Book Review: “Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music” by Eric Wolfson
The Concept of the Concept Album
Ever since I was a young teenager, I’ve been fascinated by the concept album. One of the first bands I got into was Rush, which didn’t release concept albums at the time per se but had side-long suites on most of their early albums. From there, it was a leapfrog for me into progressive rock in my early 20s — bands such as Yes and Genesis fit the bill and made bonafide concept albums. And, of course, my first Hüsker Dü album purchase was Zen Arcade, which is considered by some (including the author of this book) to be a concept album. Thus, the concept album has almost always been a cornerstone of my music collection (now mostly on vinyl). Thus, when a book about 25 pivotal concept albums released between 1967 and 2016 crossed my radar, I just had to grab it for review. The resulting book turns out to be — and I want to be charitable and courteous — a bit of a mixed bag. Much of the work is a critique of these 25 albums, which is both an asset and a liability. However, more on that later, as I do want to say positive things about this book. The good news is that it will get readers excited to hunt down copies of the albums presented here — from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Beyoncé’s Lemonade — that they don’t already own. Author Wolfson does a good job of maintaining the reader’s enthusiasm for the concept of the book’s concept across some 200 pages.
I will, however, imagine that the volume will inspire much debate over what is a concept album. Wolfson defines it as “an album that takes you on a journey by virtue of its unifying mood, theme, narrative, and/or underlying idea.” So, by that criteria, Joni Mitchell’s Blue — which I’ve always looked at as a semi-autobiographical work that was a loose assortment of very good songs — is a concept album. However, there is a vast array of albums put forth here. Two of the albums that made the cut for this book — Parliament’s Mothership Connection and Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid — are examples of Afrofuturism, while the aforementioned Zen Arcade and Green Day’s American Idiot represent the punk spectrum. Yes, progressive rock is represented via Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. (Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans, meanwhile, did not make the cut, and I would have liked to know what the author would have thought about that one — it’s a guilty pleasure album that I own.) I can say, therefore, that a broad spectrum of artists is covered here from the rock, folk, funk, punk, and rap genres.
There is a template for each of the 25 entries that are included in this volume. The examinations are essentially boiled down into three parts: the first is a historical look at the circumstances around how the album was made or what made it important in the context of the artist, the second is a lengthy critique of each of the album’s songs, and the third focuses on the relevance of the album after its release to the present day. There are slight variations on this template, but the thing that’s worth concentrating on are the critiques. I’m of two minds of these write-ups. On one hand, if you’re unfamiliar with the album, this section attempts to convey what the piece sounds like. This can be helpful, for obvious reasons. However, I found that I was more interested in the more historical aspects of how the record came to be and how it fits in the concept album canon. After all, if I wanted to know how a record sounds, I could just, you know, go out and buy it. Still, as stated earlier, some may find this aspect of the book helpful as it goes a long way to describe the music for those unfamiliar with it (ie. younger readers) and it does illustrate that Wolfson is passionate about his subject and that enthusiasm might, you know, make you go out and buy the album being discussed out of sheer curiosity. (For those of you who are interested, I owned 12 of the records discussed here at one point or another — though I purged some to pay the rent when I was broke.)
Still, I found the result of this book to be a bit on the lumpy side. I wanted more context and history, and this book is more about reviewing classic records (and some more recent ones too) and seeing if they still stack up in the author’s humble opinion. To me, that’s not nearly as interesting, except as, perhaps, a conversation starter, but your mileage may vary from mine. All in all, I can say that I can see how a great deal of craft and care went into this book with a write-up about one album segueing into another. The book will be important for some readers — namely, millennials and Gen Z’ers who were not around when most of these records were released. Thus, this book might serve as an introduction for certain readers to the concept album and may help to swing the pendulum back from the song-based cycle of music purchasing in the streaming platform world back to album-oriented music. Therefore, while this book was middling for me, it does serve an educational purpose — and, as a former music critic, this book probably wasn’t really for me as an audience in the first place as most of these albums were on my cultural radar. Having said that, if the concept of concept albums thrills you, you might find something to like here. Definitely for the curious and be sure to gift a copy of these to your teenaged nephews or nieces during their birthdays, as they need to know about this book and what it represents.
Eric Wolfson’s Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From the Beatles to Beyoncé was published by Bloomsbury Academic on February 8, 2024.
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