Justifiably Lost

I've spent the morning listening to Rhino Records' deluxe repackaging of the Bee Gees' Odessa - complete with stereo and mono mixes and a disc of demos and sketchbook versions of the songs that would become Odessa. The thrust of the liner notes is that it's an overlooked masterpiece, and here's one person who agrees.

Me, I hear the 1969 album and hear a band living sadly and belatedly in the shadow of the Beatles, and there's no song here as good as anything on Sgt. Pepper, nor is there a song here as good as "Holiday" or "Lonely Days." It's all mannered performances and average ideas, with only its ambition to distinguish it. It's likeable and certainly loans itself to the contrarian impulse to salvage the reputation of a "lost classic," but like so many lost classics, Odessa requires you to overlook some rather obvious flaws to agree.

An Underrated Skill

I'm listening a lot to A.C. Newman's Get Guilty, and I fear one day he'll drift for me into the same place that Robyn Hitchcock and Robert Pollard occupy in my thinking - guys whose lyrics I once found evocative but now find evasive. But he sure knows how to decide what song starts an album. I get caught up in his projects right away.

Give Blood

For fans of New Orleans music, I present this health update I received a couple of days ago:

I wanted to update you on Snooks Eaglin and Harry Ravain.

Snooks has been hospitalized recently, but he has been released and is doing
better. Snooks required some units of blood during his hospital stay, and
those units were charged to his hospital bill. Ochsner Blood Bank has
organized a replacement blood drive for him. Units of blood are very
expensive; a replacement drive puts donated units back in the blood bank and
Snooks gets a credit on his hospital bill for each unit donated. Thus, a
replacement drive helps keep the blood supply at good levels and helps him
with his medical expenses.

If you are able to donate blood, please call the Ochsner Blood Bank and tell
them you would like to donate in the name of Fird "Snooks" Eaglin. If you
live out of town, you can donate at your local blood bank or hospital, and
give them Ochsner's contact info and Snooks' name. The hospitals will
handle all the paperwork.

Ochsner Blood Bank
1516 Jefferson Highway
New Orleans, LA 70121
(504) 842-7826

Thank you.

Also, local drummer Harry Ravain has been battling lung cancer for a little
over a year now. Harry does all kinds of musical things, but most people
know him from Benny Grunch & the Bunch. His prognosis is greatly improved
and it is possible for him to now have surgery to remove part of his lung so
he can be cancer-free. Rock 'n' Bowl and his friends will host a benefit on
Sunday, February 8 to help defray his medical expenses. A $5.00 donation
will get you entertainment by the following: Benny Grunch, Bobby Cure, Earl
Stanley, Fleur de Lis NOLA, John Blancher (!), The Nobles, New Orleans
Quarter Notes, Orleans, Paul Varisco, Phat Tuesday, acclaimed hypnotist
Amazing Dr. Z, and much more. For more information, please call Alan Reese
at 504-888-9586 or 504-289-2167. You can check up on Harry by reading his
blog.

Showing Your Ass

I'm not someone who normally cranks on kidsthesedays and their lack of historical sense, but sometimes the only way to learn not to reveal your ignorance is to be called out. RollingStone.com has musicians handicapping the Grammy races, and in his commentary on Record of the Year, Nick Jonas says:

"Chasing Pavements" brings me back to great songwriting and classic, big-band sounds — Ella Fitzgerald comes to mind. There's a great chorus, and a beautiful string line that makes me smile every time I hear it.

Adele sounds like Ella? Really? Or does it sound like a song from some point in the past sung by an African-American woman? That is so not-close that it's hard not to think of it as an unintended variation on 'they all look alike to me.' Or, more accurately, Jonas pulling respected names out of his mental rolodex even though he's never heard them. And he should know that songs with lots of instruments and big band jazz aren't the same thing.

Funny in its own right is Bruce Springsteen's "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" being nominated for Best Rock Song. Does it rock? And the girls in their summer clothes pass him by because he looks like a dour, middle-aged man on the cover. Of course they'd pass him by.

Make a Better World to Live In

A follow-up to yesterday's thoughts on listening to music:

On my way in to work this morning, I had listened to a randomized mix disc I made of stuff in my iTunes, and I hit Holy Fuck's "Super Inuit" followed by Blackbeard's "Oohkno." I know dub is a specialized taste, and psychedelic krautrock from Toronto's even moreso, but those sounds and other non-jazz instrumentals join my world and make it more interesting, as opposed to lyric-oriented rock and pop, which generally take me out of my world. The disruption I experience trying to work to rock or pop isn't just a disruption caused by hooks; it's one caused by the music's intent to offer me another person's perspective on the world. If it's any good, it's designed to take me somewhere else - into someone else's head if nothing else. Dub, on the other hand, makes my world more psychedelic and more interesting.

Lil Wayne

My essay dealing with Lil Wayne's contradictions appeared yesterday in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Work-Free Zone

I've been following Michaelangelo Matos' Slow Listening Movement blog with sympathy. Anyone who is on a significant number of PR lists eventually accumulates so much new music that it becomes a burden that only other music writers can appreciate. One side effect of those stacks is how they affect your listening habits in ways that can become burdensome. Because of OffBeat's focus on Louisiana music, it dominates my listening and there's no joy in yet another CD by an identity-free jazz/funk combo or trad jazz revivalists remaking the most obvious songs in the New Orleans repertoire.

The concept is to spend more quality time with the music, which I appreciate because much of what I listen to is shaped by what I'm doing. I tend to check out DJ mixes, jazz, dub and electronica when editing because the lack of vocals - or their de-centralized position means they don't interrupt my train of thought. Music that makes me notice it through that process gets a second or third listen. I often listen to CDs I'm trying to review in the car because it's the least multi-tasked listening that I do in a day.

That means, though, that most of my listening in a day is work-related, and the wall of CDs go largely untouched. I finally had to make certain decisions about listening to keep from losing the fun of music in the work. I only listen to music that has no work attached to it in the house. Still, there are limits to what I listen to at home because my wife can't stand Motorhead - and I married her? - and drone-oriented music. The only place I can hear Alan Vega next to the Undertones next to the Stooges and John Barry is my iPod, which I declared a work-free zone.

... and while writing this, I've been checking out Zu's Carboniferous, which ends up as annoying as most Ipecac releases. Free jazz squeaks and squonks tied to metal crunch and fidgety beats just aren't that much fun, no matter who plays them.

The Post-Modern President

[Update January 23]

Yesterday's inaugural speech marked Obama as our first post-modern president, performing his version of church-based, African-American politician speech.

... and as we say goodbye to Bush, we're debating in the office: is "not intellectually curious" mediaspeak for "stupid"? I think we all know the answer to that.


Update: More on the references in Obama's speech here, courtesy of Douglas Wolk:

That last phrase, though, is particularly freighted with subtext. "Glorious burden," in recent decades, has most often referred to the Presidency itself, rather than the condition of being American; it's the title of a 1968 book by Stefan Lorant, The Glorious Burden: The American Presidency, and of a more recent Smithsonian exhibition about the history of the office. But it's also a phrase Obama has used at least once before. It appears in his memoir Dreams from My Father, in a description of the attitude his mother tried to instill in him: "To be black was the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear."

One More 'One Last Time'

Maybe this will be my last post on GWBush. I hope so. I thought I'd sworn off chewing on him, but then I read Maureen Dowd this morning:

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

Like my most recent post on Bush, she's involved in the question we all take away from his presidency: How could one man get so many things so spectacularly wrong? She has her take, I have mine, and other amateur psychoanalysts around the world have theirs. I've put forward the religious nut theory, but that doesn't exactly say what I mean. I think of him as clinging to his faith like, well, an alcoholic in recovery, and Jesus is the last line of defense between him and a five-day bender.

But the Oedipal relationship thing carries a lot of explanatory weight as well. When he first chose optional war in Iraq, my take was that it was all about the rights of the ruling class, and that he took us to war because Saddam Hussein embarrassed his father. I don't see same insane sense of privilege in those around him, who saw oil fields and a pretext to create the new Cold War in Iraq - the dictator who stood up to your daddy and lived to tell was just the button they pushed to get the idea from thought to Baghdad.

Know Your Market

Starting Monday at 11:59 p.m., NPR.org will stream Bruce Springsteen's upcoming album, Working on a Dream. The album won't be in stores until January 27.

To his credit, Springsteen hasn't seemed to wrestle awkwardly with his changing place in the market as he has aged - not since Human Touch and Lucky Town, anyway. Still, it's interesting to think about the role local FM rock stations played in his career up to Darkness on the Edge of Town. Before Born to Run, his reputation as a great live act kept his name in public when listeners weren't convinced by the albums, and the bootlegs of radio broadcasts suggested that it wasn't all hype. In the period between Born to Run and Darkness when he was in legal limbo dealing with then-manager Mike Appel, the slow-churn of those bootlegs through the underground helped spread the word of his live shows at a time when he depended on them for income. They also kept semi-fresh music in front of fans and gave them something to convert unbelievers with, much like Lil Wayne's mixtapes did before Tha Carter III.

One Last Kick ...

... Because he deserves it. President Bush went on television last night to parade his delusions in front of America one last time. There's no point in chewing on all of them because it's been done enough, but one last thought because it's a big one. He said:

The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems. Under one, a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace.

Beside the white hats/black hats mentality that has shaped all of his rhetoric, foreign and domestic, this is of interest because it's the final evidence we're going to get of what I've believed for the last eight years - that he's a religious extremist who has seen everything in terms of Holy War. Class, race and economic interests have all been folded into his war crimes, but it seems pretty clear that the vision that motivates him is one of the Holy Warrior. Frankly, it's a miracle we're not in a worse mess than we are.

Doesn't Consistency Count for Something?

To their credit - I suppose - Bush and Cheney are a) delusional, or b) denying-ass motherfuckers to the end. According to Bush, the low point of his presidency was being called a racist - the "N word" for white people in a way - and in tonight's interview with Jim Lehrer, Dick Cheney says of Iraq, "This was a terror-sponsoring state with access to weapons of mass destruction." And when asked about his abysmal approval rating, he says:

"I don't buy that. And I find, when I get out and talk to people, that that's not the unanimous view as you would have -- the things that count for me in terms of the people I want to make certain are with us are, for example, the American military -- the young men and women who serve, the folks who go out and put their lives on the line to carry out the policies we've decided upon.

Hall of Yawns

On my OffBeat blog, I wrote about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees:

I just received the nominees for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and frankly, I don’t know why I still pay attention. I feel like I’m in high school again, where rock equals classic rock, good equals dexterously talented, punk is suspicious and disco sucks. This year’s nominees: Jeff Beck, Chic, Wanda Jackson, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Metallica, Run-D.M.C., the Stooges, War and Bobby Womack. Who’ll get in? Beck (dexterity), Metallica (they rawk!), War (soul but not disco, and in their day, everybody talked about Lee Oskar’s talent, which equals dexterity) and probably Run-DMC, just to prove the Hall voters aren’t anti-hip-hop. Besides, with Aerosmith they rawked! If someone else gets in, it’ll be one of the oldies acts.

This morning, the inductees were announced, and I went three for four. Jeff Beck, Metallica, Run-DMC and Little Anthony and the Imperials are going in, with Wanda Jackson going in as an early influence.

Sweeter and Sweeter

Simon Reynolds' conversation on the Sweet continues at Blissblog, so I'll maintain my parallel conversation. Fans of the Sweet referred him to great/overlooked albums, to which he writes:

And yet something in me resists going down this path, chasing down the albums*... I fear it would (c)auteurise the pure enjoyment out of it for me.... I'm not sure I want to go into that zone that Popular can get into where it's all a bit studium-encrusted... you start clocking who was the studio engineer on track X and so forth.. I'm almost happier just sticking with the Greatest Hits CD. (I actually have Desolation Boulevard, on vinyl--had it for years, but only listened to it once). The idea of scurrying around scooting up every last speck of pleasure...

He goes on to say:

I feel a strong impulse to keep them in a securely cordoned-off reservation of (relatively) unreflective rapture, a theory-free zone

I wonder if it's also the reluctance to try to make the case for the greatness of albums you don't really believe in, but that contain singles that you do. If there's anything critics love, it's reclaiming the unjustly overlooked album. When I wrote about Barry Cowsill's death for Oxford American, Marc Smirnoff asked me if I could make the case for the Cowsills' II x II as an overlooked masterpiece. I couldn't, or at least not with my heart in it. There was a time when I tried to make that claim for The Beach Boys Love You, but I now recognize the argument as posturing, and I could only really make the case if I ignored at least half of the album. Look at the list of submissions for 33 1/3 books and you can see it clotted with potential books on unrecognized masterpieces.

Otherwise, Reynolds' argument makes me slightly uncomfortable because it seems to confirm the charges that many make against critics - that we take the fun out of music by intellectualizing something that was never meant to be thought of in that way. If we cordon off certain personal favorite bands from critical scrutiny, what does that say about our own thoughts on critical scrutiny?

Why People Suck

To commemorate Silence is Violence Night, someone posted signs around town that said simply, "Crime Happened Here," and under the slogan, the date and the crime. It's a startling graphic way of marking how much crime takes place and where it happens, and it reminds us that the police know where crime happens because they keep records (theoretically) and we don't. The next day, some neighbors fretted about the signs because they worried they'd affect someone's effort to sell their house. They issue evidently didn't bother them enough to be glad the sign's up, nor did have the common sense to take the signs down. After all, Silence is Violence Night was over. It was better to grouse and feel put upon than to deal with the signs in one way or another.

Today's Times-Picayune picks up a similar thought. Jefferson Parish officials now want to regulate roadside memorials for traffic-related fatalities:

Scheduled for a vote at Wednesday's Parish Council meeting, the ordinance would require council approval before a memorial could be erected on public property.

The flowers and crosses would have to be removed after 90 days and would be limited to 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide. Anyone erecting a memorial without a permit could face criminal charges under the ordinance, which, if adopted, would become part of a nationwide crackdown on roadside memorials in recent years.

That means you'd have to wait for a parish council meeting to get approval for expressions of grief. And there's nothing grieving family members really want to do more than bang heads with parish-level politicians. The article continues:

D.J. Mumphrey, an executive assistant to Broussard, said the proposal addresses persistent complaints about roadside markers that have remained years after the crash or are so elaborate that they interfere with drivers' sight lines.

"We are sensitive to the desire of families to memorialize their loved ones," he said. "But some of these things have been up for years and years and are so big that they become a safety hazard."

If there really are crazy-huge memorial markets somewhere nearby, I want a map because I want to see them. Obviously it sounds like the main issue is Jeff Parish residents worried about their property values, but I wonder if there isn't also another issue at play. Could hostility to roadside memorials also have something to do with our culture's unease with grief, and even people who dealt with Katrina-related loss would rather have others who lost loved ones get over it and move on.

In My Dark Little Heart of Hearts ...

... I don't agree, but I'm going to agree with Simon anyway because I'll always come out vocal in support of The Sweet.

A Trend?

A few months back, Down's publicist pitched review tickets to the writers and editors in the cities the band would be playing, only to withdraw the offer a day or so before the show. The same thing just happened yesterday; I was told by the publicist that Lil Wayne's management had pulled publicity tickets in New Orleans, and that the tickets I had been offered by the publicist weren't available anymore. In this case, the matter was made worse by the fact that they weren't all pulled; the writer for The Times-Picayune was hooked up by the publicist who told me i was shut out. On the other hand, photo pit passes were available. Draw your own conclusions.

Meet Ron Asheton

Ron Asheton's death this week is so sad, and I've been disappointed by the general lack of engagement with him as a musician. The Stooges weren't simply Iggy, and the band wasn't an autonomous entity divorced from its members. Asheton was central to one of the most influential and devastating rock sounds ever recorded. In his review of Fun House, Robert Christgau wrote, "Now I regret all the times I've used words like "power" and "energy" to describe rock and roll, because this is what such rhetoric should have been saved for. Shall I compare it to an atom bomb? a wrecker's ball? a hydroelectric plant? Language wasn't designed for the job."

RollingStone.com picked up some of the slack, but here's how you met Ron Asheton if the first Stooges album you heard was The Stooges:
"1969" starts at a leisurely pace with a wah-wah'ed guitar than pans between the speakers. It's not laid back, though. It's not trying to be cool. It's as insistent and regular as brother Scott's snare snaps. When the Bo Diddley beat kicks in and Iggy starts singing, the wah guitar is gone in favor of boxy, tightly controlled chord progression. Notes don't ring, chords aren't left to hang. The moment isn't about Asheton, except that it's all about him. The song's tension is all in his refusal do a show biz thing; his refusal to insert "notice me" licks, or even lead fills. At the end of the verse, he releases the tension with two heavily distorted power chords, but they're not Townshend-like power chords played for the cheap seats. They're heavily distorted depth charges that add texture without grandeur or heroics. This is anti-hero music. Another verse passes in the same way before a modulation up that brightens things a bit.

At the end of that verse, the final power chord is still crackling when Asheton enters with a guitar solo, and there's nothing polite or organic about it. His solo jumps in at maximum volume, layering distortion over distortion, working his whammy bar, paying more attention to the crisp attack of notes and the ebb and flow of melodic clusters than the melodic development itself. Iggy's repeating "It's 1969, baby" as Asheton bends the occasional held note, then breaks off another tight fistful of distorted sixteenth notes. Melodically, he's threatening to pursue an ascending line, but he keeps doubling back on himself, getting sidetracked in overtones, wah-wah, and murk. In the last minute, he's lost interest in the false optimism of that ascending melody. He could solo for 10 minutes and never get to the moment when it feels transcendent. Instead, he revels in the sound of electricity as channeled through strings and boxes. That last minute is the real tension breaker, the antithesis of his straightfaced chording through the verses. He borders on manic, as if he can't quite decide which noise he wants to play next, but he does. And he chooses the next noise and the next slur and the next jerk of the whammy bar with intuitive brilliance. Hendrix may have been the poet of the electricity, but Asheton was the Mickey Spillane, breaking off something that would never soar, but more dangerous and that would hit with a physical impact Hendrix couldn't imagine.

... and "Down on the Street," the opener on Fun House, is harder.

Just Remember ...

... drugs fund terrorism. Repeat after me: drugs fund terrorism. This was the message of Homeland Security, U.S.A., which was as foul a piece of propaganda as I've seen in a while. I watched it with my immigration lawyer way who periodically exploded in outrage at the heavy-handed narration and its countless assumptions, including the reminder that drugs fund terrorism. Of course, the narrator forgot to intone solemnly that sometimes drugs fund huge houses, kickass cars, and a sweet lifestyle. What we see is someone arrested for drug smuggling; what we're told is that we just saw funding for terrorism interrupted. What we see is mule after mule going down; what we're told is that we're fighting the war on terrorism.

The only part that didn't outrage either my wife or I beyond the time wasted was the Swiss belly dancer who was coming to the States on a tourist visa, but she wanted to look for work as a belly dancer while here. Her detention and refusal of entry was all reasonable if a bit silly, and it was obviously in the show to lighten the mood between the strikes on Bin Laden's funding through border drug raids. But is this what the Department of Homeland Security is for? To protect us from the Swiss and their pernicious plot to take jobs away from hard working American belly dancers? Is that really a national priority?

The show's particularly galling in New Orleans because FEMA was put under the Department of Homeland Security when the department was created after 9/11. Protecting the borders and fighting terrorism one belly dancer at a time was made the priority as FEMA was financially and bureaucratically weakened. And we saw where that got us. The country was left unable to respond to disaster so that we could hire more border cops who perform routine police business and bust low-level drug traffickers.

Troy Patterson's review at Slate.com is a nice introduction to the writing that has circulated about the show, including a link to Jeffery Goldberg's story for The Atlantic on the ease with which he got forbidden items through airport security - a necessary counterbalance to the bathetic monologue from an airport security drone who won't let any illegal items get through on his watch because all these people, all these travelers - they're his responsibility. They're like his children.

... and drugs fund terrorism.

What Should People Know?

It's more than three years after Katrina, and one of the underlying questions remains how we talk about the state of the city to the rest of the world. Are we half-empty or half-full? Me - I'm the half-empty type, because people can't and won't help if they think things are fine. Of course, civic leaders and tourist organizations want the world to think we're fine in most significant ways because they figure that will encourage people to come here, which has value as well. Tourist money is good for a city that has made tourism its economic engine.

When I take people to the Lower Ninth Ward these days, I point to the Upper Ninth Ward first so people can appreciate what they see when they get there. Immediately after the storm, the destruction was obvious - houses that had floated off their moorings and smashed into trees or came to rest on pickup trucks. Acres upon acres of houses contorted by the violently surging floodwaters. Now, much of it looks like a pasture because most of the irreparable houses have been demolished, leaving blocks of green space with weeds obscuring the foundations and pipes. Without a visual reference as to how dense the neighborhood once was, there's no way to gauge it anymore.

Tonight PBS' Frontline returns to the Lower Ninth Ward with 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge for a documentary on rebuilding titled The Old Man and the Storm. We didn't get a screener of it, but here are previews from Salon.com and The Times-Picayune.

... and if you see a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, we're not all as despondent and wounded as local columnist Chris Rose, who Bourdain talks to in Domilese's po-boy shop. I'm not convinced Rose is even as damaged as he seemed, and if so, he's the one who's out of step with the city right now.

Space is the Place

At my more New Orleans-centric blog, I've been writing a lot recently about the city getting involved in Mid-City's New Year's Eve tradition of a Christmas tree bonfire on the Orleans Avenue neutral grounds. (You can read previous posts here, here, here, here and here, and you can see a youtube video here.)

There's no question that it was the most Apocalypse Now event I've ever been to, with fireworks going off on all sides of you, a dense smoke illuminated by fireworks even before the bonfire was lit, and the fire itself was usually a pretty fine inferno. I understand any mom or dad who was afraid of it, and I understand any city employee or public official who thought it was too extreme to go on as it did for decades (monitored by a fire truck for the decade-plus that I've been attending). But it's worth noting that nothing did happen, and that the changes have everything to do with legal liability and the general impulse of authority to extend itself into as many elements of our lives as possible.

The saddest feature of the new, idiotproofed, uber-secured version of the bonfire is that many are happy if not happier with it this way - not because of the improved safety but because it has been recast in a form they understand. A decentralized, democratic, participatory event was unsettling for many; now it's passive (viewers wait for the fire department to bring them the gift of fire), centralized (there's nothing going on at the neutral grounds site except the bonfire), and the dominant values are those of property - who's got it, who doesn't, and whose is valuable, whose isn't. The neighborhood homeowners don't feel ambivalent about a party/event that could set their houses on fire; now they have prime real estate for a safe, city-sanctioned tradition. Now their property values could go up because the homes are near the bonfire and the start of the Endymion parade route. And at the bonfire site itself, people started staking out their land by the bonfire's barricade as early as 5 p.m. The same neighborhood is notorious for starting to stake out curbside space for Endymion days in advance of the parade. In short, a perfectly democratic, egalitarian event has been transformed into yet another place to enact a haves/havenots drama, which is a sadder fate that death for the bonfire.

No Surprises

Ben Sisario closed out 2008 at The New York Times with one last hand-wringing article about the sad state of the music industry:

Total album sales in the United States, including CDs and full-album downloads, were 428 million, a 14 percent drop from 2007, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Since the industry’s peak in 2000, album sales have declined 45 percent, although digital music purchases continue to grow at a rapid rate.

What's interesting in that is its emphasis on albums. Until the Beatles, single tracks (in the form of singles) were the primary form of artistic expression, and even after the growth of the album as artistic unit, there was still a substantial market that only wanted the individual songs they knew they liked. The increase in downloading and the decrease in album sales - whether for physical or mp3 albums - doesn't mark anything more or less dramatic than buyers resisting the industry's efforts to force them to purchase the more expensive item and buying the music they actually want.

What's interesting and sad is the lengths people will go to force people to buy albums. Kid Rock found an audience with "Bawitdaba" and "Cowboy," but he's decided that Rock N Roll Jesus must be purchased as a whole and not through iTunes. AC/DC made the same decision with Black Ice, selling it exclusively through Walmart. Both have sold well - Black Ice was the fourth best selling album of the year last year - but if sales of single tracks were bundled and considered albums, a number of downloaded artists sold as well. According to RedOrbit.com's "Digital Downloads Death Knell to Artists?":

However, Kid Rock and AC/DC alone do not tell the entire story. For example, this year's best-selling album is Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," which sold 2.7 million copies. Digital music sales played a significant part in the success, with Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” single selling more than 3 million copies. Cold play’s "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," the year’s second-best-selling album, sold more than half its 1.9 million units via digital services.

Digital stores also helped Leona Lewis single "Bleeding Love” become the best-selling digital single of the year, having sold 3.3 million tracks according to Nielsen SoundScan. The single is part of the album "Spirit“, the eighth-best-selling album this year with 1.2 million copies sold. Of those, 140,000 were digital sales. Counting every 10 tracks as an album, Lewis' sales rise to 1.5 million without considering sales of any other singles from "Spirit" – a number on par with AC/CD and Kid Rock.

Atlantic Records' attempt to force downloads to Estelle's "American Boy" to translate into stronger album sales failed miserably. It was a top ten download at iTunes, but sales of the song and album declined when the song was pulled from iTunes by the label.

The question the industry should be trying to solve is how to construct business models that value singles sales again. The question they've been trying to solve instead is how to get a piece of every end of an artists' income including live show and merchandise money. It's no wonder the industry's in such bad shape.