- Roundtable featuring Will Stockton, D. Gilson, Rebecca Wallwork, Jordan Ferguson, Evie Nagy, Jovana Babović, Shawn Taylor
“Make me a present and make it something sweet. / Small enough to go unnoticed and big enough to compete,” the ghost of Elliot Smith pleads from his 1998 B-side, “How to Take a Fall.” Since the invention of the vinyl record in 1948, the term “B-side” has referred most literally to the second side of the disc. The B-side means the flip side – sometimes the place for filler tracks, but not always, and less so for LPs as the idea of the album developed after the mid-twentieth century. On singles issued to record stores, the B-side became a place to showcase non-album tracks, demos, remixes, and live songs. As opposed to the song promoted on the A-side, the B-side housed something else, something presumably worth hearing, but also something generally considered lesser. Singles sold to casual listeners who wouldn’t pay for the album and, because of the B-side, to fans who already owned the album. As commercialized superfluity, B-sides were also marketed to a fan’s obsession: to the desire of music listeners – and completists – for more of an artist’s catalog.
For obsessives such as ourselves, the B-side haunts the A-side, giving the album as a discrete concept innumerable afterlives.
B-sides were not always unpopular. Several, including Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and The Smith’s “How Soon is Now?” superseded their A-sides on
Billboard charts. The exception nonetheless proved the rule: the B-side was secondary.
As vinyl records became cassettes and then single-sided compact discs, the B-side didn’t disappear. Instead, it became an even more powerful marketing tool to drive up overall sales in the “post-album” age of the twenty-first century. As the MP3 digitized music, however, and the market for physical copies of singles crashed, the B-side has threatened to become obsolete. Today B-sides still survive as “bonus tracks” appended to iTunes purchases, or extras awarded to specific streaming services. But they no longer seem as crucial to the experience of music, or to the appreciation of an album, as they once did.
This roundtable questions: How have B-sides shaped the consumption of music and our identity as music fans? To what extent should the B-side be considered lesser than, or secondary to, A-sides? How has the B-side countered the development of the album? How has the advent of streaming music reconfigured our notions of the B-side? And finally, how have B-sides from the past been rediscovered and loved following the death of prominent musicians and artists?
We offer this roundtable in preparation for the release of
33 1/3: The B-Sides, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Each participant on the roundtable has contributed to this volume. Here, we asked that each participant present a five-minute manifesto addressing one or more of the questions above. From these manifestos, we will invite the audience to participate in a conversation about B-sides as a haunting device — the ghost you know and love — in keeping with the conference theme
