Jargon triage

I've been thinking lately about the gradual death of the word "album." And how high-tech might wind up being strangely responsible for its comeback.

When I was a kid, everybody had records—there are a few stragglers left next to my stereo now, and most of the musicians I know still collect vinyl—but it's probably been 15 years since I've called anything round that holds music a "record." Nobody ever really called tapes "tapes" too often ("album" usually won out), except in the early hip-hip and electronica scenes, where underground mix tapes and DJ demo tapes helped spawn new stars.

But starting in the late 1990s (a little too late to help tapes much), it seemed like folks began talking about albums in terms of media, rather than content: You went to buy a CD or buy vinyl, not an album. When I worked at Rasputin in 1998, customers would ask for "the new Garth Brooks CD" or, more often around here, "Do you have Lauryn on vinyl?"

Artists talked about recording CDs or discs, and the staff at Rasputin compared the size of their CD collections. One manager had more than 800, with his favorites stored in a rotating, programmable 250-CD changer. Sort of like the iPod of stereos.

Then came digital music. Most of us have actual iPods now, and even though we download music at staggering rates, I've never heard anyone say he just got the latest Kanye download or MP3 file. Instead, he downloaded the latest Kanye album. My guess is that "MP3" and "download" (as a noun) both sound too much like an impersonal technology, and not enough like a song, for us to embrace it as musical language.

So, we're back to our good old universal signifier. "Album" is the only word we have that can refer to any form of media we manage to dream up: 8-tracks, records, tapes, CDs, mini-discs, MP3s, MP4s. Every collection of music in any one of those formats is an album.

Vinyl and tapes may already be collector's items, and CDs well on the way there—and good luck doing anything with those dusty 8-tracks in your parents' basement—but albums, thankfully, will always be albums.