The Long Track
Nostalgia, a traffic queue, and the ten minutes neither of them could explain
By Rafi Mercer
The traffic comes back in September before anything else does. The schools, the offices, the conversations left half-finished in July all arrive at once. For a week or two every road seems to move at the speed of someone reluctant to get where they're going.
That was the morning. Brake lights, a long queue, nowhere to be for a while.
I put on Electribe 101. I couldn't tell you why. I had a feeling that somewhere on Electribal Memories was a tune I wanted, and I didn't know which one, and that seemed reason enough.
Some things came back straight away. The opening track still wasn't the one I'd have put first. It's a slow burner, and I remembered thinking that, even if I couldn't say when. I remembered the title track properly, and the voice completely. Billie Ray Martin sounds like no one before or since: cool on the surface, running hot underneath. The beats around her are so exactly of their moment you could date them to within a year. It was a small moment in the early nineties, one plenty of people walked straight past. Played now, it sounds rawer than I'd kept it.
Then something else. The tracks kept going. The groove turned over, and over, the voice came and went, and the queue ahead stopped being the main thing in the car. It was close to hypnotic. It made the waiting easier, and I'd be lying if I pretended otherwise.
I looked down at the screen. The title track was over ten minutes long. I scrolled. Almost everything else ran past six.
The question arrived a few cars later, and it hasn't really left. Was that the record, or was it me? Was I hearing something true about long music, or was I just a man around fifty hearing his own past come back at the pace of the traffic?
The nostalgia case deserves to be taken seriously. It's the easy one to dismiss and the hard one to rule out. Of course a record from 1990 feels good to someone my age. It comes pre-sorted, the drawers already labelled. Nostalgia is the most efficient listening there is. You don't hear the song so much as confirm it.
But nostalgia has a habit, and this is where the case comes apart. It edits. Memory keeps the hook, the voice, the title, the way a chorus opens up. It does not keep the length. I had carried this album around for years, and in all that time I never once remembered that its title track ran past ten minutes. Nostalgia had given me the trailer. The record, when I finally sat with it again, gave me the film.
If anything, the surprise was the opposite of nostalgia. What stopped me was the thing I'd forgotten.
So perhaps it was the other thing. Perhaps it was just being trapped.
Set the car beside how most of us listen now. The average modern song runs about three and a half minutes, and whether it survives is often decided in under twenty seconds. More than a decade ago, Paul Lamere went through billions of Spotify plays and found that almost a quarter of tracks were skipped inside the first five seconds. Nearly half never reached the end.
Five seconds is not listening. It's a verdict on an introduction.
Lamere found something else in that data that I keep coming back to. We skip more when we have time to pay attention, at weekends, in the evenings, when we're young. We skip less when the music is in the background. That sounds backwards until you notice what a skip actually is. It's a choice. Give people more attention and more options, and they spend the attention choosing.
The car took the choice away. There was nothing sensible to press and nowhere to go. And into the space where the choosing would have been, the listening came.
So yes, trapped. But I'm not sure trapped is the insult it sounds like.
Most of what I write about, stripped back, is a room that does the same thing on purpose. The kissa in Tokyo where nobody talks over the record. The listening bar where an album plays from the first groove to the last and nobody reaches for the arm. The Listening Club, where we put one album on, all the way through, together. None of these are prisons. But each one works by removing the same small option the traffic removed that morning: the option to leave early.
A listening room is a queue you chose to sit in.
The long record is built for exactly that. Electribe 101 were making music for rooms where nobody was going anywhere, and the length wasn't indulgence. It was instruction. A groove at ten minutes isn't a song that forgot to end. It's a song that assumes you've stayed. It knows that what it has to give you doesn't arrive until the sixth or seventh minute, when you've stopped waiting for it to change and it simply is. Cut it to three and a half minutes and you haven't made it tighter. You've made it a description of itself.
So which was it, nostalgia or being trapped?
I think the honest answer is that nostalgia brought me to the record and the traffic kept me there, and neither of them was the moment. The moment was what happened in between: the minutes where I wasn't remembering the album and wasn't escaping the queue. I was just in it. The record was allowed to be as long as it actually is, and for once I was in no position to argue.
That doesn't happen by accident very often any more. We've built extraordinary machinery to make sure it doesn't.
When I looked back up from the screen, the title track was still going, and so was the queue.
For once, I didn't need either of them to end.
Why are the tracks on Electribal Memories so long?
The album came out of the house music moment of the late eighties, when records were made for clubs and DJs as much as for radio. Across twelve tracks it runs close to eighty minutes. Most tracks pass six minutes and the title track passes ten, so the songs are built as grooves rather than cut to a radio edit.
Is skipping really changing how we listen?
The data suggests it is. An analysis of billions of Spotify plays found that nearly a quarter of songs are skipped within five seconds and almost half before they finish. It also found that we skip more when we have more time to pay attention, which says as much about choice as it does about attention spans.
What is the Tracks & Tales Listening Club?
It's a monthly listening session held online on the last Sunday of every month, open to members anywhere in the world. One album is played in full, all the way through, together, with no skipping and no shuffle. It's a simple answer to the way music has become something that happens while we do something else.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.
Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.
