About 15 years ago, our music consumption was vastly limited. If it wasn’t on our parents’ radios or in their CD rotations, we just didn’t hear it and we certainly never saw music.
Fast-forward a couple years, and YouTube began its gradual takeover of the online video space, giving music videos the chance to start a comeback in the post-MTV generations. Even with the rise of social media alongside YouTube in the early 2010s, there was still little innovation in music videos as a medium. By and large, a famous artist made a song, and wide enough commercial success could justify the production of a music video.
Today’s artists are not so easily satisfied, and the change has opened up a new medium in the music-visual arts space. Over the past couple of years, a number of artists have set their sights on visual albums as the next mountain to conquer.
Jonah Baker | Argonaut
A visual album is a sort of collaborative project between two types of media that then imbue each other with further meaning or beauty. Take for example last week’s surprise release of Flume’s visual album. The Australian producer and electronic artist released a 17-track ‘mixtape’ that is intended to be viewed in its 42-minute long entirety on YouTube or through whatever other platform you get your music videos from.
To say the project is anything other than experimental would be categorically false, as the experimental music and trippy visuals are almost overwhelmingly out there on their own. However, when the two pieces come together, there is a much clearer (or at least better contextualized) piece of art that comes into focus.
This idea of creating music and inspired film that is to be consumed concurrently is not brand new, but artists are pushing its boundaries like never before.
The year 2016 was probably the beginning of the visual album as a cultural mainstay, with Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” bringing the medium back from an extended slump after Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Since “Lemonade’s” groundbreaking release into the collective consciousness, artists like Tierra Whack and Janelle Monáe have put their own spin on using a variety of tracks with visual media to tell a more cohesive story.
It may feel like we have less time than ever to consume not only an entire album but a visual product to go along with it, but the caliber of that very product is in historically unmatched territory.
The media we consume works harder than ever to get its message across, and the messages of today are so often charged with multiple layers of political and social commentary that lyrics on a beat often aren’t enough to guarantee that the audience gets the message. The visual album doubles down on music videos by requiring the audience to commit significant time out of their days to give all attention to a particular piece of media, and that commitment is almost always rewarded in spades.
As artists continue to stretch their creativity beyond the studio and movie making becomes even more accessible, we could be looking at a revival of the album thanks to the unlikely source of visual accompaniment. Regardless of what exactly that future looks like, today’s artists are doing everything they can to push the boundaries of the album and I can’t wait to see how far the visual album can go.
Jonah Baker can be reached at [email protected]