By Liesel Bradbury
Many acclaimed concept albums are still spoken about today — the likes of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1985) come to mind — dating back to the 60s and 70s. Whilst these works may epitomise what we think about concept albums today, the origins of the concept album actually date further back.
It is a notion widely believed that the first concept album originated around 85 years ago, with folk pioneer Woody Guthrie’s 1940 Dust Bowl Ballads, a record focusing on the agricultural and ecological impact of the Dust Bowl on America and Canada. Going on to influence the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, Guthrie’s music was indisputably unique in this way.
The 40s and 50s further saw the birth of the LP, or ‘Long Play’, record, allowing for longer record lengths and a growth in more conceptual music: the invention of the gatefold during this period was also monumental, allowing for notes to be printed in the record sleeve in order to explain the concepts behind more abstract albums. Two leading figures in concept album history at this time were Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole, who both employed a consciously artistic style of narrative lyricism in their works.
With the peak of the Rock and Country eras in the 1960s, concept albums seeped into American Country music, though remained unremarked by the mainstream and music critics following rock and pop music culture. It was only with the emergence of the “album era” in later years that the concept album broke into the genres, and with them, mainstream listening: think the Beatles, the Who and the Beach Boys, all of whom are variously cited for the “first concept albums” during this period. It is largely thought that the first rock concept album was marked by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): with distinctly abstract cover art, vivid in colour and suggestive of thematics, this record made concept albums widely accessible and further integrated into mainstream music consumption.
The 1970s were a period of significant development and variation in the concept album: a direct countercultural response to the proto-progressive bands of the 60s, according to Edward Macan (Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, 1997) records like, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and The Wall (1979), and Eagles’ Hotel California (1976), defined the concept albums of this time, with progressive rock as a genre being largely conflated with the concept album. Where discussions of records such as Sgt. Pepper as concept albums can be indeterminate to an extent — based upon the signifiers of a concept album as following thematic cohesion and development, and alignment with these may not always be present — the 70s prog-rock era of concept albums is arguably the most consistent we have seen yet.
Furthermore, many progressive soul artists utilised the concept album in exploring identity through music; notable works including Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971), George Clinton’s Parliament album Mothership Connection (1975) and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions (1973) and Songs in the Key of Life (1976).
The concept album found later extension to the disco genre, with Phylicia Rashad’s Josephine Superstar (1978), Parliament’s Mothership Connection (an album which pertains disco progressive soul in conjunction, in its exploration of space and sci-fi elements), and The Undisputed Truth’s Method to the Madness (1976), abstractly detailing the band’s alien abduction.
Willie Nelson, meanwhile, released Phases and Stages (1974) and Red Headed Stranger (1975) which marked the most prominent concept albums in 1970s country music.
From the 1980s, MTV marked a pivot in concept albums: where the music video network valued singles over whole albums, the progression of the concept album started to stagnate. This picked up in the 90s and 00s, however, where some artists persisted: Green Day’s American Idiot (2004) is considered one of the most pertinent examples, and later, My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade (2006), as a notable example of the modern concept album. It’s thought that the rise of streaming as a method of consuming music played a large part in the resurgence of the concept album, where services such as Spotify and Apple Music, play a key role even today.
Now it seems concept albums continue to flood the mainstream: Radiohead’s Kid A (2000), Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois (2005), Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and Taylor Swift’s folklore (2020) and evermore (2020) “sister albums” are some noteworthy cross-generic examples of the past few decades. Reflecting upon the concept album as a format, its success and singularity is rooted in its assimilation of music and artistic purpose across an entire body of work, be that tracing a storyline, tackling political issues or evoking emotion. As listeners, we often find value in music beyond just the way things sound, and where individual tracks become one singular work in adding meaning to this sound, it’s undoubtedly gripping, and exactly why the concept album format is so widely renowned today.
Surround Sound 
Leave a comment