My "source" is that it is listed on the back of the CD booklet as the final track, and when I play the album, it is the 10th track out of 10. That makes it, by definition, the "final track." I'm not sure where your disconnect is. Yeah, it's labeled as a "bonus track." So what? It's a bonus track on the album. It's not like droves of fans hunted down this mysterious, obscure bonus track on the Internet and randomly appended it to their track listings. It's on the album. Hence, people listen to it along with any other song on the album.
Ummm...because when one puts the CD in the CD player, it has ten tracks, not nine, and the tenth (and final) track is Viper King. That it's called a "bonus track" and that there are versions of the album on which it doesn't appear doesn't change reality for those of us that bought the 10 song version of the album.
So, again, the Haken album
The Mountain includes two alternate versions of tracks as part of the album? The final track on that album is essentially a radio edit of another song on the album? And I'm some sort of freak for not listening through to that radio edit whenever I listen that album?
I guess I just don't understand this way of thinking. To me, an album is not "whatever happens to be on the CD," but a structured sequence of songs with a defined beginning and end. A CD release could contain the whole album and nothing but the album. But it could also contain the album, plus some extras that are not part of the album proper, but addenda to it. To me, the phrase "bonus track" literally means "this is not part of the album." It's like the bonus features on a Blu-Ray. The deleted scenes and the bloopers and the behind-the-scenes documentary on my Blu-Ray copy of
Avengers: Endgame are not part of the movie
Avengers: Endgame, irrespective of whether they were packaged on the same disc.
To me, it's very clear that
Distance Over Time was created as a nine-song album. The experience of listening to
Distance Over Time, as the band intended it, is the experience of listening to Untethered Angel through Pale Blue Dot. Viper King is a standalone thing that was given as a bonus extra. Basically the equivalent of a B-side for the post-vinyl era.
I don't have a problem if people like to listen to it right after the album, but it's just completely foreign to me that so many are treating it as though it's on the same level as Barstool Warrior or Out of Reach in terms of being a part of the album
Distance Over Time, because as I see it the band has made it explicit that it is NOT part of that album.
I find this absolutely perplexing, because my understanding of the very meaning of the term "bonus" in "bonus track" is "extra, not part of the core album." If they meant for it to be part of the core album, why on earth would they give it that label?
But that's a different issue than what you first asked about. You asked, "When y'all are listening to this album, are you typically really listening to it with Viper King as the final track?" If you intended a different question, then you should have asked a different question. Had you asked, "Do you consider Viper King to be part of the core album," you likely would have gotten different responses.
On that issue, I don't really care what label is slapped on it. If I thought it sucked I wouldn't listen to it, but I don't, and it's there, so I listen to it as part of the album.
This is fair. I guess maybe I'm a little more precious than some people about the experience of listening to an album. For me, I usually like to listen to *the album*, as designed, as a single experience, and stop listening, at least for a few minutes, when the album ends. To me, listening to an unrelated song uninterruptedly after an album would, I guess, feel weird in terms of breaking up my ability to take in the unified album experience. I suppose this may be more of a me thing and less of a common experience than I thought.
Topic: Official Distance Over Time discussion thread (Read 189255 times)
