Songs are too short these days

You'll feel better if you listen to longer ones

Jun 04, 2024

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Jonah & Erin

We can’t tell you how often people hit us up on the street or over the Internet to ask us, “Blackbird Spyplane, how do you live such a satisfying life?”

It’s hard to come up with one answer, because a satisfying life is the result of luck, dedication, and a vast, ever-changing array of Fire Life-Improving Procedures for the Maximization of Deep Enjoyment — a.k.a. going F.L.I.P. M.O.D.E.

Photo of Busta Rhymes looking incredible in 1997 by Jeff Kravitz / Getty Images

Today we are inaugurating a new series where we will generously share these procedures…

Because increasing the “deep enjoyment” in the world is what we are here to do!!

Let’s get to it —

Short songs. Done right, they are a beautiful thing. Maddeningly beautiful: We love them in no small part because we hate how quickly they’re over. “Numbers on the Board” by Pusha T is right on the razor’s edge of “too short” at 2:44. I (Jonah) always wished Flipmode OG Busta Rhymes’s jubilant “Rhymes Galore” (2:33) was just a bit longer. “Song 2” by Blur is perfectly “too short” at 2:02. “Fell in Love With a Girl” by the White Stripes does its d*mn thing and is over in 1:50. “Poland” by Lil Yachty… 1:23!! “Hungry Hippo” by Tierra Whack… 1:00!!??

Songs like this do not overstay their welcome. Quite the contrary, they vanish so quickly that you wanna rush after them and cajole them back inside. ‘Friend, please… your melody is so nice… what’s the hurry… take a load off…’

Short songs used to be anomalous, functionally novelties. But these days, for a bunch of reasons that essentially boil down to “TikTok,” songs are getting too short as a rule.

Spyfriend Nathan Heller published a great New Yorker piece recently about “the war on attention,” and up top he noted that — among other alarming instances of shrinkage across culture, screenshotted below — “the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020”:

The other day, it finally occurred to me that short songs are not just a “thing,” but a “problem.” I was listening to two new songs that are fantastic and way too short: Spyfriend Porches’ “Rag” (2:22) and Charli XCX’s “360” (2:14). To be clear, I gotta salute these tracks and their creators. They make you want to instantly replay them, which is not true of any song just because it’s short. It has to be really good, and what’s more it has to be constructed in such a precise and hard-to-nail way that a listener is still trying to get the measure of its goodness when it suddenly ends.

In a vacuum that’s fine. But in 2024, when our attention flits around more gnatlike than ever — when “people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds,” as Nathan reported — there is something that can feel manipulative… antagonistic… and cruel ! … about a song that evaporates right when you’re getting into a d*mn groove with it.

Which brings us to today’s F.L.I.P. M.O.D.E.:

Do your soul a favor and listen to long songs!

What does listening to a great long song do for you?

It gives your brain room to breathe… to stretch out & luxuriate on the chaise longue of a monster groove … to get into some deep thinking rather than some kneejerk reactive s**t… It nourishes you on a level that must be cellular, like the difference between a power nap you squeeze in amid a day full of doing harried bulls**t vs. a full night of restful slumber featuring an hour plus of R.E.M. sleep.

Like a good novel, a good long song carries you off somewhere you weren’t expecting, and brings you back slightly different than you were before. In some cases a long song becomes mantralike, hallucinatory, even, unlocking and rewiring neural pathways like a psychedelic…

There are tons of great long songs in the Spyplane Chune Pantheon, spanning eras and genres. I’m talking about, e.g., long “story songs” like Bob Dylan’s “Isis” (6:59) or Grateful Dead’s “Peggy-O (Live at Fox Theatre, Atlanta, GA, May 19, 1977)” (8:34)…

I’m talking about unhinged train-of-thought epics like RXK Nephew’s “American Tterroristt (9:44) … polyrhythmic post-minimalist galaxies like Steve Reich and Pat Metheny’s “Electric Counterpoint” (13:42) … proto-noise-rock like the White Light White Heat version of Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” (17:31) … Sonic Youth’s droning alt-rock lullaby “The Diamond Sea” (19:38)… Miles Davis’s slow-burning “In a Silent Way” (19:53)… Sam Gendel x Vampire Weekend’s uncategorizable “2021 (in the space between two pieces of wood)” (20:21)… Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s “The Heavenly Music Corporation” (20:55)… hammering downtown-NYC avant-garde landmarks like Tony Conrad & Faust’s “The Side of Man and Womankind” (27:40)…

I’m talking about Young Thug’s spacey, virtuoso “Thug N 30” (30:25)… deep-cut Japanese mid-‘90s jazz-rock triumphs like Fishmans’ “Long Season” (35:16) … and, last but certainly not least, I’m talking about Sleep’s megalithically good, prestige-TV-pilot-episode-length “Dopesmoker” (1:03:29), which we like to describe as the sonic equivalent of a weighted blanket.

The other day I was listening to “Dopesmoker” on a long drive down Highway 1 when I saw a hawk sitting in midair. Perched in the sky thousands of feet up. Wings spread but still. Soaring in place.

Planking on an invisible throne of wind.

That’s what listening to a great long song feels like!!

🎶 Drop your favorite long-a** songs — no bad ones, please, life is too short !! — in the comments 🎶

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