The Spirit of Radio: Conceptus Interruptus

[athelind]

AAAUGH.

The radio station just played one track from Rush's 2112 album.

For those who aren't familiar with it; 2112 is a "concept album" of the sort so beloved of Pretentious Prog Rock Bands like the Trio from Toronto. The "A" side is a single long story-based piece, divided into individual tracks solely for the sake of convenience.

Playing just "The Temple of Syrinx" is like ... like ... cutting off Star Wars right before the Death Star run.

Naturally, I have the CD, so I'm playing the entire album right the heck now, but, nevertheless, the damage is done. I'll have that irritating UNFINISHED feeling for the rest of the night.

How can you DO that?

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Comments

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I was originally gonna find fault with the statement that 2112 is a concept album. The second half - once the second "side" but that's an obsolete term! - has nothing to do with the *song* 2112. But then it sank in that they played part of the orchestral suite 2112.

To be fair, classical music gets treated like that all the time. You listen to classical music stations and you'll heard Ode to Joy or The March of the Swiss Soldiers without any contextualization at all. And they do that kind of stuff to prog rock all the time. Four words. Thick as a Brick. ;)

[araquan.livejournal.com]

The local classic rock station will play Temples of Syrinx from time to time.

I'll grant that many other concept albums are more easily split up into radioable bits, but as I usually listen to them as whole albums, I get a bit of that sense of incompleteness when, say, certain bits of Dark Side of The Moon are played by themselves.

What's even worse is when the station is doing some thing where they play two songs from the same artist in a block (two-fer Tuesdays) and they run a pair from the same concept album out of order...

Nnnnngh...

[twentythoughts.livejournal.com]

There are some exceptions. Even though The Mars Volta has done a concept album or two, nobody understands what the hell they're going on about anyway, so playing a single song doesn't make a difference.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

I recall a radio station local to me playing the entirety of 2112 one day on a holiday, just because.

Mind you, this was about 20 years ago.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

Well ... to be fair, the band did it themselves (or they did it by proxy of their record label) with their first Greatest Hits dual disc set, which only has "Temple of Syrinx" as the contribution from 2112. Given that commercial radio thrives on Greatest Hits compilations, it's a fair chance they don't even have the full album on hand.

Of course, this is the sort of philosophy that also thinks that you have to play "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" as one song.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

I remember when classic rock stations had the plays of "perfect album sides", something I have now heard repeated on Satellite.

[richardf8]

Well, you know, Temples of Syrinx. It's got a good beat and you can dance to it, and it doesn't have all that drug subtext like Bangkok express.

[mocha-mephooki.livejournal.com]

I can live with just hearing a single out of a sequence... but it drives me absolutely nuts when I hear two songs from that sequence, out of sequence. I nearly snapped my headsets in half the one time I had The Wall on, and forgot that my computer was playing in shuffle-mode.