showcasing the societal and cultural practices that evolved within Appalachian communities, specifically the complex roles and creative pursuits undertaken by female-identifying members, June Carter Cash and Dolly Parton combined their rural Southern upbringings with universal experiences of love and loss.

“What a Concept! What, a Concept? What Concept?” The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, and the Early Days of the Concept Album

While almost everyone agrees that the Beatles set the bar for the concept album, many would argue about possible precursors, rivals, and imitators. Two releases frame the Beatles’ two most important albums: the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension appeared on July 18, 1966, just weeks before the release of Revolver on August 5 and 8 (the British and US releases, respectively); while Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxter’s was released in late November 1967, nearly six months after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared on June 1 and 2. Fifth Dimension and After Bathing at Baxter’s each provides its own interpretation of how thirty to forty minutes of music, articulated by a break halfway through between the end of side one and the beginning of side two, should proceed. The Byrds create an artful succession of songs familiar from single releases and new material, generating a multitude of stylistic cross-references and binding the album together despite the variety of styles it embraces, including Dylanesque psychedelia, Coltrane-inspired jazz, and items from the traditional folk repertory. The Airplane, on the other hand, attempt to string groups of two or three songs together into “suites,” as the band terms them on the jacket, with greater or lesser success. But the overall structure of the album depends on the strength of the material with which each side begins and ends. Both Fifth Dimension and Baxter’s contribute their own perspectives on how the album could become a well-integrated, thoughtful, and creative collection of material.

The Album “Guernica” by the “KAT” band: a Musical Representation of a Painting by Pablo Picasso

Relevance of the study. Rock art has a syncretic origin and gravitates towards multi-level synthesis throughout the history of its development. Incorporating elements from other art forms is an essential characteristic of rock music. The trends in the interaction of art forms in the field of rock culture are considered on the example of the concept album “Guernica” by the “KAT” band, dedicated to the cognominal painting by Pablo Picasso. The main source of analysis is the audio recording of the album. The “Guernica” album is a vivid example of an artistic dialogue that takes place on the literary, musical and visual planes.
 The scientific novelty of the study. The concept album “Guernica” by the Ukrainian hardcore band “KAT”, dedicated to the painting of the same name by Pablo Picasso, for the first time became the object of musicological analysis and is considered as an example of synthesizing trends in the field of rock art.
 The main objective of the study is to determine the levels of artistic interactions between the concept album “Guernica” by the “KAT” band and the original painting by Pablo Picasso.
 The methodology is based on the contextual method (to consider rock art as a synthetic phenomenon) as well as methods of holistic (to describe the album), comparative and intermedial analysis (to identify the levels of artistic interaction between a piece of music and the original painting).
 Results of the study. The concept album “Guernica” by the hardcore band named “KAT” is not just a dedication to the cognominal painting by Pablo Picasso. Аrtistic dialogue between works of art takes place in the visual (album cover), literary (direct descriptions of the elements of the picture, the technique of seeing events from different angles borrowed from visual art, reportage style of texts) and musical plane (recitative intonations, fast drumbeats, extreme vocal techniques); on the descriptive (direct references to the elements of the picture) and emotional and figurative levels. The album is a vivid example of intermediality in the field of rock art.

Reception of Cultural Texts in the Progressive Rock Concept Albums

Relevance of research. The special place of progressive rock among other phenomena of popular music is not least due to its semantic richness, concentration of bold artistic ideas and originality of creative solutions, which immediately transferred this layer of pop culture into the category of “music for listening”. The main achievements of progressive rock belong to a relatively short period (late 1960s — mid 1970s). However, it had a significant impact on the further development of rock music and popular music in general. Many studio albums by progressive rock bands show signs of some kind of echo with a number of specific cultural texts, as well as with the systems of cultural codes.
 Main objective of the article is to describe the mechanisms of the work of the cultural memory in the processes of creating a new artistic integrity by demonstrating in the creative works of progressive rock groups the projections of cultural texts related to different traditions and layers of artistic heritage.
 The research methods. The article is dominated by the principles of the semiotic approach, which allows us to apply to the subject of research such concepts and categories as reception, cultural memory, cultural texts, interpretation, reflection, intertextuality.
 Results and conclusions. The artistic value and semantic richness of the creative heritage of progressive rock bands of the “classical” period was formed in the interaction of many components, which showed itself both in dynamics, at different stages of the formation and implementation of the idea, and in the final result: a combination of compositional and dramatic characteristics and means of musical expression. In the case of conceptual albums, the initial stages are of great importance, when the mechanisms of transferring the cultural memory are started in the process of creative search. In fact, it is this that becomes the main factor ensuring the emergence of a general principle, which should unite individual fragments into a single whole. Examples of the albums by “Genesis”, “Camel”, Rick Wakeman and others, allow us to determine the effect of the reception of cultural texts in different variations: from reinterpretation with a significant transformation of the source material to subtle displays of intertextuality (intermediality). The value of the finds localized in this layer of musical culture triggered further experiments in the field of popular music (such as Sting’s albums of the 2000s), which is a confirmation of the depth of the already implemented and the limitless potential of future dialogues of cultures.

Said the Hooker to the Thief

Said the Hooker to the Thief

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

“It’s Brutal Out Here”: Adolescence, Betrayal, and Vulnerability in Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR

ABSTRACT Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album SOUR (2021) is a concept album about betrayal. Although the album’s adolescent themes suggest that it was designed for a teen audience, its cultural impact reached beyond this target demographic, achieving critical acclaim and popularity across multiple generations. This article draws on Jennifer Freyd’s theory of betrayal trauma to suggest that Rodrigo’s emotional vulnerability in SOUR resonated with widespread feelings of betrayal and distress regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the album’s themes of adolescence presented a nostalgic setting in which listeners could cope with pandemic-related trauma without having to fully acknowledge or understand its source. Using SOUR as a case study, this article contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about youth musical culture by demonstrating how the comfort listeners draw from nostalgic teen music can reach beyond escapism to contribute meaningfully to processes of coping and healing in times of great sorrow and betrayal.

The Second Death of Concept Albums World-Building and Unification Strategies in the Age of Streaming


 
 
 As the end of the album format is apparently drawing near due to the radical change in music consumption habits motivated by streaming services, artists and genres interested in creating musical works with meanings broader than those of single songs find themselves in a situation worth analysing. Despite all appearances and expectations, I argue that nowadays artists willing to create narrative, thematic or generally conceptual contexts for their songs are living in a potential second golden age of concept albums. Some attempts at keeping the (concept) album alive are more alike to an act of resistance, others creatively take advantage of the same means of communication used by their digital enemy, in order to create something unique and capable of taking the place of the supposedly doomed CD/lP format. They are often transmedial works, thus requiring an interdisciplinary analysis. In this paper, I offer an overview of the contemporary situation of the album format (and concept album more specifically) and finally propose a classification of four forms of contemporary musical world-building strategies, starting from a selection of emblematic case studies.
 
 

The Concept Album and the Early Music Revival

ABSTRACT Early music has been recorded for over half a century but most of its pre-1600 repertoire resists the programming conventions accepted in classical-romantic albums. Instead, the early music revival has developed its own unique approach to recording, inspired by innovations in musical styles other than classical music. The emergence of the rock concept album in the 1960s helped to shape the genres of art rock and progressive rock and to set them apart from other sub-genres. Some of the achievements of the early concept album—the use of studio technology and the medium of the LP in a way that yielded a large-scale musical and narrative form—appealed to early music and folk musicians. The article examines the work of prominent early music performers who adopted a conceptual-narrative approach to the recording of early repertories. David Munrow’s first early music albums demonstrate techniques borrowed from his work in the folk scene. Thomas Binkley’s careful handling of large-scale musical form helped to shape the pilgrimage narrative of his influential “Camino de Santiago” album. The article analyses further examples from several recordings of Hildegard’s music, and from the recordings of Jordi Savall and Pedro Memelsdorff, as early music concept albums. These albums show how early music performers use narrativity both to create a quasi-historical illusion and to create abstract musical narratives.

Brian Wilson’s Song Cycles

ABSTRACT In the Beach Boys’ eleventh studio album, Pet Sounds (1966), the group’s primary creator, Brian Wilson, set forth a compelling flow of lyrical themes across a shimmering soundscape to create what has been described as one of the earliest concept albums. Its eleven songs and two instrumentals in fact constitute a “song cycle” as conventionally defined, with a transparent narrative and artful progression of interwoven musical ideas. Further, Pet Sounds was but one of several explorations of multisong narrative and musical structures in Wilson’s work on Beach Boys albums, extending back to side two of their Today album (1965) and continuing in later years through the unfinished Smile (1967), Wild Honey (1967), and The Beach Boys Love You (1976). Since Brian Wilson began recording as a solo artist in the late 1980s, he has continued to conceive albums as unified artistic statements, achieving his goals with special clarity on That Lucky Old Sun (2008) and on the reunited Beach Boys’ That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012). Each of his song cycles is a unique realization of principles of organic unity found in the art-song tradition and makes its own important contribution to the history and development of the concept album in pop and rock music.

LP Keywords Editors’ Note

This special section began as something between a lark and an imperative: How, after all, could the Journal of Popular Music Studies let the auspiciously numbered issue 33.3 pass by without marking the occasion? The slowing down of a phonograph record’s movement to 33⅓ revolutions per minute (or some variable approximation of that measurement, as Jonathan Sterne explains here) has made possible an array of forms and practices, including the long-playing album, the concept album, gatefold cover art, scratching and beat-matching, crate-digging, and the series of album-based books named after that rotational speed. The LP’s persistence in the twenty-first century hints at some of the ways popular music—its memories, its cultures, its material shapes—can endure across time.With all these avenues and more in mind, the editors of JPMS issued a call for keyword-style entries on any term or concept carrying a credible link to 33⅓. Co–associate editor Roshanak Kheshti and I were rewarded with a surfeit of pitches, and this special section is the result. In taking up a range of once-novel innovations and their continual redeployments in the present, the contributors to this section listen closely to the ongoing resonances of the vinyl album form, with all its accoutrements, in our digital age.

The Album Cover

The Album Cover

Aura(l)

Aura(l)

Structuring subjectivity: Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element: Part I (2000)

This article examines how Pain of Salvation’s album The Perfect Element: Part I (2000) develops narrative subjectivity through a range of compositional and performative parameters. We reveal a myriad of ways in which the music contributes to the expression of human subjectivity and offers significant moments of interpretive clarity. Attending to the expressive aspects of music, we focus in particular on how the song structures are articulated through the following elements: formal, harmonic, temporal, thematic and textural/timbral content. Contextualizing the concept album narrative within the genres of progressive rock and heavy metal and offering a framework for analysis derived from narrative theory, we interpret how the musical parameters convey the song lyrics and overall album concept. Pain of Salvation’s narrative of human trauma emerges through musical structures that are channelled to shape storyworld and subjectivity. Presenting analytic snapshots of the twelve album tracks, our aim is to create a sense of analytic ‘immersion’, whereby the reader engages actively with the multifaceted expressive content of words and music.