The act of dropping an album in 2015
You wouldn’t expect to see the names Miley Cyrus and Adele in the same sentence, but the fates of the two seemingly disparate artists have continually intersected — as they did again this week — and almost always in ways that delineate their differences.
First it was Adele defending Cyrus after the latter caused an uproar by admitting on camera that she was probably guilty of smoking too much weed (2011: such a quaint year for pop music).
Then rapper Wiz Khalifa boasted that both artists would be making guest shots on his then-upcoming 2014 album Blacc Hollywood. (The album appeared. The guest shots didn’t.)
Now, Cyrus and Adele have made headlines for the same reason: a new album. Cyrus actually surprise-released her new work this week, online and free, while signing off from hosting Sunday’s MTV video awards show. (In a sign of the times, the first line of the first song — the vowel-enhanced “Doooo It!” — is “Yeah, I smoke pot.”)
Adele’s next album, on the other hand, is making news simply for getting a reputed title ( 25) and a vague release date (November), as Billboard reported and dozens of other outlets immediately re-reported. (In Canada, Adele’s music comes out on XL via Beggars, a spokesman for which wisely offered us a brisk “no comment” to both pieces of information.)
The contrasting approaches neatly stake out the two poles at opposite ends of the shifting territory around album releases.
On one side, we have what is shaping up to be a traditional, measured, meticulously planned buildup to launch day (whenever that turns out to be).
On the other, we have Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, a sprawling 23-song beast that features new collaborator Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips and is generally characterized by the same signifiers of authenticity (raw, confessional lyrics, occasionally ragged vocals) that are reflexively praised in a rock or hip-hop context and routinely criticized in a pop one.
Cyrus’s tactic, while an increasingly popular one, also illustrates a danger inherent to free releases: they often don’t feel like “real” albums. So, despite serving the rapid dissolution of the line between her life and her music in ways that 2013’s Bangerz couldn’t even imagine, Dead Petz still doesn’t feel like a “real” album. It seems more like an act of collation that self-identifies as an album.
Meanwhile, the big question around the (putative) Adele release is whether she’ll prove to be the one superstar not named Taylor or Swift who can transcend the CD-killing effect of streaming music.
After all, Adele has yet to put out an album during the era of streaming dominance. Her last studio effort came out at the beginning of 2011, the same year Spotify launched in the U.S.; here, the service isn’t even a year old. Granted, Rdio, Deezer and Pandora each goes back before that, but the rapid ascendancy of the format is a much more recent phenomenon.
It all makes for an interesting case study in the evolving habits that govern our music consumption, not to mention the relationship between an artist’s staying power and the manner in which her work is unveiled. In Adele’s case, we should know in November. For Cyrus, the answer could come a lot sooner.