February 1: The Hidden Track

Do you remember your first experience with a hidden track on a CD? I do. I was lying in bed listening to "Weird Al" Yankovic's Off The Deep End. I was slowly falling asleep towards the end of the album when I was suddenly jerked out of my slumber by ten seconds of yelling, screaming, and all around obnoxious noise.

I was really confused because when I looked at the stereo's display panel, it said the CD was over. I replayed the last song on the album and didn't hear anything out of the ordinary. I kept the CD playing though and once the song ended, I noticed that the timer was still ticking away which meant that the last track on the album was still playing. It was just playing silence. I sat watching the digital seconds climb up towards the 14 minute mark and that's when the screaming and yelling returned.

I thought it was hilarious! Sure, I was a little ticked off that my afternoon nap had been so rudely interrupted, but I thought Yankovic was a genius for putting this little gem of a sound byte at the back end of his album. I considered myself a true fan of his for finding it. As I continued collecting CDs throughout time, I realized that "Weird Al" wasn't the only one using this form of creativity. Ben Folds, Matchbox Twenty, and even Nirvana were doing it too.

Well, now we're in the age of digital music and hidden tracks are nothing more than extremely irritating. When I'm listening to my iPod on shuffle and I come across a track that has three minutes of silence in between two songs, I rarely sit and wait for the hidden track. I'll just skip to the next song. By doing this, I've wasted the artist's time. Why would you go through the trouble of writing music and recording it only to have someone skip over it every time? There isn't any reason to listen to "Weird Al's" hidden track of yelling and screaming, but some hidden tracks are actually really good. Coldplay has one on Parachutes and all of Travis' hidden tracks are fantastic as well.

Now whenever I download a new album with a hidden track and put it in iTunes, I have to make a copy of the last song and specify that I want the original to end at a certain time and the copied track to start at a certain time. Because I'm so meticulous about the organization of my music, I have to go through every song's information menu and change the track number from something like 1 of 12 to 1 of 13. To top it off, I then have to make a copy of the album artwork and attach it to the newly created track. The entire process takes maybe one minute tops, but the fact that I have to go and do this just so I can listen to the entire album without having to listen to three to seven minutes of silence is ridiculous.

If you're a music artist and you're reading this (Hey it could happen, right?) do all of us a favor and stop adding hidden tracks. They don't prove you anymore creative or artsy and I don't think I'm the only one that hates them. It's no longer fun to find them. It's more annoying than anything.