The Not-Pop Jukebox

In case you missed the first two posts in this series, I have been digging through my music collection, starting in the 50s, in an attempt to bolster my theory that fading out tracks gained popularity in the disco era and then artists came to their senses and started actually finishing their songs rather than repeating themselves until the volume knob hit zero. We’ll pick up with the nineties.

I tried the 90s, for which I have mostly lesser-known songs. Frente’s Accidentally Kelly Street includes a little repeat and about a second of fade on the last note but it’s noticeably a last note. The Connells were Slackjawed for just shy of four minutes and the final chord stretches almost ten seconds but again it’s clearly final. Rancid’s Junkie Man ends quite abruptly with no fade whatsoever as does Killing the Fly from The Union Underground, and David Byrne stops dead in the middle of a phrase to terminate UB Jesus.

In the last ten years, we see Maximo Park end Apply Some Pressure quite sharply and The Brighton Port Authority take thirty seconds of repeat before a final screech in Should I Stay or Should I Blow. The Golden Silvers give us fifteen seconds of organ fade, though, for Magic Touch while Vampire Weekend constrain themselves to about four seconds of the same to close Giving Up the Gun. But then The Knux showed up with twelve seconds of fadeout to finish Cappuccino.

So I may not be imagining the change but it does seem to be more varied now and perhaps coming back into favor. I don’t really have the room here to visit every genre from every decade. It does seem like the fadout peaked in the late 70s and early 80s and has become a great deal less popular. But I ask you, my darling readers, to share with me your experiences. Does it seem like the fade has faded from music? Can you think of a recent song that has a thirty-second fadeout at the end and do you think it's more genre-related now?

NOTE: Grooveshark and I had a little argument about Apply Some Pressure so I'm including a video instead of adding it to the play list.

The other day I started a lengthy consideration of the history of the fadeout in commercial music. I started in the fifties because, well, a lot of what I have from the 40s is live big band and swing which generally ends a great deal differently than studio recordings. Let’s turn to the next three decades.

For the sixties I tried Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy which ends abruptly after about twelve seconds of repeat and The Angels with My Boyfriend’s Back that closes after about seven seconds of fade with a little noodling just before it. The Dixie Cups only sang Iko Iko for 2:03 but the last ten seconds was fadeout. Martha & the Vandellas gave Jimmy Mack about five seconds to fade.

In the 70s I went for Boogie Nights from Heatwave, which fades for a whopping 40 seconds at the end, and The Guess Who’s Clap for the Wolfman, with a shorter fade of about five seconds but about twenty-five seconds of fade-able repeat before that. And Styx stayed true to form with about 25 seconds of fade at the end of Come Sail Away. Even The Clash got in on the act with twenty faded seconds at the end of All the Young Punks.

Then I moved to the 80s. I tried Run DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk This Way, which doesn’t fade but includes about ten seconds of basic sample loop at the end. The Pointer Sisters closed The Neutron Dance with fifteen seconds of fade after about thirty seconds repetition. The Housemartins noodled around for about twenty seconds to finish Freedom but the only actual fade is about two seconds of the last note. U2 took their own 30-second repeat (and a quick, two-second fade) at the end of New Year’s Day but Prince, after a full minute of self-indulgent wailing, ends Let’s Go Crazy with a scream and a downstroke.

And so we see a general expansion of the fadeout in the seventies and a backing off into the 80s, but not without exceptions. I’ve purposely stuck with more mainstream music for these examples. I wonder if the expansion of the fade was a record company push or if the musicians or producers heard and liked it. You can read the end of this series and see if I think this is the end of the fade. Any thoughts?

A fade to silence used to end what seemed like every song. Radio stations would lay the beginning of the next track right over the fade out of the last in a seamless manner that that little space between songs on a record couldn’t quite match. When we started making mix tapes we could either time it or roll back the tape enough to get the same effect. Ah, finally we could all feel like our own DJs, back when, to most of us, that meant someone playing discs on the radio rather than mixing and sampling.

These days, it seems to me like almost all songs end with, well, an ending. That means, of course, that you cannot use the crossfade feature on your mp3 software without cutting off the song. It used to be that the beginning of the repetitive fade signaled the end of the song so you expected a new one. Now songs go until they stop, and you never know if there’ll be something extra at the end (much like movie credits, these days).

But don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m going to rant about the loss of the fadeout. I don’t miss it. It seemed like a lazy way to end a song to me. To check my own perceptions, I went through a few songs from the past six decades. Here are the results of my non-scientific survey. This will actually be a three-part series because it’s so long.

I started in the 50s, with Jimmy Rogers’ Honeycomb. That song doesn’t fade out, though the last note is held for three seconds or so and could be crossfaded, I suppose. Dion and the Belmonts gave us five seconds of fade at the end of The Wanderer. Little Richard had the Heeby-Jeebies for 2:15, however, and stopped dead on a saxophone toot.

In a few days I’ll post a few more decades’ worth of random songs and how they end. Check my finding for fade in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and whether this is the end of the fade. Any one have predictions?