{"id":532636,"date":"2026-06-05T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T05:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=532636"},"modified":"2026-06-06T10:28:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T08:28:21","slug":"requiem-album-pierre-valentin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/music\/requiem-album-pierre-valentin\/","title":{"rendered":"Requiem for the album (\u22481965-1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"

With progress, it's easy to know what you're gaining, harder to know what you're losing. So let's take this opportunity to perform an autopsy on the lovely corpse that is the pop album format.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The album was born in the second half of the 1960s and died around 1990. This gives it an age of 25-30 years at the time of death, roughly the life expectancy of a horse or a dolphin. Over this brief period, albums sold better than singles, which is all the more remarkable given that they are obviously more expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before this, music producers generally saw the album as a simple collection of singles, sometimes recorded several years apart and sometimes even selected without the artist's knowledge. Hence the need to specify on the cover which songs were included. Thus, the Beatles' first album, Please Please Me<\/em> \u2013 particularly significant in symbolic terms, insofar as they themselves largely initiated the advent of the king album - not only bears the title of a single present within it, but also specifies on its sleeve the name of a second (\u00ab... With Love Me Do<\/em> and 12 other songs\u00bb). In other words, the distinction between compilation<\/em> and thealbum<\/em> was frankly thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | 1966-1971: a golden age nobody lived through<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

With the Beatles, but also Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys, the album became a coherent artistic statement. Covers became increasingly \u00abartistic\u00bb, and the artists' faces (and even their names!) even disappeared from some of them. In the highly influential Srgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em> (1967), followed by their Abbey Road<\/em> (1969), transitions were introduced to link certain tracks together. With the great Pink Floyd albums of the 1970s, it became virtually impossible to extract a single song from the rest of the album, so much so was the album constructed as a coherent whole, rather like a classical symphony, with several \u00abmovements\u00bb and melodic themes recurring repeatedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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