Short Story: The Perfect Album

2856 words


No one is quite sure when the perfect album came into existence. Everyone went to sleep one night, and the next morning there it was. A music historian traced it as far back as he could and discovered very little of use; where it came from or who produced it, there being no language or illustrations on the jacket. There seemed to be no distributor, either; the perfect album simply appeared without announcement in record stores around the world, just as ghastly as it came into our lives. The music buyer at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles had no recollection of purchasing it: “I wish I could take the credit,” he said. After interviewing every employee at Amoeba within six months of the perfect record’s estimated release date, the music historian found that none of the employees could even remember stocking it. And yet there it was, waiting to be bought, and when it was the word spread like a rash. No one knows who bought the first copy. Stores didn’t catalogue the album, and how could they, for an album without genre, artist, producer, or title? It would come to pass, though, that over six billion people would own a copy.

The perfect album held the world hostage for a time – some say for a day, others a week – when businesses shut down as listeners failed to go to work. Streets were empty, cars left in their driveways, phones unused, televisions silent and black. It is said that Paul McCartney cried when he heard it. “I didn’t even realize it,” he would recount to the news later. “Once it was over my face was wet. I didn’t know why at first.” John Cage, upon hearing it, reportedly took an eraser to a stack of his manuscript drafts and began to work feverishly at them. Since he heard it, Kanye West has never been known to use his voice; to this day, whenever he is asked even the simplest of questions he only shakes a heavy head. “It makes you feel like you’ve gone through life again,” Herbie Hancock tried to explain. “But you’re not yourself when you listen. It’s like you’re somewhere else, inside the music but outside the world at the same time. You can feel yourself grow up and grow old when you’re out there. Then, when it’s over, you fall back into yourself and it feels like you’ve never had a body before. Sometimes I have to watch myself move my fingers, just to be sure they’re really there, and that they’re mine.”

A week later, Quincy Jones, Madonna, and Thom Yorke announced that they would cease playing music and that all other musicians, besides the birds, should do the same. 99% of the world’s musicians agreed immediately. Lady Gaga tried to release another album, an ambitious three-disc set with four hours of music videos. It sold one copy, to her mother. To this day it sits unopened on Lady Gaga’s mother’s nightstand, under a stack of old New Yorkers. Keith Jarrett’s post-perfect album CD sold three copies, each to jazz collectors, one of whom unwrapped it an popped it into the CD tray. After three minutes and twenty-two seconds he was seen by neighbors throwing his CD player into the street, Keith Jarrett’s CD still inside. When Justin Bieber came to Fantasy Studios with a reluctant house band, he found the building deserted, the windows shattered, and all the equipment missing.

You couldn’t find an online copy of the perfect album; it only exists – or I should say “existed” – on vinyl. A London DJ tried to transfer it to his computer and gave up after five minutes, filled with remorse. An anonymously uploaded version circulated the internet and produced a moment of excitement for people who missed their iPods, but they quickly learned that the music was different. “Computers don’t understand it,” lamented Steve Jobs in an internationally televised announcement in which he announced that Apple would cease to produce portable mp3 players of any sort. “It’s too beautiful. It hurls us towards our eventual death and allows us to confront our loss of self without fear, and machines will never be able to understand that.”

The Red Cross decided that, in light of all the impoverished people around the globe who could not afford the perfect album, a turntable, or a speaker system, it was their duty to provide the unfortunate with this indispensable piece of art. Massive strike forces were sent out to each continent and disseminated into the countryside, lugging wagons filled to the brink. It was the greatest humanitarian effort ever known in human history. People from well-to-do families around the globe donated money and manpower to the effort. Rural areas without electricity witnessed power grids built to supply them with the energy needed to operate the stereo. Speakers of the native language gave lessons on how to operate the machine, culminating in a playing of the perfect album. These lessons ended in bear hugs, tears of epiphany, and unbearably lengthy goodbyes. It was estimated that less than a year after this project began that every household in the world owned at least one copy of the perfect album as well as the capacity to listen to it.

Soon after this successful effort a popular Japanese recording artist whose name has been lost to history claimed to have been the mastermind behind the perfect album. He was immediately ostracized and has been living in anonymous exile ever since, if in fact he is still alive.

Years and decades passed, and eventually a generation came to maturity who had never known a world without the perfect album, nor a world with albums less perfect. Some old record collections did exist still, mostly in libraries for archival purposes, or in personal collections for sentimental value. One wealthy family in Austria mounted their old records like photographs and lined them along surfaces around the house, including the worthless grand piano, to impress guests. The children in one South African elite family used old jewlcases for an imagination game, or as building blocks. The general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, in order to improve his team’s pitching, used his old records as targets for his struggling young pitchers. The team’s ERA dropped a full point in the following month, and soon teams all over the league were following suit. But no one ever listened to the old records just to listen, for pleasure’s sake. The perfect album was the be-all and end-all for listening, and as the children of the new generation grew up they found themselves in a world with only one piece of music to listen to.

And they began to wonder why. Most importantly, they wondered why the musician behind the perfect album, or anyone else for that matter, hadn’t composed a second. At the heart of the matter was their greed: they wanted more. One perfect album wasn’t enough. They were bored by hearing the same note collection over and over again, as if telling them what to think and how to feel. “If someone could give perfection such beauty,” the valedictorian of Harvard Law was once heard to say, “the same could be done for imperfection.”

The curious youth made their ways to the libraries and listened to the archives for pleasure, not for research. Those precious families who never threw out their CD players or CD collections found their teenage sons and daughters bringing friends over who dressed weirdly and listened to awful sounds, all the music from before the era of the perfect album. And as the parents disgustedly tried to switch off their rebellious offspring’s interest in the imperfect classics and grew deaf to their shouts of protest, they realized with horror that it wasn’t that their precious children had fallen into the wrong crowd but they had instead become the wrong crowd. “We have to nip this at the bud,” the Senator from Arkansas, a fiery seventy-six-year-old man, proclaimed to Congress. “We cannot risk having our youths tainted by the imperfect values of what used to pass for music.” Parents were encouraged to burn their old record collections, take a hammer to their old CD players, and rip the tape out of their old cassettes.

Many did, and the CD as a method for documenting sound was nearly lost forever. However, at this time the world’s youth made a number of technological breakthroughs. A pair of students at MIT, two shy sophomore women aged nineteen each, developed a way to cheaply build small CD players in a way that could easily be mass-produced – the reinvention of the headphone was to be completed by the same young women the following year. Around the same time a graduate student research team at Stanford University created a technology that could retrieve data from a CD and load it into a computer. So, as the previous generation busied themselves with the supposed extermination of all impure music, the young men and women of the world secretly circulated their underground technology and kept the flawed musics alive.

Some took this hungry zeal to the haughty extreme of musical reproduction. A Brazilian college student once voiced his depression that almost all the Antonio Carlos Jobim recordings had been lost forever. After searching for the lost sheet music and historical piano instructions around the world, then finding himself a splintered out-of tune piano, he taught himself over the period of two years how to replicate the lost music with his own two hands. “We’ll never know how beautiful it really sounded,” he said after an unpublicized concert, attended by over two hundred young people. A French Jimi Hendrix fan, in search for what historical archives documented as his most famous song, discovered an ultra-rare tablature transcription of “Purple Haze,” built himself a guitar based on photographs he had seen, and taught himself the piece. “I don’t understand how he could make the guitar sound so dirty,” he marveled to a friend. As a consequence distortion was reinvented, a project that would take years to complete, a project that some would say is still in progress. In Egypt a team of construction workers built a large wooden instrument with strings made of pig intestines, and they learned the Bach Cello Suites by ear from a Yo-Yo Ma recording. Until the reinvention of the bow five and a half years later, the new cello was played by scraping one’s fingernails lightly across the strings, a very rough approximation of the record’s sound. Alongside this musical renaissance, the young women from MIT, now recent graduates, developed high quality recording technology derived from the mediocre equipment normally utilized on a Hollywood movie set. They traveled around the globe in search of underground music preservationists, as they called themselves at the time, and recorded them.

The young women’s names have also been lost to history, but by their own choice. “Music,” one was heard to have said, “belongs to everyone.”

The older generation was nearsighted, but not dumb, and they began to see the underground trends after a time. Many seemed to give in to the changing times: “People don’t value perfection like they used to,” a sighing, old Australian woman summed up. Many tried to fight back, fight harder against the rising resistance of the young, and it was this attitude that would eventually doom the perfect album. There was a movement to outlaw CDs, originating in Spain and quickly spreading throughout Europe. The first country to make a law to this effect was Afghanistan, whose government decided to punish imperfect listeners with jail time. El Salvador followed suit with a similar law, and police were known to go door to door at unexpected hours and confiscate contraband CDs and the young men and women who were caught listening to them. The most extreme law was in Nigeria, where even possession of CDs or CD equipment could result in ten years of prison, though the reality was often longer. In Europe and North America the norm was to enforce a fine on the listener, and in extreme cases impose mandatory community service. The Chinese government developed an educational video series to show schoolchildren, demonstrating the risks of listening to imperfect music. The video contrasted two students, one who listened exclusively to the perfect album and one who listened exclusively to anything else. The student who listened to the perfect album was kind to his family, worked hard in school, and grew up to own an important multinational company. The student who refused to listen to the perfect album was lazy, snobby at home, and was lonely and unsuccessful in school. She eventually died of this laziness, although the video never made clear how.

The successful student was a boy, the unsuccessful one a girl, a distinction that nearly caused as much outrage among the music preservationists as the attack on music itself. Despite this, the video was translated into fifty-six languages; the average schoolchild saw it 5.2 times before entering high school. The only state in the United States of America not to air it was Florida, which was only because the state of Florida had filmed its own version with the same script, featuring a white boy and a Hispanic girl.

These draconian efforts only enflamed the preservationist movement more, which reacted to this attack with one of their own: a popular call to destroy any copies of the perfect album they could find. Parents returned home to find shards of vinyl on the carpet, accompanied sometimes by an apologetic teen (“I dropped it by accident”), sometimes by an inflammatory note (“Expression cannot be silenced!”). Anger turned to panic as the elder generation realized that the world’s supply of perfect albums had been used up decades ago, when the record stores closed and Amazon removed the music wing of its online shop. Now parents found themselves in the same position as their children were five years ago, huddling in the homes of their lucky friends who still owned a copy of the perfect album. Many marriages were broken by this practice; the intense experience of listening to the perfect album created an overwhelming intimacy between those present and often ended in sexual experiences between co-listeners as if in a dream, compelling them to be unfaithful to their spouses, the mothers and fathers of their children, without thinking of it. “I wasn’t even myself,” one Vancouver woman said to her enraged husband, who himself had had a secret affair days earlier. “I am filled with so much guilt I could die, but at the time I couldn’t do otherwise.” Despite this risk, detachment from the perfect album was far too great a loneliness than anyone could bear. The divorce rate skyrocketed.

As the elderly aged, fragmented, and grew cynical with the passing of these events, the youth movements snuck into power. It happened in Ecuador first, in a coup. After its success there were celebrations in the streets where people threw the perfect album to the ground and danced on its shards. By night’s end not a single perfect album existed in the country. Encouraged by Ecuador’s success, the rest of the world soon fell as if it had been balanced on a marble the whole time. The rest of South America changed power more or less peacefully, with the exception of Venezuela where the military, in a moment of confusion, shot on a crowd of not-so-peaceful protesters, killing nine and wounding forty-six. Music preservationists called it a massacre, and movements around the world grew even more intense. When Russia fell most of the elder generation knew the writing was on the wall. “I believe in democracy with all my heart,” growled the President of the United States of America. “If the people want Satanist imperfection to be the norm, so be it.”

He was not reelected. The power change in the United States and most other non-corrupt democracies came about by popular demand. The young elected other young, likeminded politicians. Most of the change happened overnight, over the course of a single election. The new Congress, an average of 12.6 years younger than previous, did only one thing before overturning the old censorship laws: it ordered the destruction of all remaining copies of the perfect album. Within a year the United States joined sixty-four other countries in reporting that no copies of the perfect album existed within its borders. Now, if any copies of the perfect album remain, only the most secretive know where to find them. They’ve been hidden away stealthily throughout the world, like Holy Grails or wise men atop mountains, meant to be searched for but impossible to find. Despite all modern-day assurances that any trace of the perfect record has been eliminated, you can see the disguised fear behind the youthfully democratic censors of today.

If he is still alive, I’m sure the artist behind the perfect album is dismayed at this blatant display of human nature. And if I could ask him about the perfect album, I’m sure he would insist there was nothing perfect about it.

Fine

-Sam goldsmith