Background: America and the Late Eighties

Growing up, I got almost all my information about new music from the radio, and from my friends who also got most of their information from the radio (probably MTV as well).¹ I knew of one person who subscribed to a music magazine (Rolling Stone), but for some reason I never spoke with him about what he read in that magazine. Radio was the chief medium through which we learned about new music, and for us “radio” meant Top 40 radio, and “Top 40 radio” meant KZ-93 out of Peoria (roughly one hour south of our town). Top 40, one assumed, meant the forty best-selling singles in the nation during any given week. This singles canon (probably not the best word for a body of work with so short a shelf-life) was re-codified every Saturday morning by Casey Kasem, who proclaimed it, so to speak, on his weekly radio program, Casey Kasem's Top 40. So the single was driving radio, and radio was driving the single, a paradox I now find almost impossible to fathom, but that only makes sense if one grasps that the single had a dual nature, simultaneously abstract and concrete.

As an abstraction the single was the intangible song you heard on the radio, the melody and lyrics running through your mind; it was a song that became the subject of conversation; it was the Holy Spirit of fame descending dove-like onto a human and conferring, however briefly, the gift of celebrity: Tiffany might have created the song “I Think We're Alone Now,” but didn't the song “I Think We're Alone Now” really create Tiffany the star?

As a concretization, the single was also a thing, a physical object that you could purchase and own; it was the vessel that carried the abstraction, somewhat as a fetish carries a god.² Sure, the abstraction that you heard on the radio was what made you desire it, but the concretization that you could buy at the store was what made you able to possess it, hear it whenever you wanted, not just when some distant disc jockey happened to broadcast it over the radio.

Even in its concrete form, however, the single was elusive, continuously adapting to changes in technology and changes in the marketplace. Singles were everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere in the sense that all the songs we heard on the radio were hit singles. And nowhere in the sense that people didn't seem to buy very many of them. I can remember purchasing three or four singles at most: Informer by Snow, Please Don't Go by KWS, and The Crying Game by Boy George, all three when I was seventeen.³ More typically, though, if I wanted to buy music, I purchased a full album, and my friends did as well, even when an album only had one or two songs we wanted to own. If we purchased a full album, however, we did so for the one or two songs we heard on the radio, which is to say those hit singles. So while my friends and I bought almost no singles, singles were what interested us.

Who then was buying singles, and if nobody was buying them then why were record companies selling them? In theory, if a record label wanted to have a hit single, then it had to sell as many copies of that single as possible. By the late eighties, however, a song could become a bona fide hit in the United States without ever being released commercially as a single (raising the almost-occult question of how a song becomes a hit anyway). “Suck My Kiss” by Red Hot Chili Peppers was a hit single in the United States, but was never actually released commercially as a single here.⁴ The band's record label only released the song as “LP cut” promotional copies.⁵ These promotional copies were distributed to radio stations and night club disc jockeys—to anyone, presumably, with the power to make sure the song was heard by lots of people. A single like “Suck My Kiss” was never, however, something that a fan could go to the store and purchase, except as part of the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

The contemporary trade papers reported a divide within the music industry over the single's value, by which I mean the single's value to the music industry(!). Record labels worried that whatever marketing value a single might possess was offset by the risk that it would “cannibalize” sales of the more expensive full-length album from which it was lifted. This reasoning actually makes sense to me: why would a rational person purchase the more expensive album when he could get the one good song on the far less expensive single? I remember purchasing Falco3 (on cassette tape, at Wal-Mart, when I was ten), and the only track I ever enjoyed from it was the album's novelty hit, “Rock Me Amadeus.”

When an album only had one song you wanted to hear, the single version of that song was, in almost every respect, the better choice, not only because it was less expensive, but also because (in the world of cassette tapes, at least) it spared you the frustration of having repeatedly to rewind and fast forward in order to locate the desired track. “Rock Me Amadeus” was the first track on Falco3, making it relatively simple to locate and relocate. If, on the other hand, the only track you wanted to hear was buried somewhere in the middle of side A or side B, then you had to muster considerable patience for the ordeal of locating not just the song, but the beginning of the song: rewinding, fast forwarding, rewinding again, in ever shorter durations until you finally arrived at the brief moment of silence signaling the beginning of the song you wanted to hear. This elaborate ceremony of trial-and-error often required far more patience than the song could ever possibly reward, for an example of which see “Lady in Red,” track 4 on side A of the cassette Into the Light by Chris de Burgh, a pretty common case of rapidly diminishing returns, actually. All of which is just a long way of agreeing with the record company logic that, as a consumer, I would have saved myself a lot of frustration and money by purchasing the single rather than the album.

And yet that's not what I did. I consistently chose to purchase the more expensive, full-length album, and my friends report doing the same. If music consumers had been rational actors, then we ought to have preferred singles, and the record label logic would have been correct. A rational actor might even have paid more for a single, if only to save himself the frustration of trying to locate the desired song on a cassette tape otherwise filled with undesired songs. One really has to have had the experience of listening to music on cassette tapes to understand this particular market disincentive. But also, it's worth repeating, we did not have access to much information about music, as the American music press was not nearly as influential as radio or MTV. Sometimes you lucked out: when I was eleven I got hooked by Paul Simon's radio single “You Can Call Me Al” and bought Graceland, the album from which the single had been lifted. Graceland quickly became a favorite. She's So Unusual by Cindy Lauper was another excellent album I bought on the strength of its first radio single ("Girls Just Wanna Have Fun").

Unlike the record labels, music retailers, especially shopping mall retailers, wanted more songs released as singles, not fewer. Retailers viewed the single as the key to developing the “record buying habit” among children, children who would eventually move on to the more expensive stuff (LPs). To retailers, singles were essentially a gateway drug. Furthermore the shopping malls were filled with children, many of whom were unwilling or unable to spend $15.99 on an LP, but who could easily be tempted by a $3.50 single. To the shopping mall retailers, the availability of singles meant the difference between a customer who made a purchase, albeit an inexpensive one, and a customer who left the store empty-handed, to spend her $3.50 on an Orange Julius, or a cheap pair of earrings at Claire's, or a can of green slime at Spencer's. Music retailers were therefore at odds with the record companies, either over the lack of a commercial release for an important single, or the intentional limiting of supply, an apparently common practice by record labels for songs they expected to be huge hits: the record label might release half-a-million copies as a single, half-a-million being the magic number for gold record certification. After chart-returning retailers had sold their copies, and the single achieved gold record status, it would disappear (be "deleted" in record industry parlance), continued demand notwithstanding, leaving customers no choice but to purchase the much more expensive LP if they wanted to own a copy of the song.

The American singles culture was basically dead, or if not dead then completely joyless.

Britain and the Nineties

In Britain the music single was very much alive as a concrete thing you could buy, and this flourishing singles culture was largely a consequence of Britain's influential music press, which included two weekly music tabloids, NME and Melody Maker,⁶ two weekly music magazines, Smash Hits, and Number One, and a slew of music monthlies and semi-monthlies (Select, Q, Mojo, Uncut, Vox, Muzik, The Face, Dazed and Confused, Blitz, and more).⁷ The music weeklies relied on singles not only as a source of copy, but also as a source of advertising revenue: at a giant 15 X 17 inches per page, with an average of 50 to 60 pages per issue, each of the weeklies had a lot of space to fill, and much of the content in these publications was driven by the singles culture. The music weeklies printed reports of forthcoming releases (confirmed and rumored), reviews of current releases, chart coverage, news about bands with singles in the charts, and lots of advertising for singles. Many of these singles advertisements were full-page, full-color extravaganzas.⁸

While American record labels used the single primarily as an index of popularity, the British labels turned it into a finely-honed merchandising technique. Not only were the British labels apparently unafraid that singles would cannibalize sales of full-length albums, but with breathtaking hubris they seemed to believe that singles could be used to sell the same song to the same customers over and over again. They used five merchandising techniques to induce these repeat purchases:

1. Release singles with previously unreleased tracks (usually called B-sides or non-album tracks).
2. Release singles in multiple formats.
3. Release singles in multiple parts.
4. Release singles in limited editions.
5. Release singles with novelty features.

Aside from the title track itself, the most obvious lure of a single was the availability of B-sides that you couldn't get anywhere else. These B-sides, combined with the merits of the title track, were the basis by which the music press reviewed singles. Single reviews tended to be written ecstatically, spastically, sarcastically, sophomorically…they were, in short, fun, especially compared with album reviews, which were often written with unwarranted gravity, as though reviewing rock music were every bit as serious as reviewing novels from the Man Booker shortlist. Reviews of singles wasted little time getting down to the essential question: is this single worth the “two quid” sticker price?

A successful full-length album was expected to produce three separate singles (and by “singles” here I refer to the abstraction, the song that was to become a hit). This meant the band had to supply six to fifteen B-sides for those singles, depending on the marketing strategy the label chose, more on which below. (And bear in mind that these six to fifteen B-sides were in addition to the dozen-or-so tracks the band already wrote and recorded for the full-length album itself.) Some bands developed a reputation for the excellence of their B-sides, and a certain prestige redounded to such bands. When Tanya Donelly released her first solo album, she wrote every song on the LP, and nine of the ten B-sides on the flurry of singles accompanying the LP. Many bands' B-sides were strong enough to be album tracks, which always struck me as a statement of extravagant generosity, a gesture of nonchalance, or both. Such bands made songwriting appear effortless, as if they wrote songs so easily that even their throwaway tracks were better than other bands album tracks.

Not all bands had reputations for outstanding B-sides. Beck tended to fill his singles with noise art. With a few exceptions (“Inertia,” “Berserk,” “Garden Central,” and the magnificent “Sing”) Blur's early B-sides add little to the band's oeuvre—thousands cringed when the band performed “Young and Lovely” at their 2012 Hyde Park concert. In his 2022 memoir, Blur's lead guitarist, Graham Coxon, acknowledged this grafty side of the singles business: "The pressure was huge, and I thought we were shortchanging our fans with live versions of the same song on the B-side of a vinyl single, different CD editions, a twelve-inch, a seven-inch and even a cassette, each one with a different B-side. All that meant that every time you released a single, you had to supply ten new tracks [...] and they were usually needed while you were in the middle of a tour."⁹ Sometimes a band seemed barely to be trying. All the singles off R.E.M.'s album Monster were backed by live recordings of previously-released album tracks.

Live recordings were a type of B-side that you could call derivative content, which was frequently found on singles in the nineties. By “derivative content” I mean recordings that emanate from some other, previously released song. So, a live recording derives from an originally released studio version, as do remixes, alternative edits (extended versions, radio edits, instrumental versions, acoustic versions), demos (although technically the album cut derives from the demo), cover songs, and music videos, which began appearing on “enhanced” compact disc singles in the late nineties. I've even seen “live remixes” and “live covers” on singles, which I guess would be double derivatives!!

A cover is a new recording by a different band of a previously-released musical work. Covers were an interesting form of derivative content because bands rarely covered songs that would eclipse the single's title track. Covers often seemed to have been a way for bands to acknowledge influences, or to spotlight other bands they admired, and these tributes could sometimes be very surprising: the Breeders covered Hank Williams on Divine Hammer; Belly covered the Sherman Brothers on Feed the Tree; 10,000 Maniacs covered David Bowie on These Are Days; and Pavement covered R.E.M. on Cut Your Hair.

Another form of derivative content found on singles was the remix, which is a new version of a song created by rearranging production elements from the original recording session, and combining those original production elements with samples, disco beats, and synthesizers. I loved remixes, which were always interesting, sometimes baffling, often intoxicating. A remix added marquee value to a single when the remix was by a superstar DJ.¹⁰ Blur made excellent use of remixes on their later singles—Cornelius, Unkle, and Moby all remixed Blur songs—but the most famous Blur remix was the Pet Shop Boys's mix of “Boys and Girls,” still probably the band's most famous song in Britain. Some other famous remixes from the nineties:

• Cornershop's Brimful of Asha (A-side remixed by Fatboy Slim, probably more popular than the album cut)
• Garbage's I Think I'm Paranoid (A-side remixed by the Crystal Method)
• Smashing Pumpkins's Perfect (A-side remixed by Paul Oakenfold)
• Chemical Brothers's Life is Sweet (A-side remixed by Daft Punk)
• Air's Sexy Boy (A-side remixed by Cassius)
• Manic Street Preachers's If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next (A-side remixed by Massive Attack)
• Gay Dad's Joy (A-side remixed by Brother Brown)
• Depeche Mode's Barrel of a Gun (A-side remixed by Underworld)

An advantage of derivative content was that the consumer likely knew the source track, and was therefore, in theory at least, taking less of a chance on a B-side that might have been better left unreleased. That said, remixes could be truly horrible too, but honestly you probably can't really say for sure until you experience them while high on drugs, which is, I gather, the state in which they were meant to be heard. Another advantage of derivative content, for the band at least, was that it required less effort to create, though I imagine some remixes must have been expensive to commission.

A second technique popularized by British record labels in the nineties was to issue a single in multiple parts, usually two, with the release dates staggered by a week or more. Both parts would have the same A-side, but different B-sides, and different (but related) album art. Sometimes the A-side on the second part would be a different edit or even a live version, though more typically the A-side on each part was identical. For Tomorrow by Blur was released as a two-part compact disc, with part two being issued one week after part one. Each part had the same A-side, but different B-sides.

Releasing a second version of the single a week after the first version was probably a way to maintain chart momentum, and to keep the song in the music weeklies. Two part singles were usually only issued in compact disc format, though sometimes a 12 inch single was issued in two parts as well.

A third strategy was to release a single in multiple formats. (Not to be confused with multiple parts, which was one format in separate parts.) Almost all British singles in the nineties seem to have been issued in multiple formats, with each format having slightly different artwork and different song configurations. For example, in 1989 the American band Throwing Muses had a minor hit with the song “Dizzy.” While the band's American label refused to release a commercial version of the single in even one format, their British label released it in four: a compact disc, a 7 inch, a limited edition 10 inch, and a 12 inch, with different artwork for each version, and each version carrying one to three B-sides.¹¹

When multiple formats were released, the 7 inch was often a limited edition.

Limited editions—the fourth strategy for jolting sales, especially repeat sales—were really what separated the fan from the casual listener, because the fan would insist on owning all formats, and the limited edition was by its very nature the most coveted format of all. Furthermore, the limited edition was purchased for owning, not for listening. A limited edition single would usually have specially designed packaging, or something else to distinguish it from the regular releases. Limited edition singles tended to be issued on colored vinyl or with deluxe packaging, but not always. The 7 inch, limited edition of Blur's Song 2 was issued on purple vinyl (in the days before colored vinyl was almost essential), but Cigarettes and Alcohol by Oasis was distinguished only by the numbering on the wrapper. Firepile by Throwing Muses was issued in a two-part, 12 inch limited edition, with strikingly designed, card-stock inner sleeves, as opposed to the white paper inner sleeves on the regular 12 inch release.

Limited editions might also include gee-gaws like stickers, postcards, calendars, and posters. One of the best limited editions I saw was R.E.M.'s Crush with Eyeliner, issued on 7 inch orange vinyl, along with a handbag and a wall calendar:

There were two limited editions of Private Psychedelic Reel by the Chemical Brothers, a compact disc and a 12 inch, and both versions included a poster and a sticker.

These novelty gee-gaws could also be included with regular releases as well, which reveals a certain logic behind the singles market: all single formats were special, and desirable as such, but the packaging made them special in a way that transcended the music that the physical object actually contained. The music might have called the packaging into being, but the packaging assumed a life of its own. Parts one and two of the Pulp single Mis-Shapes / Sorted for Es and Wizz included DIY patterns for garments in which one could conceal illicit drugs.¹² Parts one and two of Something Changed, also by Pulp, each had the exact same music, track-for-track, but the packaging came in risqué his-and-hers versions, with naughty close-ups in the liner notes of the man or woman in various states of undress. The Spice Girls released their double A-side Mama / Who Do You Think You Are? on a heart-shaped compact disc. Bjork's Big Time Sensuality compact disc included postcards. Oasis's Roll with It 12 inch came with a souvenir sticker. The packaging for Blur's Boys and Girls was an example of found-object art, the design firm Stylorouge famously having taken the cover images from a condom advertisement.

Maybe the American labels were right to fear that a commercially released single would “cannibalize” sales of the full length album, but retailers were probably also right about the single's role in cultivating collectors. In Britain, the music single helped to create a fan culture that was maybe a bit of a scam, but also incredibly fun. I happily embraced these pleasures, however frivolous they might have been. I possibly justified my purchases as collecting, but I doubt I seriously harbored any illusion that I was anything other than a punch-drunk plaything of the marketplace. And it's indeniably true that the single, the concrete thing, shaped my perception of the song that the single marketed. The song, the A-side, disclosed itself as you experienced it through the various parts and formats through which it was released into the world. For example, Seal My Fate by Belly:

The packaging guides my interpretation of the music. For example, is "Seal My Fate" a dark song or a bright song? The packaging suggests it's brighter than dark, but the inebriating amount of reverb on that first B-side (compact disc, part one) makes me see shimmering sonic depths in the A-side that I never apprehended when I first heard this pop masterpiece on the radio. (And yes, the B-sides can, arguably, be considered part of the packaging.) At the same time, the live recording on part two of the compact disc reveals another dimension to the song, with a jagged edge that again defies my original interpretation: even on the live version, it undeniably remains a love song, but I now discern overtones of despondency. Meanwhile, with a limited edition 7 inch you're always going to be wondering, is this a purple vinyl kind of single, or a marbled vinyl kind of single, or maybe just a plain black vinyl kind of single? Oh! It's a clear vinyl kind of single, in a clear plastic sleeve, not so much transparent as slick, hinting at possible delusions of transparency. (Amazing how silvery clearness suggests cold repression.) The compact discs, on the other hand, have busy covers evoking motion and flow, with diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades cascading over everthing, and the word “king” (the title of the LP from which the single was lifted) refracted and duplicated like a late-nineties screen saver running across the background. Inside the compact disc sleeves, however, all is stillness and silence, with dark red images on saturated sea-foam green, mint, and teal. Stillness, but not tranquility: the inside sleeves are icey and highly aestheticized, hearkening back to past gambles and discarded love tokens, devolving into cold stasis.

Today, many (but not all) of the B-sides from those nineties singles are now available on “Deluxe” digital editions and sold for chump change, possibly their true market value, who knows. The B-sides lose much of their value when taken on their own, much as the souvenir stickers do. It was all these elements together, combined with the search, that made singles fun, for me at least, and the B-sides sounded better when heard in smaller doses, alongside the other bonus features like the decals and postcards and multiple formats, the spiffy sleeve designs and the stamped numbers on the limited edition stickers.¹³

Footnotes

1. I grew up in a small Midwestern town, during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Our parents would not let us have MTV for the longest time, but there was still “Friday Night Videos” on channel six.

2. Not an original insight: see Seymour Lubetzky's theory of the work and the book. Lubetzky's theory is especially illuminating in the case of the music single.

3. Why this sudden, brief flurry of single purchases in the annus mirabilis of my seventeenth year? Something surely to do with finally having my own car.

4. “Suck My Kiss” peaked at number 15 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart, January 18, 1992.

5. Warner Brothers released its promotional copy of “Suck My Kiss” as a compact disc.

6. Unlike Billboard in the United States, these weeklies were intended not for industry insiders, but for music fans.

7. The United States had one monthly music magazine, Spin, and one semi-monthly, Rolling Stone. In other words, despite a population 21% the size of the United States, Britain, had at least eight times as many music magazines.

8. In contrast, I don't recall ever seeing singles advertisements in contemporary issues of Rolling Stone or Spin.

9. Graham Coxon, Verse, Chorus, Monster! (London: Faber, 2022), 139.

10. These remixes are often unavailable for purchase on iTunes today because they were never licensed for digital release.

11. The band's American label only released the song in promo copies, to radio stations, highlighting the vast difference between the British and American approach to singles. In America, “Dizzy” was never a single you could buy, except on the full-length album from which it was lifted.

12. Tom Leonard, "Why Cocker Snapped," Daily Telegraph (UK), February 22, 1996.

13. It seems to me that digital music purchased from iTunes or Amazon, and especially music leased through streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music—these technologies represent the fullest currently possible realization of the single-as-an-abstraction model.