Lamenting the Death of The Hidden Track

Not to sound like a copypasta, but I listen to a lot of music. Even before quarantine, I spent most of my waking hours with something playing on my phone. Now that I’m inside all day and have very few real-world obligations, music is playing from virtually the minute I wake up until the second I fall asleep. This means, yes, I’m on my emo bullshit more than ever before, but it also means that I have the time to revisit lots of older albums from my childhood.

As someone who was born in 1993, I grew up in a time where CDs reigned supreme. My parents had hundreds, if not thousands of CDs, which was probably where my obsession with music began. We listened to music in the car, at home on our stereo, and in my room on my personal CD player. Once I got my first iPod back in 2004, I eventually just started ripping every CD that I had even a passing interest in, quickly building out an expansive library of MP3 files to satiate my voracious musical appetite. 

Now that I have more hours than ever in the day to listen to music, I’m breaking out of my typical emo/indie rock rotation and revisiting more classics from my childhood. Albums like Barenaked Ladies’ Gordon, Presidents of the United States self-titled record, and Relient K’s Two Lefts Don’t Make A Right… But Three Do. I’m not necessarily going to bat for the artistic merit of any of these records because my mind is too clouded with the pleasant glow of nostalgia to listen to them objectively. What I will say though is in revisiting all these 90’s and 2000’s albums, I was reminded of a trend that seems to have been forgotten completely: the hidden track. 

It may seem goofy to explain, but for the sake of anyone under the age of 20 reading this, “hidden tracks” were essentially bonus tracks buried at the end of an album, usually after a long period of silence. The experience of discovering these hidden treasures was almost always notable. Whether it was being jolted awake by the chuggy stoner rock riffage of “Endless, Nameless” or being blindsided by the Daniel Johnston-ey weirdness of Green Day’s “All By Myself,” the hidden track provided artists with an outlet to deliver die-hard fans some of their weirdest, most left-field easter eggs. 

While vinyl records and cassettes had their own novelties, the hidden track was a unique byproduct of the compact disc format. The expansion from a vinyl’s 44-minute running time to CD’s 74-minute running time meant that artists had nearly double the amount of time to play with. This was even an increase from cassette tape’s roughly 60-minute running time. While some artists utilized CD’s entire time allotment, the average running time of an album still hovered somewhere between the 40-60 minute range. That meant a large chunk of extra time at the end of the CD for literally anything else. 

The experience of listening to an album, reaching the end, and sitting in silence for a few minutes is a near-lost art. The surprise of an additional piece of music that wasn’t listed on the back of the album is all but dead. 

The hidden track began to mean less as soon as iTunes and other music digitization meant all the raw MP3s and their running times were exposed. This meant that the final track with a suspicious 10-minute running time was a little less sneaky than the artist originally intended. It also meant you could just skip straight ahead by clicking on the timeline in your music player of choice. Sure, you could do this on a CD too, but that “first listen” surprise is gone forever. 

Even now, most of these songs exist on streaming services, but they’re just listed as their own song without any pause or gap in between the album’s intended closer. This is especially frustrating because it’s not the true “ending” of the album as the artist intended. For the most part, hidden tracks were meant to be throwaway jokes, weird little callbacks, or fun bits of studio chatter, they were not real songs, but now streaming services treat them as such.

Sometimes there are legitimately great tracks hidden at the end of records that, for whatever reason, the band just didn’t feel like highlighting on the tracklist proper. Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever To Tell is a landmark album for many reasons, but why something as great as “Poor Song” was tucked away unlabeled at the end of “Modern Romance” will forever be a mystery to me. 

Tracks like “Poor Song” were the exception rather than the rule, and if you need evidence, look no further than practically any one of Blink 182’s albums. It’s hard to accurately articulate the strange mixture of shock and confusion of being nine years old and hearing “When You Fucked Grandpa” while listening to Take Off Your Pants and Jacket for the first time… hell, I still get blindsided by that one. 

The digitization of music has arguably brought more good than bad. It’s easier than ever to discover a new artist, share songs with your friends, and even get your own music out into the world on a massive scale. On the flip side, losing physical media means the average listener views music as more disposable and less unique. This is all on top of the fact that there are now even fewer opportunities for format-based easter eggs like hidden tracks.

I’m not going to pretend that the death of hidden tracks is as terrible as artists being paid fractions of a penny per stream, but it’s something that still hurts as a lifelong music nerd. Things like this are why vinyl had a resurgence because it gave artists the opportunity to go above and beyond with their art. Same thing with cassettes… that’s more of an affordability thing, but there’s no denying how cool it is to fold out a new J-Card for the first time. Hell, I’ve even seen people getting back into VHS in 2020, so who knows what the future holds. Hidden tracks may have become a forgotten art form, but I have faith that the next generation of musicians will find something even cooler to replace them with. 

Apropos of nothing but being stoned, I recently watched 2002’s Scooby-Doo and was struck by the movie’s depiction of early-2000’s cool. It was all radio-sanitized pop-punk, spiked hair, and frosted tips. I remember thinking, “these college kids are so cool” when I watched the movie back in 2002, but now it’s just a hilariously-dated time capsule. In other words, hidden tracks had their time, and that time has passed. Much like frosted tips and chain wallets, maybe it’s for best that we leave them in the past.