As I've mentioned plenty of times I like my songs short. It's well-documented that songs are getting shorter all the time and I'm all in favor of it. I frequently find myself watching and listening to tunes on YouTube that are about the standard length of a chart hit from the eighties or nineties, thinking "this is fine and all but if it was half as long, it'd be twice as good".
Perhaps ironically, a great number of my very favorite songs are much longer - Heroin, Sister Ray, Land, Like A Rolling Stone, Sebastian, Mainlines, Ride, Venice Bitch... it's a long "long" list - but all of them do a lot more with that extra time than just repeat verse one and two and throw in a few more choruses.
It's fine to keep going if you have something worth hearing. Otherwise, keep it short. Get in, make your point, get out.
Unlike Bayta, I couldn't immediately bring up a mental shortlist of
super-short songs I love. It seems I find the long ones a lot more memorable,
which is an intriguing psychological insight I may need to dig into further
some time. Fortunately, I don't have to remember any shorties. I have
technology to do that for me.
My Big Folder of Interesting Tunes (Damn! Should have called it that instead of boring old "Music Archive") contains more than four thousand songs and nearly one hundred and fifty of them run two minutes or less. Some of those are just clips but a lot are the full thing. It seemed like I ought to be able to pull a post together out of something like that.
Clearly they aren't all going to be my "favorite" short songs but they are, by definition, at least going to be short songs I like or they wouldn't be in the archive in the first place. To make the post manageable, I thought I'd set a few ground rules: no more than a dozen songs in total, nothing I've embedded in a post before and nothing too tediously obvious.
For the first criterion, well I can count up to twelve so we should be fine there. For the second I'm relying on Blogger's internal search function because I for sure can't rely on my own memory. And for the final rule, I'll let the audience be the judge.
Let's do this thing.
It's A Heatwave! - Hotpants Romance
(1.03) Couldn't be more appropriate. Beryl's on her cool-mat but I'm sweltering. I'm guessing a lot of the sub-two minute tracks I'm picking from are going to be some flavor of punk rock but his is the kind of anarchy I prefer. More Minnie the Minx than Kropotkin.
Hot Rod - The Collins Kids
(1.18 not counting the showbiz introduction.) And you thought Hotpants Romance looked young! There's so much I could say about that clip. It's older than I am for a start. And that double-neck guitar in 1958. What's that all about?
Most importantly, though, it shows how time moves backwards before it moves forwards again. That was an acceptable song length (And tempo.) back in the rock and roll age, before the sixties drifted into the seventies and everything s t r e t c h e d out. Then punk arrived and it all snapped back into place and mostly stayed there, thank the lord.
Comic Strip - Claude François and Jodie Foster
(1.22) Sometimes even a really short song just isn't quite short enough. This is one of those times.
On paper, it sounds like such a good idea. Jodie Foster took an extended sabbatical in Europe following John Hinckley Jr's bid to win her affection by attempting to assassinate President Reagan. (I mean, you can see his logic. It should have worked, right? All the girls love a bad boy...)
She made a few movies, did some TV to promote them and one show had the bright idea of getting the American star with her perfect, fluent French to sing this cheery little number that Serge Gainsbourg wrote for Brigitte Bardot. Back in the sixties, those two icons had turned it into a classic piece of pop-art that just oozed gallic cool. Maybe lightning would strike twice.
All that was needed was a male co-star to take Gainsbourg's part. Who better than French singing sensation Claude François, co-writer of "My Way", the man President Giscard D'Estaing called "the French equivalent of The Beatles"?
And then some moron sat them on a swing.
mámá hé mátádó á ún sím - PUTOCHINOMARICÓN
(1.24) - Hyperpop is another genre known for its brevity. Also its wit. Funny how those two seem to go together. As a movement and a style it's clearly one of the godchildren of punk so it's not surprising the songs are short.
The title translates as "Mom, I killed a sim". The full line it's taken from is even
better:
"Mom, I killed a sim, I was bored, don't you see?" I mean, we've
all been there...
As for the rest of the lyrics, I refer you to this utterly magnificent translation. Now that is poetry.
Third Floor Fire Escape View - The Cat's Maiow
(1.27) Indie's another genre that favors tunes that don't hang around long enough to outstay their welcome, something you can also say of the bands themselves. A couple of singles and back to teacher training college they go.
These days, of course, you don't even have to play a gig to be immortalized on YouTube for as long as Google cares to keep it going. Back when this lot were around, though, you had to be lucky enough to get picked for an indie label collection before anyone was going to make a video of you. Which is exactly what happened.
For You - Elephant Parade
(1.37) Of course, once the iPhone arrived, it was everyone their own
Richard Linklater.
Effecto Ingenio - Pony York
(1.41) This one combines two of my personal mythologies, band names or songs with the word "Pony" in them and that elusive, indefinable guitar sound I associate with Central and South America. It seems to me like the aural equivalent of the ligne claire and I love it. Even so, I'm not a huge instrumental fan so this is just about the right length for me.
Shakerella - Dolly Mixture
(1.43) My favorite band of all time and always will be. Admittedly, not the best of recordings but some great photos. Also, super-rare. I remember them playing it when I used to go see them in Cambridge but it's not on the exhaustive compilation "Eveything and More" or any of the live recordings I have. Most of their stuff back then was no longer than two and a half minutes but they could say more in a hundred and fifty seconds than most bands manage in a career.
Party Jail - May Rio
(1.44 although the actual song is barely a minute of that.) It's a
lovely song but it's the "David Lynch makes a pop video" vibe that
really sells it for me. I keep expecting that little guy in the red velvet
suit to walk through the shot.
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I find this hard to believe, unless you're talking about the last 20 years or something. Look at popular songs from the 60s and they were pretty short, no?
ReplyDeleteThe Beatles "Do You Want to Know a Secret" is under 2 minutes, for example.
Chuck Berry's Johnny B Good is like 2.5 minutes?
Buddy Holly's That'll Be The Day is 2:20
Then they started getting longer as FM radio took off and now I guess they're getting shorter again?
Or is my memory just singling out short songs from back in the day?
The Vice article I linked has quite a lot of corroborative detail including statistical analysis from reasonably authorative sources (UCLA for example.) I recommend reading it and following its many links if you're really interested in the topic.
DeleteYou're right though, that the trend is relatively recent. You're about right with the last twenty years but also with the much earlier examples you're citing from more like sixty years ago. As I said in the post, pop songs were really short in the fifties and early sixties but balooned in the mid sixties through the mid-seventies before being - to an extent - pegged back by punk.
They were still long by today's standards, though. The UCLA research found that in 1990 the average length of a song was 4:19 but by 2020 it was down to 3:17. That's a big drop but the current trend is towards ever shorter songs, many of them not hitting the two-minute mark. The combination of streaming services, which use a system that tends to penalise songs that run longer than 3.15 and especially Tik Tok, whose influence on popular culture simply cannot be overstated, is pushing run times ever downwards.
The big positive is that nothing needs to fit a physical format or a radio station's requirments any more. Songs can be just as long as they need to be and if that's forty-five seconds, it's fine. I think it's a major advance for the aesthetics of the form, personally, but I'm sure not everyone would agree.
I'm going to read the Vice article but I'm still waiting for Inna Godda Davida to end first.
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