Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet Here's link a version of this email for your browser , jerks. link click upn equals ei 6R 0f M 2Bt Fk Gmg 2Fv… HUNTING FOR THE END OF THE LONG TAIL bullet TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2015 link graphic Facebook link graphic Twitter link graphic Tumblr link graphic Pocket link graphic Buffer Today in Tedium: We gained a lot when albums went fully digital, but we also lost a bunch of stuff along the way. Among the things we lost: Record sleeves, link media towers , and link Tower Records dot We have digital equivalents of all these things, so it's not like we necessarily miss them. But perhaps the one thing we lost that we'll never get back is the hidden track. It was one of the few things about an album that couldn't easily be converted to MP 3 or Spotify. Why is that? Simple: When everything's a file and Siri can dig it up for you if you ask nicely enough, there's simply nowhere to hide anymore. And it's a shame, because the hidden tracks were the only interesting part of some albums. Today's Tedium analyzes the artform of the hidden track. Ernie at Tedium heading level 3 23 The length, in seconds, of The Beatles' Her Majesty, a song that's widely considered the first hidden track. link The brief acoustic ditty , written and performed by Paul Mc Cartney, was supposed to be part of link Abbey Road s lengthy medley on its back side. The problem was, there was nowhere good to put it, so Mc Cartney ordered engineer John Kurlander to remove it from the album. He did, but in a happy act of defiance later added it to the end of the album after a few seconds of silence. The Beatles always picked up on accidental things. It came as a nice little surprise there at the end, and he didn’t mind, link Kurlander later recalled dot heading level 1 Why C Ds had more interesting hidden tracks than vinyl records The compact disc was such a forward thinking format when it first came out that it needed its own bible. That bible was called the Red Book. The book, formulated by Philips and Sony, explains the detailed technical specifications of the format, including the maximum length of a CD (74 minutes), the maximum number of tracks there can be (99), the minimum length of a single track (4 seconds), and the standard sampling rate (44.1 k Hz). (If you would like to read a copy of the Red Book, good luck with that: being a book that describes the innards of a proprietary material, link it'll cost you a solid $295 dot ) The Red Book also hid within its specifications a number of quirks that bands would later discover and take advantage of. They introduced a number of opportunities to do really interesting things with albums that you couldn't do during the vinyl era. For one thing, you could mess with the track listing by adding a few seconds of silence between tracks; for another, you could actually put music before the official start of the album, in an area called the pregap. It's a spot so hidden only accessible by rewinding the CD as far back as possible that most computers to this day still can't access these hidden tracks. For the most part, hidden tracks at the end of the album tend to hide full songs (most famously Endless, Nameless at the end of Nirvana's Nevermind), while hidden tracks in the pregap area tend to hide introductory music in most cases. (One notable exception to that rule is the Northern Ireland band Ash, whose album 1977 included the band's pre album single, link Jack Names the Planets , in the pregap.) To this day, new albums are taking advantage of these tricks even though most buyers are most likely never hearing them in this form. A good example of this is the Arcade Fire's most recent album, Reflektor. The first disc of the double album includes a ten minute pregap track of reversed instrumental music culled from other parts of the album. Problem is, link the pregap was a better trick when we were using five disc players. Computers, for the most part, don't recognize pregaps, and modern DVD and Blu Ray players don't recognize them either, as one Arcade Fire fan learned when his Blu Ray link treated the pregap as part of the first track of link the album dot Oops. Sounds like someone should go look over the Red Book again. heading level 3 We had these visions of stoned fans, of which there were a lot in the early 70s, having the shock heading level 3 of their lives when brand new material was playing on a record they had had for months. Some people heading level 3 thought there was an alternative version because they would hear talk of these mysterious sketches heading level 3 that they had never heard on their record. It drove people mad. This was precisely why we did it, heading level 3 of course . Monty Python's Michael Palin, discussing the comedy troupe's reasoning link for creating a three sided link record dot The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief, link which came out in 1973 , featured a record with concurrent grooves, an impressive technical feat pulled off by recording engineer George Peckham, who had experience with tricks like this, having worked on numerous Beatles records in the past. The goal of the trick was confusion: both sides of the record were labeled side 2, and they basically wanted people to trip upon the third side by accident. Peckham later invented another vinyl phenomenon, the run off groove, in which hard to see messages link are placed onto the dead area link of the wax dot heading level 1 Five hidden tracks that have transcended their hidden status 1 link Train in Vain , the final track on The Clash's London Calling, was added to the album after the sleeves had already been printed, but nonetheless was a calling card for the band, becoming one of the band's two Top 40 hits in the United States. 2 link Can't Take My Eyes Off You , as performed by Lauryn Hill for her 1998 album link The Miseducation of link Lauryn Hill , was such a critical success that it received a Grammy nomination that year one of ten that she received for the album that year. It was one of the album's two hidden tracks. 3 link Bitches Ain’t Shit , an unlisted track on Dr. Dre's landmark 1992 album The Chronic, found a second life on the pop charts in 2005 after Ben Folds made a version that … link well, made it whiter dot 4 link Euro Trash Girl , a 1994 hit by Cracker, was one of three hidden tracks at the tail end of the band's 1993 album link Kerosene Hat , and (thanks to the help of numerous blank tracks) it was listed at track number 69. The band added the song at the last minute due to positive fan reaction at shows. 5 link Mr. E's Beautiful Blues , one of the most popular singles released by Mark Oliver Everett (better known as Eels), was put on his album Daisies of the Galaxy essentially link because his record company link told him he had to dot He put it at the end of the album because it ruined the flow of the record anywhere else. They made it the single, and essentially forced him to put the song link in a Tom Green link movie dot The hidden track these days is seen as a relic of the past, link something that we didn't appreciate while we had it. But back in the late 90s, they had been overdone to the point that people were starting to get sick of them. link A 1999 New York Times essay by Scott Sutherland made the case that such gimmicks were transparently wearing thin. It's time for musicians and labels to rethink why they hide what they hide, he wrote. If most artists have a hard enough time filling even half the space on a 74 minute CD with compelling material, why bother hiding something equally uncompelling? And if a song is good enough to be the best thing on the disk, why hide it at all? As annoying as they were for the listener, they could often be just as annoying for the label. link A link 2014 Wondering Sound piece on hidden tracks noted how They Might Be Giants really peeved off their label by including a pregap track on their 1996 album Factory Showroom. The reason for this is that such tracks require a more detailed production process, meaning that the label has to do more work to ensure that the discs are up to snuff during the pressing process. These days, we just call these extra pieces of art what they are: bonus tracks. No hiding necessary. It's not like Spotify will let us hide them anyway. link graphic Tedium link follow on Twitter link forward to a friend Copyright Copyright 2015 Tedium, All rights reserved. Disclosure: From time to time, we may use affiliate links in our content but only when it makes sense. 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