Ian Murray | The Top Song

 

Ian Murray

The Top Song

Toronto, Canada: Shorewood Packaging, 1973

12” vinyl record

Edition of 250 numbered copies

I just read an article about angry composers (timed to coincide with the Succession finale tonight) upset with the “Skip Intro” feature on Netflix. They argue that TV opening credit theme music sets the tone, settles you down and guides you in. Watching downloaded  TV on a laptop, I invariably forward past the intro after the first episode.1 Apparently I am not alone. According to Netflix, the “Skip intro” button is now pressed 136 million times a day, saving users a cumulative 130 years. 

A decade ago, the radio station QuickHitz drew headlines for announcing that they would edit every song they played, in-house, to under two minutes. In the age of the dwindling attention span, the station aimed to play 24 songs an hour, twice the industry standard. A few months later, the station backtracked after considerable blowback, with most of the outrage coming from the industry and artists themselves, rather than the listener - many of whom had been skipping past the ends of songs on iPods since the beginning of the century. 

Ian Murray’s The Top Song explored the short attention span involved when consuming media, fifty years ago. The work responded to the practice of the time where radio disc jockeys decided the fate of a song in ten seconds. The liner notes to the LP explain: 

"When you have over three hundred 45's coming in a week, you don't have ime to listen to them all, or even half of them. Generally a disc jockey will play about ten seconds, and he can usually tell if it is a good song or not"

An early super-cut, "The Top Song" consists of the top hundred songs from the previous decade, all truncated to their opening ten seconds. Topping this, the b-side is a 17 minute live recording called "Keeping on Top of the Top Song”. Drummer Tim Cohoon was commissioned to play along with The Top Song, which he had not previously heard. 

The work was first performed at the Dalhousie University Student Union Auditorium in Halifax on November 22, 1970, and was broadcast on Dalhousie University Radio. 

The LP followed three years later and a decade after that, in 1984, Arno Niewenhuysen performed "On Top of The Top Song" in Amsterdam. Four years later, in 1988, a 3:15 excerpt of Niewenhuysen's performance appeared on Tellus #21 - Audio by Visual Artists, alongside works by Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, George Brecht, Terry Fox, Joan Jonas, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Prince and others. 

In 2010, the work was performed again as part of the traveling exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 - 1980. 

The above copy is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in NYC. The liner notes describe the simple and effective premise: 

"A professional drummer was contracted to play along with a prerecorded tape. (He hadn't previously heard). He was told only that the tape went through a number of changes and that he should play continuously along with the music, always searching for a point of reference (allowing him to play without changing his rhythm)."

1. A rare exception is Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters, which featured a PJ Harvey cover of Leonard Cohen’s "Who By Fire", which I was happy to revisit weekly.