Have you listened to Cowboy Carter yet? No, but I mean all of it? All 27 tracks? All 78 minutes and 21 seconds? Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. Beyoncé’s sprawling paean to country music is a formidable piece of work, created by a boatload’s worth of talent (seriously, check out how long those album credits are), full of luscious layered textures and inventive production, and dabbling in everything from acoustic, finger-picked folk to zydeco. It’s probably not one to gobble up in a single sitting.
Beyoncé’s hardly an outlier in this regard – Drake’s albums regularly nudge past the 80-minute mark, and Morgan Wallen’s 2023 chart topper One Thing at a Time was a preposterous 111 minutes long. And excess is hardly specific to music. So much of popular culture tends towards the lengthy these days, from films (including the current Oscar best picture winner) that require at least one mid-screening loo break to get through, to TV episodes that regularly nudge past the hour mark (or two hours in the case of Stranger Things), to podcast episodes that take multiple commutes to get through.
These long runtimes tend to attract a fair bit of annoyance, particularly when it comes to films, where 90 minutes has long been considered the platonic ideal. (I remember one year at the Cannes film festival, critics seemed more excited to see Joaquin Phoenix thriller You Were Never Really Here than any of the other films in competition, primarily because it was 1hr 35m in a sea of backside-numbingly long dramas.)
There isn’t anything particularly wrong with art running long. In fact in a sense it might be considered heartening, a sign of creative freedom still being allowed to flourish at a time when so much culture seems algorithmically micro-tooled. It’s even slightly flattering to us consumers – so often told that we have the attention span of a toddler – to be given something substantial to chew on.
Still, it is good to have something to provide a bit of contrast, and there are plenty of people creating small but satisfying culture at the moment. Just arrived on BBC iPlayer is series three of Diane Morgan’s gonzo sitcom Mandy, which trims the comedy down to 15 minutes but packs plenty in – the new series features, among other things, a plane hijacking and a spot of paranormal activity. And my favourite movie of recent months is the Oscar nominee for best animated film Robot Dreams, which managed to tell an epic story of loss and loneliness in 80s New York in just over that desired 90 minute benchmark.
But it’s music that seems to have the biggest contrast between long and short releases. One of 2023’s most celebrated albums, Guts by Olivia Rodrigo, clocked in at half the length of Cowboy Carter, but was no less impressive for its brevity. At 39 minutes and 12 tracks, Guts is really what used to be considered a fairly usual length for an album – about the same length as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for example – but is almost a novelty in an age of track creep. And Guts is still longer than Tierra Whack’s outsider-rap opus World Wide Whack, a svelte 37 minutes despite being 15 tracks long (mind you, Whack’s debut mixtape had that many tracks and was just 15 minutes long).
But we can go even shorter: two of my favourite albums of 2023, Dead Meat by the Tubs and Life Under the Gun by Militarie Gun, clock in at under 25 minutes. And 25 minutes almost looks decadent compared to the brevity of some hardcore and punk albums – This Is All We Ever Get, the new album by hardcore band SPACED from Buffalo, New York gets in and out in just 15 minutes. The king of short albums though must be Tony Molina, who has made a career out of creating miniaturised albums, each tackling a different sound – fuzzed out pop-punk, gentle folk-country, hair metal – sometimes in as little as 10 minutes.
In fact, add together the lengths all of the six albums Molina has released to date and you’ll get a total listening time of 82 minutes and 11 seconds … in other words, just a shade over the length of, yep, Cowboy Carter.
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