Concept Album

#REDIRECT Concept album

Concept album

[[Image:Pepper's.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, generally considered to be the first concept album]] Usually, in popular music, an album of an artist or group simply consists of a number of unconnected songs that the members of the group or the artist have written or have chosen to cover version. In a concept album, on the other hand, all songs contribute to a single overall theme or unified story. Frank Sinatra released several albums with songs about the same subject. This gave rise to the phrase "concept album". What may have been the first example of a concept album in rock of any form was the Beach Boys' 1963 ''Little Deuce Coupe'', which features 12 songs, each one about America's automobile culture. It was one of the few Sinatra-style concept albums in rock. Three years later, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention created an odd farce about rock music as a whole with ''Freak Out!''. The earliest example, however, is Woody Guthrie's 1940 debut album, "Dust Bowl Ballads". The 1967 album ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' by The Beatles is generally considered to have been the first true concept album. For this album, the members of the band were each supposed to adopt a fictionalized persona, and the title song, styled as the theme song of the fictional "Lonely Hearts Club Band", wraps around the rest of the album like bookends. However, most of the songs on the album are unrelated to the theme, and the fictional characters have little life beyond the introduction of Ringo as "Billy Shears" on the first track. Thus, there is some debate over whether ''Sgt. Pepper'' really qualifies as a true concept album, although its reputation as such helped in spreading the idea of concept albums. Certainly, many of the songs on ''Sgt. Pepper'' are like short story ("She's Leaving Home", "A Day in the Life") and others are like character sketches ("When I'm Sixty-Four", "Lovely Rita"), making the album something clearly special. Several albums that could be considered candidates for early concept albums include ''S.F. Sorrow'' by the Pretty Things, which tells the life-story of the eponymous character, and ''Days of Future Passed'' by the Moody Blues, which combines the acoustic instrumentation of the Moodies with the orchestral interludes of the London Festival Orchestra to document a typical "everyman's day". Both of these albums were released in the same year as ''Sgt. Pepper'' (1967). ''Sgt. Pepper'' was itself inspired by an earlier work: the abandoned Beach Boys album ''Smile (album)''. Later bands such as Pink Floyd became famous in particular for their concept albums, with one of their most famous albums Dark Side of the Moon. The concept album genre overlaps with rock opera and to some extent with rock musical. Concept albums are especially common in the progressive rock genre. For classical music that tells a story or evokes a concrete idea see program music. An extension of the concept album idea could be seen in a series of albums which all contribute to a single effect or unified story. This was the original plan behind the first four albums by King Crimson, which were all related to the four elements of Occidental mythology. These are ''In the Court of the Crimson King'' for the Air Element, ''In the Wake of Poseidon'' for the Water Element, ''Lizard (album)'' for the Fire Element and ''Islands (album)'' for the Earth element. ==See also== * List of concept albums Albums

Concept album

Radiohead's Kid A and Hail to the Thief are ''not'' ostensibly concept albums. Can anyone prove that they are? I believe that Radiohead may have intended for them to be at the outset, but abandoned the idea. I don't think they belong here. User:Matthew McVickar 20:08, Apr 11, 2004 (UTC) ---- The descriptions for alot of these albums aren't very detailed. Ill fix some of them and nope the Wikipedians fix more. --User:Arm ---- I am not familiar with all the albums on this list, but quite a few of them are clearly NOT concept albums by any definition I can think of. This list appears to be completely out of hand. For example: "A Hard Day's Night"??? What exactly is the concept of that album? Just because its songs were featured on a movie, that does not make it a concept album. (On the other hand, the Alan Parsons Project albums clearly belong). User:soulpatch ---- "A quick one while he's away", while it was an early trial of the "rock opera" for the Who, is not an album, it is a collection of six songs that tell a single simple story, presented as a single album cut, not an album, even though it appeared on an album called ''A Quick One''. It was the second Who album, had "Boris the Spider", "So Sad About Us" and other unrelated songs. User:Ortolan88 :Removed. I suggest also removing all the The Moody Blues albums except ''Days of Future Passed'', but I'll wait for a second opinion rather than doing it myself. User:Bobby D. Bryant 18:14 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC) ---- I am glad to see that people are finally starting to prune some albums from this article. This is such a frustrating article because of all the questionable albums that were thrown into the list. User:soulpatch ---- I did some major pruning job. Because I don't know most the albums myself either, I have taken an outside source for judgement, being http://www.allmusic.com/. They have album descriptions for all major and many minor albums. When this description did not specify that it was a concept album (directly or indirectly) (or there was no description), I have removed it with the argument that it might still be one, but it certainly isn't famous as such. User:Andre Engels 16:15 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC) :I can't say I agree with every single removal, but I do agree with the vast majority, and I greatly admire your courage and intelligence in doing the pruning job. If a few of these get back on the list in spite of allmusic.com missing them, with their advocates making the case for them in the annotation or here, then fine, but good riddance to most of the obscure, unimportant, non-concept albums you took out. User:Ortolan88 ---- Just wanted to fix the domain in the previous message. Allmusic.org redirects to a domain auction site. The correct domain is Allmusic.com. User:Zarggg ---- Added (or put back in?) Muswell Hillbillies by The Kinks. This is definitely as much a concept album as OK Computer. If you have a problem, take it up with User Talk: Chinasaur, but first read my description and the liner notes... Also wonder whether Einstein on the Beach is really appropriate since it's technically an opera by most people's standards. I suppose I see a slight distinction from other Glass works, e.g. Koyaanisqatsi, Naqoyqatsi that did not make the list (the latter are movie soundtracks for one, although "movie" in the same sense that ''Einstein on the Beach'' is an "opera" in my opinion). Also, the description of Sgt. Pepper at the top is a bit long for my taste considering the point of the whole paragraph is that this is not a real concept album and considering this is not an article about the Beatles... --User:Chinasaur 10:09, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC) *Furthermore, the ''Pepper'' LP is significant enough that it has its own article. No need for excess info here. Place it in the ''Pepper'' article. User:Kingturtle 03:06, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC) == spoilers == it makes sense to me to have the spoiler warning on this article. User:Kingturtle 07:26, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC) :So what do we do now? I think neither of us is interested in an edit war, but I also think giving arguments will not help, since we probably already know them... I give mine below, but I don't think it will help. :My argument is that a spoiler warning should indicate that reading the article might 'spoil' people's pleasance in reading a book by giving away what happens. To me this includes extensive reading, and the mentioning of major plot events. It does not include giving the basic setting of a book (thus my comment about the Odyssee - I would not expect a spoiler warning before "The Odyssee is about Odysseus, a Greek hero from Troy, who tries to get back home". A second reason is that a concept album is quite different from a book - few will listen to a concept album in a "what happens next?" state of mind. User:Andre Engels 09:13, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC) In general I think it's kind of silly for an encyclopedia to have spoiler warnings; if someone is looking something up in an encyclopedia, he should be aware that he might get more details than he is looking for. The difference is that this encyclopedia is on the web, and seems to turn up in Google searches more and more these days. So I think it makes sense to assume the spoiler warning is more of a courtesy for people who navigate to the page accidentally. In that light, I think the overriding argument is to leave the warning in; it doesn't really detract seriously from the article and you never know who might stumble onto the page. Although it does bring up the interesting point: a spoiler warning should probably add something to the page