Neil Young has been working on his Archives project for so long that the big news in the tech world when it was first announced was Windows 3.0. Back in 1988, the curmudgeonly musician conceived the mother of all box sets, a multimedia data dump that presents the breadth of his work—the good, the bad, and the ugly—in hi-def audio. Young envisioned Archives as not just a spiffed-up music collection but a virtual autobiography, including video footage, photos, press clips, and memorabilia such as original lyric sheets and personal correspondence, retained against all odds. To Young fans—and anyone interested in how digital media can enable new means of self-expression—this sounded pretty nifty.
But in preparing this harvest of material, Young has made even Microsoft look like a short-order cook. Year after year, Archives remained in perpetual just-about-there mode. (”It’s already together,” Young gushed to an interviewer back in 1991.) Then, a couple of years ago, the advent of hi-def optical formats removed a significant barrier. Larry Johnson, Young’s media wizard, explains that fans could at last enjoy super hi-fidelity audio while simultaneously poring over set lists from a 1969 coffeehouse appearance and newspaper reviews of Buffalo Springfield.
Well, Archives has finally arrived. The full version includes 10 Blu-ray discs (128 songs in 24-bit/192 kHz stereo and a reissue of the seldom-viewed documentary Journey Through the Past), a 236-page hardbound book, a poster, and code for downloading the music (even though Young regards MP3s as the aural equivalent of Satan). And this is only volume 1, covering his prolific career up to 1972.
Longtime Youngophiles like me will be giddily overwhelmed from the get-go. When you follow an artist closely for many years, your own consciousness inevitably becomes intertwined with theirs, and sudden access to their personal vault of unreleased tunes, alternative mixes, and private paraphernalia is a bounty that requires a lot of unpacking. Archives drops you into the Neil Wide Web. At first I jumped from one gem to another. It thrilled me to hear gorgeous versions of tunes I’d experienced only on fuzzy bootlegs, to discover cheesy instrumentals from Young’s high school band, and to view evocative items like the article his father (a well-known Canadian journalist) wrote after seeing his son play Carnegie Hall.
Eventually, though, I got frustrated. The paradox of Archives is that while it breaks ground in exploiting the relatively new Blu-ray format, the very concept of physical media is racing toward obsolescence.
Archives shares its central interface metaphor with 1970s computers: a file cabinet. That navigational trope has more miles on it than Old Black, Young’s vintage Les Paul guitar. Young plans to add folders to the cabinet by letting users download additional material. Subsequent volumes of Archives will stretch the cabinet to ludicrous proportions. “It will be like a file drawer that goes on for a mile and a half,” Johnson says. But this puts limits on the Neil Wide Web that don’t exist in Google’s world; search functionality would be a welcome addition.
Considering the rate of production at Young’s digital operation, it may take a decade or two until Archives gets around to the current period of Young’s oeuvre. My guess is that by then the project will quite logically move to the cloud (with access granted via subscription fee or limited-time pass), where all of Young’s outtakes and memorabilia—along with photos, sound files, and reminiscences provided by his fans—will be available in an instant. (If the Internet of 2020 can’t deliver top-grade audio quality and hi-def images smoothly, all will be lost anyway.) The alternative—a stack of 40 or 50 Blu-ray disks on the verge of irrelevance—would just leave us helpless.
Email steven_levy@wired.com.
