Punctuation Hotline Bling

Songs are getting shorter. In vinyl days they couldn't be long enough. If people liked a tune they wanted more of it and the only way to do that was an extended 12" mix of handclaps, off-beats and echoing vocals pinging between right and left channels. This effects wonderland was limited only by the sampler's memory and the producer's imagination, both of which maxed out at five megabytes.

When CDs extended playing time the music expanded to fill it. Rave mixes last 74 minutes and replay was literally at the press of a button. 

Now artists play less. Because Tiktok has narrowed pop music's purpose to 90 seconds an artist like Ice Spice gets it done in two minutes. These finished compressed song-products can later be assembled into a single performance that satisfies brief attention spans with MC-pauses while its audience shares the brief segments to anyone who wasn't there. This is music that's an advertisement for itself, like movies that are their own trailer. It's seamless commodification.

No complaints here. These songs aren't meant for me. But the journey of the form is becoming more interesting than the music itself. Age means making a shift from listener to spectator.

It is frustrating, however, to see that at the same time that novels are getting longer. Amazon displays word counts with the implication that the more words you get for your dollar, the better the story – right? So very wrong. I miss the pocket paperback days of European fiction: Manchette, Garnier, even slack old Simenon. A good story gets to the point. I want novels to speed up and songs to last forever.