I just pulled out some swag I scored from CKXU awhile back (yes, listeners and volunteers sometimes get free CDs), and I found a CD single for Massive Attack. I neglected the CD for awhile, I haven’t been in a Massive Attack mood lately, finally I gave it a listen. The CD is just a single, containing a Radio and Album version of the song. Sounds fine to me, I didn’t pay for the CD, so I’m excited to have it.
However, I noticed a 49 second difference in length. Where did the 49 seconds go? There sure wasn’t 49 seconds of curse words… ??? I swiftly surfed to wikipedia in order to get the scoop on radio edits.
A radio edit is a remix of a musical performance to make it more suitable for broadcast to the general public via radio. When compared with the original version, a radio edit usually is shorter, or being free of profanity, among other features.
Ah, I hear a little difference already. The end features a string reprise that doesn’t do much for the song, however I assume the album benefits from the little musical flare. The radio edit just fades out. I guess this is the big difference in the recordings. I’ve always heard a fade out is best for radio and jukeboxes as it gives a nice illusion of length. It also makes for easy cross fading in to another song. Fade is an amazing wikipedia article, have your mind blown at the science that is music!
“Neptune”, part of the orchestral suite,”The Planets”, by Gustav Holst, was the first piece of music to have a fade-out ending. Holst stipulates that the women’s choruses are “to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed”, and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is “to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance”.[10] Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound - after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst’s daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during “Jupiter”) remarked that the ending was “unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women’s voices growing fainter and fainter… until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence”.
That is compelling, let’s hope it’s true. I’m downloading a torrent as we speak. The article gets better with the first pop culture instance;
“Bill Haley’s cover version of ‘Rocket 88′ (1951), often considered the first rock song, fades out to indicate the titular car driving away. There are claims that The Beatles’ ‘Eight Days a Week’ (recorded 1964) was the first song to use the reverse effect — fade-in. (It also fades out.)”
“The earliest such recording anybody could name for me is an 1894 78 rpm record called ‘The Spirit of ’76′, a narrated musical vignette with martial fife-and-drum that gets louder as it ‘nears’ the listener and quieter as it ‘moves away’.”
“The fade-out as a simulation of a moving sound source seems to continue right up to ‘Rocket 88′. But other examples aren’t so obvious (though fade-out may always imply that the song continues forever and we’re only passing by it for a few minutes).”
“The oldest true songs with fade-out pointed out to me by 78 record fans bear no obvious relationship to movement. One is ‘Barkin’ Dog’ (1919) by the Ted Lewis Jazz Band. Another contender is ‘America’ (1918), a patriotic piece by the chorus of evangelist Billy Sunday.
“By the early 1930s longer songs were being put on both sides of records, with the piece fading out at the end of Side One and fading back in at the beginning of Side Two. Records at the time held only about two to five minutes of music per side. The segue allowed for longer songs (such as Count Basie’s ‘Miss Thing’), symphonies and live concert recordings.”
“However, shorter songs continued to use the fade-out for unclear reasons—for example, Fred Astaire’s movie theme ‘Flying Down to Rio’ (1933). Even using fade-out as a segue device doesn’t seem obvious, though we certainly take it for granted today.”
“As a film buff, I have a gut feeling that movies were an influence here. Fade-ins and fade-outs are cinematic devices that begin and end scenes—film language that developed at the same time as these early recordings. The term ‘fade-out’ itself is of cinematic origin, appearing in print around 1918. And jazz, a favorite of early records, was a popular subject of early movies, too.”
It really can make for good segue, as well it adds a feeling of length and repetitiveness, good for sticking in people’s heads. Enjoy the CD white label single for the 2006 song “Live With Me“. This is for review and promo purposes only.
Have a good weekend.
