If you’ve spoken to a music snob sometime in the past 15 or so years, you’ve probably heard of the Loudness War. Regardless of their preferred genre or era, mentioning those two simple words will drive most audiophiles into long, astonishingly detailed speeches they have memorized for precisely such occasions. Expect to hear the names ‘Rick Rubin’ and ‘Barry Grint’, as well as a lot of bitching about Oasis, Metallica, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. If you have a spare hour or two, taunt your favorite snob to get an earful; you’ll probably learn quite a bit, and you’ll get a first-hand experience of how horrible the Loudness War is to boot.
The Loudness War, simply put, is about volume. Since the mid-90s, the record industry and music producers as a whole have become convinced that ‘louder is better’; what that means is that believe that if a song is louder than other songs, it will be more popular. This isn’t a new phenomenon, by any means, but digital recording has given producers and engineers in charge of mastering (finalizing what a song will sound like in playback) unprecedented control and a much bigger range of sound to play around with.
I don’t want to get into too much detail here, largely because I’m hardly an expert on the concept, but the central trouble with the race for the loudest record found in pop is something called dynamic range compression. Since CDs have a limit on how loud they can be (the digital full scale, marked as 0dBFS, the only way to make a record ‘louder’ after reaching that point is to shove the quiet moments up to the same volume. This is what audiophiles are referring to when they talk about a ‘compressed sound’; it means there’s no objective change in volume during a crescendo. We may still perceive a change due to the way we interpret what we’re hearing, but in actuality everything in the sound is pushed up into the red.
What does that mean for a song? The most obvious signs of compression are clipping, a kind of audio distortion, and a dramatic loss of audio fidelity. Both are obvious around the 1:00 mark in “You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire” by Queens Of The Stone Age. For another example, check out the remix of “Search And Destory” done by Iggy Pop himself (which is the loudest rock song ever, by the way) and note how distorted everything sounds. That’s all due to the mastering, not any recording techniques. Because the volume has been turned up to 11, so to say, it’s almost impossible for the music to be subtle or varied. It catches your attention sure, much like a shouted word from a friend would. But imagine that same friend yelling in your ear for an hour and you’ll begin to grasp how irritating audiophiles find this kind of nonsense.
This is well and good when we’re talking about hard rock songs like those above, but what about songs from genres that would supposedly demand more of a soft touch? For songs like those, it’s best to look at something called a waveform chart. These offer an objective way of seeing volume peaks and dips across the course of a song or album, and are the go-to talking points for the compression conversation.
That’s a chart for (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? the Oasis album that people actually care about. It’s also the historical reference point that audiophiles use to start their compression rants; critics have gone so far as to call it a “jump the shark” moment for audio recording as a whole. Ignoring the question of whether this album ruined music forever, it still offers a stark image of range compression; note that the peak volume is almost entirely consistent throughout the entire album.
It’s not actually that loud though, which is where the album differs from most modern day examples of the Loudness War casualties. Morning Glory generally avoids the problems of clipping that plague other examples; it still sounds like shit but it’s a less offensive variety of it. Here’s a truly onerous example:
As much as I love Rick Rubin for resurrecting Johnny Cash’s career, the production on the American albums Cahs recorded for Rubin’s label are almost unbearably. Compression isn’t the real problem here; instead it’s how loud this album is. Should an album full of ballads and country songs really be this far in the red? Compare that chart to this one, for Townes Van Zandt’s self-titled album that took a similar, “Man and his guitar,” approach to recording:
See how none of the numerous peaks for the album hit the top of the vertical? That’s a sign of competence on the producer’s part; it gives the music room to breathe and keeps the fidelity intact. I was convinced for years that the audible crackling at the end of “Hurt” was the fault of bad YouTube videos, radio broadcasts, or bad MP3 rips, so you can imagine my horror when I finally bought the CD and discovered the extent of Rubin’s incompetence.
But the worst of all is probably Hot Fuss, the debut album of The Killers. Just look at this shit:
That’s not music, its refrigerator buzz. Jackhammers have more variety than this! It’s hardly an isolated phenomenon either; take a look at the chart for Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga:
Spoon’s album is able to get away this slightly better because there’s less going on so the lack of fidelity is less obvious. Still, both albums sound significantly worse than they could have with a decent producer. Compare those to an album like The Nightfly:
Think I’m being unfair to compare across vast eras? Here’s a chart for Ten:
Of course, this one was released before Morning Glory, so it is essentially from a completely different era than Hot Fuss and its kin.
The problem with albums like Hot Fuss, American IV, and Californication (which is even worse, if you can believe it) isn’t that they’re heavily compressed and overly loud, but that this style is misused for music of that nature. All three of those albums, along with countless other demolished records, demand some measure of restraint and subtlety, measures that are not necessarily mandatory for music like Queens Of The Stone Age, The Stooges, or this week’s album, The Woods.
For reference and comparison, here’s the waveform chart for Sleater-Kinney’s album.
Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? I’m not going to argue that this is the ideal state for the record to be in; I would much prefer something a bit subtler that (to repeat himself briefly) allows the music a bit of room to breathe in. That being said, I’d be very surprised if S-K and their producers allowed this brickwalling to happen out of a simple urge to follow the leader and catch up to the Gallaghers.
For one thing, the sound works for the album. It takes some getting used to (it took me weeks before I was willing to listen to any of the songs other than “Jumpers” all the way through) but the distortion enhances the songs. It’s not like anything on here is terribly complex after all; the whole album is modern-day punk, optimized for current tech by abusing the hell out of it. I have this marked as ‘Gunge’ in my library, but noise rock would probably be more appropriate.
As long as you do it deliberately, even the worst decisions can end up in a good place. John Lennon hated recording double-tracks for his vocals, so he did it with machines; Paul Simon couldn’t think of any good lyrics, so he just went “Lie-a-lie” for a while; and Ray Charles decided to end a concert with some improv. Breaking the rules is often the best way to get interesting results.
In the case of this album, I’m drawn once more to my musings on post-modernism. When it takes a deliberate effort to approach and enjoy an album, the music has to be able to stand up to the redoubled effort the listener is now expending to listen to it. If a species adapts to a new environment, they do it in expectation of being able to survive with their new biological equipment. If they can’t, the species dies, regardless of their nifty new abilities. So it is with music: once a listener takes the effort to really listen to a piece of music that is seemingly unlistenable, they have to be able find something there to really dig into, some real content. If there’s nothing to be found, the attention dies, the album is tossed, and the artist is forgotten.
When the album is instead treasured and widely discussed, it means that the music was, in fact, rewarding. That’s a word that only really gets applied to difficult music, as pop music is often rewarding on the very first listen. It doesn’t take effort to enjoy “ABC” , “Dancing On My Own”, or any other of the countless, truly good pop songs out there. I’m not enough of a snob to discount great pop music, the only thing I have issue with is the worthless dreck that I’ve talked about more than enough already.
There may be an issue in the critical community, and in my own efforts on this site, to prefer music that takes time to approach, but that isn’t an issue of snobbery or dismissal. Critics who rebound by embracing even the tackiest of gilded pop are just being reactionary; the reason why unusual, almost alien music gets so much press is because it’s different. It takes effort to approach because it doesn’t conform to the pop stereotypes we all get inundated with in everyday life. If they played music like “Rollercoaster” in elevators and “Modern Girl” on the radio then it would be all topsy-turvy and I’d probably be droning on about how great Rihanna is or something.
It’s all about dynamics, after all. Contrast is key, and it’s the reason why crazed, mal-produced, discordant, shout-at-the-top-of-your-fucking-lungs music like Sleater-Kinney gets so much cheerful adulation. This is as far from Justin Bieber’s plinky acoustic and Jason “I wish I was Paul McCartney so very much” Mraz as you can get. And I fucking love it.
Cheers, all. I’m getting another beer.
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