I found this great little article on the Guardian Unlimited site this morning and thought I’d share.

The magic circles

First they killed off vinyl 45s. Now even the days of CD singles are numbered. In the future, laments Paul Morley, pop fans will collect nothing but lists in cyberspace

Friday August 1, 2003
The Guardian

The first single I ever bought was “Ride a White Swan” by T Rex. It was the first thing I had ever got for myself that wasn’t a toy or a comic. I was 13 years old and it was like buying a piece of magic. It was as if I could begin to understand what I was living for. I would slide the mysterious black disc out of its paper sleeve. I would put it with unlikely care on to a soft rubbery turntable. I would nervously drop the needle on to the edge of the disc and hear the tantalising crackle and pop that seemed to last an eternity before Marc Bolan, as if from space, as if for me only, began singing his electric folk song that seemed to be all about swans, sex and the strangeness and tender brilliance of being a teenager.

You could actually see the record work its magic as it spun and wobbled and let the needle make its inevitable way across it to the spiralling end. The transparent plastic top of the cheap but fantastic Phillips stereo bought from the Co-op seemed designed so that you could watch. The 45rpm single. It was the first thing you owned for yourself as a kid. It was a sign you were establishing your own identity. It was your secret.

As I started collecting seven-inch singles, buying one every so often, then one a month, then one a week, accelerating through puberty each time Bowie or Bolan or Mott or Roxy packed a universe of rhythm and mystery into the tight grooves, I could not think of a time when there would be no such thing.

Perhaps because my first single love was the work of a star who had a special understanding of how the pop song was a spell, I can feel myself instantly pulled back to the time when the whole universe had just been made sexier, sweeter, and something to love. I am taken away by the magic of the music and the way that a flat black disc with a hole in the middle transmitted that magic into the world.

I was brought up on the pop single, and now it is no more. It truly was just for me, and the others who were around at the right time, in the right place. Those of us born in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s. Those of use who find ourselves measuring out our lives in terms of the seven-inch vinyl single that was alive with the moment, and all moments.

I now find myself wondering what the last single I ever bought was. Recently, for my 11-year-old daughter, I’ve bought singles by Big Brovaz, Liberty X, Christina Aguilera. I quite enjoyed them, actually, cursed and maybe blessed by Bolan’s original spell to forever find something in the pop song, the three-minute blast of mood and rhyme, sound and time. But it didn’t seem that I was buying a single, not in the way I remember. It was like buying some tacky merchandise, a bag of sweets, an accessory for a mobile phone, a new hat. Part of a world of sensation, not the world itself. For Madeleine, my daughter, the fuss I make about the idea of the single as artefact is pretty embarrassing. She shuts me up as soon as I try to explain how all the pop music she likes exists because once there was this thing called vinyl. If I show her a seven-inch single by New Order, I can see it is like my grandfather showing me a George Formby 78. She wonders how much it might make on the Antiques Roadshow.

I have never been used to buying CD singles – the seven-inch, its glamorously schizophrenic combination of A-side high and B-side throwaway, the feel of it, the vinyl noise it makes accompanying the noise of the single, all seemed to have more weight and presence than the slick, neat flimsy CD packages, which delivered music, however magical, in a more prosaic, efficient but lacklustre way. The practical weakness of the seven-inch vinyl single was actually what contributed to its peculiar beauty. It was vulnerable – it might melt, the magic could dissolve.

From the moment Peter Powell demonstrated on TV that the compact disc was, allegedly, unbreakable, invincible, and you could spread it with jam and it would still play, the CD has seemed dull and worthy. It has never been likely to create the love that vinyl did – it has always seemed to be what it has turned out to be, a banal bastard stopgap between the perfection of vinyl and the moment when music is transported into our lives without the need for any object.

The vinyl seven-inch didn’t seem to interfere with the size of the music and its power, it helped it on its way. The CD seemed to reduce the music, to organise and tame it, and now that music will just appear, on demand, whenever and however you would like it, it seems closer to the unfixed, slightly anarchic drama of vinyl than the ruthless shiny antiseptic order of the CD.

I guess the last seven-inch single I ever bought would be something by the Smiths, the Human League, Associates, the Fall, Kim Wilde. Something in the early 80s, just before the moment the single really died, as a thing of tactile glory, as a vivid two-sided drama. The single died as soon as we stopped dropping a needle on to a holy edge spinning between here and eternity, and there was no mesmerising preliminary static. As soon as we pushed a compact disc into a slot, and there was a deadened silence before the song, a limbo moment that seemed to represent the way the art of pop had become big business, we felt that the magic had been tidied up, controlled.

All this has meant that the seven-inch has been a difficult thing to get over. Individually and culturally, we are preposterously nostalgic for it. Commercially, the record industry has ground itself into a kind of paralysis trying to work out what to replace it with, spoilt by the success, the money, the power the single gave it.

We’ve lived in the shadow of the seven-inch single for almost two decades now. We still called popular songs packaged as compact discs “singles” because what else were we to call them? Perhaps the moment we think of a new word we will truly get over the economic and emotional impact the seven-inch single has had.

Songs built in the image of the seven-inch pop song, their length still dictated by the old format, continue to be at the centre of the pop world. The single is still the preferred marketing route for the industry that controls the popular end of what we listen to.

By the middle of the 90s, songs built in the image of the vinyl single were used to form a soundtrack that suited the way the industry was marketing music to young teenagers. It was almost the last thing in the ruthless new formula – the image, the clothes, the colours, the smiles, the names, all this came first, and then the song was added at the end, because, this being pop, you needed songs as part of the overall strategy. And pop being at least 50 years old, there is plenty of material to copy, appropriate, adjust, remake, remodel.

The chart system that made a kind of artificial sense during the life of the simple seven-inch fell apart as soon as vinyl started to be discontinued. The old chart, which allowed the single to have a kind of long life, fighting its way up as high as it could, sometimes taking weeks to get to number one, was replaced by a chart that was a ferocious form of exhibitionism. A chart that lacked the rough, fantastic poetry of your favourite act living a whole musical life for a couple of months as they battled their way to the top.

Those of us defined by the seven-inch single were also trained to believe, like it was a religion, that there was something noble and important in the idea of a number one, or even a number eight, and watched with superior alarm as the charts were bent and burned into something used by the likes of Simon Cowell to pretend that Westlife were somehow as important as the Beatles. To persuade us that Girls Aloud were breaking chart records.

The top 40 was used more desperately as a shop window to showcase acts that seemed more like toys than the Wombles – and where once there was a Womble, there was also a Sex Pistol, which means something for those of us who fell in love with the single as a potent form of action as well as a bit of rubbish.

The charts were ruptured in a greedy attempt to pretend that there was still excitement in the world of the single, in an attempt to disguise the reality that the single was dead, replaced simply by songs that formed a soundtrack in the selling of an act whose sole purpose was the production of money. The industry didn’t have a clue how to replace the charts, so they just let it bleed to death. Some say the bleeding might have started in the 80s, as vinyl transformed into CD, when a single ceased to be just one format – when it became a multi-coloured package of mixes and gimmicks and gifts. Some might say my contribution as promotional director to the big-selling Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and the numerous versions of the songs Two Tribes and Relax, triggered this desperate need to hype singles using accessories and extras. Multi-formatting confused the issue. It spoilt the beautiful basic contours of the seven-inch.

For me, I was, from a rock writer point of view, watching the rise of new technology and the hardening cynicism of a music industry scalded by the dangers of punk, predicting the end of the single as we knew it, and fixing things so they ended with a bang – sensing that the future might be what it has become, abstract and elusive. I just wasn’t ready for the intervening years, and the lingering death of the idea of the single, as the industry and the media held on for as long as they could. Compromised by an unexpected nostalgia, I can only put down to something nature does to your psyche as you speed towards death, I still don’t pretend that the seven-inch should come back – the world changes, it moves on. It’s the whole point of pop, to create change, to be part of change, to record that change.

But the world is different because the seven-inch single has gone, and it is only now, as the new world finally begins to arrive, that we can get over the loss of the damned thing. The CD single created the illusion, for a while, that there was still a single, and as great as the songs have been, they have gradually become something else. Post-singles, sub-singles, shadows, adverts for themselves. Albums are different too – broken up into collections of songs, the two-sided adventure replaced by meandering journeys that don’t suit pop.

Pop was framed by its formats, the length of music that the seven-inch and the twelve-inch forced on the writers and performers. The CD era gamely hung on to those notions: perhaps one of the advantages of this new era, the objectless era, the phase where the popular song moves somewhere else, is that a new sense of time, of length, of dynamic can be allowed to develop.

Perhaps the ideal length of the downloaded pop song will be 45 seconds. It might be over 10 minutes. Hopefully, gradually, the terms and formula dictated by the vinyl age can be left behind, as mere whims of fashion, not the way things have to be. Four or five songs by a pop act is about all you need, unless you want 37, and you can pay by the minute. The new download world will hopefully see an end to those shapeless 20-track CD monsters that seemed to equate quality with amount, as if you weigh music by the kilo.

The death of the single is not the death of the popular song – since the death of vinyl, the popular song has gone from strength to strength. The industry has reverted to the cliches of teenage obsession, guitar riffisms, and lightweight nursery rhymes, but the likes of Nirvana, Blur, Underworld, Eminem, Beck, NERD have carried on the idea of the popular song as a way of recording cultural movement, of using popular culture as an alternative, an opposition to restrictive conservative politics and narrow-minded business interests.

There will still be songs. There might be a different kind of magic. Music might slip into a new underground, the system might be abstract and fluid in a way that actually suits the idea of music as an art not a business. This won’t disappoint music lovers; it might be heaven and only ruin things for those who found the music an unpredictable obstacle they didn’t really understand.

Whatever the future is, there’s no doubt that the seven-inch single as we knew it is gone. It’s been gone for a while. This means the charts as we knew them are irrelevant. Top of the Pops cannot possibly work in anything approaching the way it has, and the fact that even BBC bosses now recognise this is a very specific sign that an era is truly over. The fact that they still might hang on to the programme shows what a struggle it has been to shake off the single’s impact. Top of the Pops was a show built around the vinyl single. These are minor points, but in a sense they point to something slightly unnerving, as huge areas of comfort and routine are shifting beneath us, representing larger shifts in who and what we will be in computer and machine years to come.

The iPod, at once a nail in the coffin and some kind of saviour, is an object that seems beautiful enough to honour the history of the popular song as a vast and varied art form, and to be the futuristic replacement to the vinyl single. It represents a brave new world in the way that the CD never did. The iPod, the place where storage becomes magic, now helps us say for sure: It’s all over. The physical presence of the popular song is gone. It’s time for the next thing, as scary as that is going to be, as scary as the thought of Elvis would have been in the 40s, the Stones would have been in the 50s, the Sex Pistols would have been in the 60s.

No one born in the 90s is going to remember so definitively the first single they ever bought, that they held in their hands. Pop songs are just part of the delight and scandal of the modern entertainment world now – they’re jingles, stings, edits, suggestions, theme tunes; they’re part of ads; they’re ring tones, a soundtrack to the idea of fame, incidental music for the famous. They’re things you dance to at the edge of your life. Not the centre of everything, just a part of everything. They were, after all that, just a phase, leading us to a monitored abstract world loaded with a kind of controlled commercial chaos the pop music of the 60s, 70s and 80s merely hinted at.

In my new book, Words and Music, I accompany Kylie Minogue on a journey she takes through history, driving from the pre-modern through the modern into the postmodern and beyond. The book is an introduction to an edited history of everything with a soundtrack largely supplied by popular music. The fact that I chose Kylie Minogue to take us on this journey proves that my worldview was formed by the power of the popular song, and shows how hearing a song like “Can’t Get You out of My Head” can help you make some sense of the mysteries of existence.

She drives towards a city, a city that is a metaphor for the future, for the internet, for the iPod, for music, for the mind, for a world where everything happens at once. At the end of the journey, I say to Kylie, or Kylie says to me: “Some day music will only be air. There will be no objects to hold or fetishise, and people will simply collect lists. No disc, nothing spooled or grooved, no heads to clean, no dust to wipe, no compulsive alphabetising. Nothing to put away in shoeboxes or spare cupboards, and be embarrassed about. A chip inside us and inside the chip a route to all the music that there ever was, which we can compile and organise and reorganise and reorganise and merge with and feel into and in whatever way possible find the time to listen to, and we’ll need the time, all the time that music finds the time to press into.”

Hope you found that interesting. I liked it.

Now Playing in My iPOD: Travis — The Invisible Band