Ultra marathons.
Triathlons.
Listening to pop albums.
Endurance sports come in many forms these days.
It's been said that brevity is the soul of wit. And framed in those terms, my goodness has modern popular music gotten so, so, so dumb.
Over the past decade or so, musical stars' releasing extremely overlong albums hasn't become just a trend but the new norm.
While it's long been the belief that the ideal pop song comes in at three to three-and-a-half minutes, the albums by the premiere purveyors of such tunes now regularly stretch well over an hour. They've crossed the tipping point from being fun collections of new songs to endurance tests for anyone who's not a total stan.
The latest and highest profile example comes in the form of Taylor Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department. While the album kicks off with a nice little catchy, if subdued, pop tune in "Fortnight," it's also probably Swift's least universal album to date with some cringy try-hard cursing ("Down Bad") and features more of Jack Antonoff's truly terrible and boring production (he's the continual plague on modern female pop music — thank the Lord that St. Vincent finally freed herself from his grasp). It's far from peak Swift, but for the most part it's inoffensively milk-toast.
But The Tortured Poets Department goes down as smooth as swallowing gravel because it just keeps on going... and going... and going... and going...
The core album is an exhausting 65 minutes, 8 seconds that loses all momentum by track 10 of 16. But really this is a double album — The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology — which stretches on for an interminable 2 hours, 2 minutes, 21 seconds. And we are supposed to listen to it all — that second record isn't meant as bonus content, which is clear simply by the fact her team had visualizers for each of the songs on YouTube the day the album dropped. That's an insane ask for music lovers that aren't dyed-in-the-wool Swifties.
More to the point — that's just bad art.
This is not trying to yuck anyone's yum. Swifties are welcome to listen to The Tortured Poets Department to their heart's content (one Inlander staffer listened to it six times on its release date!). If anything Swift is good Swift in your eyes, go for it.
And Swift is far from the only artist in desperate need of an editor. Plenty of other megastars suffer from the same affliction. Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter and Resistance both last over an hour. Four of the last five Drake albums have checked in at over 81 minutes. Metallica's new album 72 Seasons gets outnumbered by its 77-minute runtime. Morgan Wallen's One Thing at a Time is 111 minutes, while Kayne West's latest, Donda, is a whopping 130 minutes (both just "great" dudes).
Digital production has certainly made the process of making songs quicker and easier. Physical media fading also allows for the ballooning album lengths. But these overlong albums aren't exercises in boundless creativity — they're exercises in commercial content creation.
It's not that albums should never be long, but there should be an artistic reason to justify lengths nearing or exceeding an hour. Perhaps it's a concept album with a strong hook like Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville being a song-by-song response to The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. or Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City being a coming-of-age snapshot of growing up in Compton. Maybe it's a rock opera that actually has a narrative arc that needs to play out over many tunes like Green Day's American Idiot or The Who's Tommy. It could even just be needing the space for true sonic experimentation — something also rare in modern popular music — like The Beatles did on The White Album.
But none of those creative endeavors are driving the glut of laborious marathon albums.
Rather, the music industry has oriented itself around quantity over quality in the streaming age. In 2007, Billboard started incorporating streaming numbers into their calculus and for already established acts like Swift, having a glut of tracks is basically a cheat code for record-breaking charting. Add in that the larcenous streaming platforms only significantly pay the superstars — Spotify announced it will stop paying smaller artists that don't hit streaming minimums that the company sets and can tweak — means that stars making overlong albums is an effective and unsubtle money grab.
To be blunt, there's one reason albums shouldn't be so long: Almost nobody can write that many good songs in one fell swoop.
Just look at the pop realm. What are some of the best pop albums in recent memory? Lorde's Pure Heroine? 37 minutes. Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?? 42 minutes. Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia? 37 minutes. Charli XCX's Crash? 33 minutes. Heck, even Swift's 1989 — her best album in the last decade? A much briefer 49 minutes.
And you know one of the reasons why all those records are so great? They cut out all the unnecessary fat. Those albums are lean — when you put them on, you're not tempted to hit the skip track button to get past a host of filler songs. Acts almost always come into the studio with more songs than end up on a record, but the smart ones streamline things down to the best tracks. Sometimes the best thing an artist (or their team) can do to maximize the lasting impact of these albums is to edit them down. It's never easy to kill your darlings — to toss aside songs the songwriters are attached to because they put emotional effort into crafting them. But it is an essential part of the artistic process.
Maybe it's a fool's errand to care about the integrity of the album at all. With streaming being the dominant listening medium, the idea of cohesive visions for albums begins to fade. For the superstars, albums seem increasingly less like artistic statements and more like content drops to be added to playlists.
But I do think some of these artists still care about their craft and are probably gonna look back on these listening endurance tests as embarrassingly self-indulgent exercises as the years pass.
These tortured poets should stop trying to write the Iliad and instead attempt to write a coherent chapbook. ♦
