Under Preure: Music Is for Listening, but the Isolated Track is for Creating

This week, I become obsessed with the popularity and implications of one of the Internets favorite objects of curiosity: the Isolated Vocal Track.

(View Source is a weekly column in which Rex Sorgatz obsesses over the new ways we create, consume, and manipulate moving images.)

This week, lets strip away the haughty pretense. Lets get rid of that seductive introductory paragraph found in all columns throw out that beguiling prose that assimilates you into the columnists worldview. Lets jettison the overwrought bullshit, free ourselves from those deceptive verbal accoutrements. Say it with me: Rhetoric, begone! Now, finally, we can focus on The Fundamentals.

Roll tape:

It feels good to strip out the noise, right? Can you feel it?

Welcome to the Isolated Vocal Track, one of those enchanting oddities that only the internet could popularize. Inexplicably fun to hear, the Isolated Track is in an exercise of reduction. It is music refined to its atomic unit simplicity emerging from the peeled-back layers. But the Isolated Track is also a violent deconstruction, the outcome of technology issuing its power to decode the entire history of recorded music....

To the best of my knowledge, the history of the Isolated Track has never been told.

Oh hell, those verbal accoutrements crept back into our prose. Lets just watch another video:

I could listen to these all day!

A HISTORY OF ISOLATION To the best of my knowledge, the history of the Isolated Track has never been told. No one has declared a starting-point for this marvelous little invention. But if someone says, "Its as old as Gregorian Chant," then you know which foolish person to unfriend.

Lets dissolve all ambiguity: the Isolated Track is not the same as a capella.

A cappella is a vocal rendering that is intended to be heard without music. The Isolated Track is very, very, very much not that. In most cases, the singer never imagined being heard solo, outside the instrumentation of that piece of recorded music.

That is important to know as we introduce the Copernicus of the Isolated Track, the one and only David Lee Roth:

Diamond Dave, clearly, did not intend for us to hear these squeaks, squawks, and squeals outside of Eddie Van Halens fretwork. But when we do hear them either for the first time, or years later there can be no response that doesnt include both glee and confusion. What is that otherworldly sound?

Ever since Van Halen supplied us with a Big Bang moment, the Isolated Track universe has been expanding

David Lee Roths Isolated Track was wildly influential on internet culture so much so, that it birthed another magnificent internet invention, The Soundboard.

(Note: This quick history could be flawed. I dont know if "Running With The Devil" was actually the internets first Isolated Track. I have vague internet recollections of John Bonhams isolated drums trackspredating his caterwauling. And I dont know if it was created with Audacity, the program most associated with splitting music into tracks, or if it was taken directly from the studio mixing board. And, I confess, Im not positive that Roth inspired the first internet soundboard. But history is victors game, so go brawl it out in the comments.)

HISTORY CONTINUED: A FORM SPREADS Ever since Van Halen supplied us with a Big Bang moment, the Isolated Track universe has been expanding. YouTube, that felicitous cats meow of media innovation, has of course owned the market on this phenom. When proof of quality and quantity is demanded, the internet always answers with a list. To wit:

32 Wildly Enjoyable Isolated Vocal Tracks

Bee Gees - "Stayin Alive"

Soundgarden - "Black Hole Sun

The Beatles - "Eleanor Rigby"

Beastie Boys - "No Sleep Till Brooklyn"

Radiohead - "Creep"

The Doors - "The Crystal Ship"

Nirvana - "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Michael Jackson - "Billy Jean"

Beach Boys - "Wouldnt It Be Nice"

Van Halen - "Running With The Devil"

Eminem - "Lose Yourself"

Jay-Z - "99 Problems"

Faith No More - "Epic"

AC / DC - "Let There Be Rock"

Bonnie Tyler - "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

Journey - "Any Way You Want It"

Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Give It Away"

Notorious B.I.G. - "Dead Wrong"

Guns n Roses - "Welcome to the Jungle"

Kiss - "Detroit Rock City"

The Beatles - "A Day In The Life"

The Carpenters - "Ticket To Ride"

Elton John - "Tiny Dancer"

Metallica - "Enter Sandman"

The Police - "Roxanne"

Alice In Chains - "Man In A Box"

Oasis - "Wonderwall"

John Lennon - "Imagine"

Danzig - "Mother"

Heart - "Barracuda"

The Clash - "Rock The Casbah"

Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up"

(Sorry, didnt mean to time-suck your life! Take that, Buzzfeed! But if you desire more, theres a Subreddit all about Isolated Tracks. Because, of course, if it isnt a Subreddit, it didnt happen.)

That list is clearly an appendix, because in addition to seminal Isolated Track figures as Van Halen and Queen, we have overlooked the Mother of Vocal Track Invention. Hit it, Whitney:

When Whitney Houston died last year, that clip became the piece of media that people most shared with each other. It was not the original recording we heard on the radio, nor was it one of the many a cappella performances populating the web it was, crucially, an Isolated Track. It almost needed to be an Isolated Track, because only this clash of authentic and synthetic can get to the essence of such a conflicted person.

One might even argue the Isolated Track is a completely different art form, separate from the original recording.

THE MYSTERIOUS JOY OF ISOLATION I like Queen, but I dont seek out their music. However, I do frequently seek out the "Under Pressure" Isolated Track, because it seems different, possibly even better. In the original recording, Freddie Mercury and David Bowie sound like partners boldly exploring

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