I’m just now moving into the 21st century with things and I recently bought a CD player. I’ve got about 12 CDs, two of them have hidden tracks at the end of them. No names of the songs and no way of knowing if they’re there unless you just wait.
Why do they do this ?
Thanks.
Marketing gimmicks.
I think it originated less as a marketing gimmick and more as an exploration of a new format. Hidden tracks were impossible with cassette tapes, since they were two-sided. The first hidden tracks were something of a delight to their listeners, I’m sure, when they were discovered. Since then, the hidden track has become almost obligatory in some genres, and although its novelty has worn off, I don’t believe promoters use them as selling points. Usually the hidden track is a novelty itself: often different stylistically from the “official” tracks, and quite often a “joke” song.
There have been hidden tracks on Cassettes. R.E.M.'s Green Album is one I can remember that had one. ( I always wondered on the cassette sleeve for that one why they had a number 4 on all four of the Rs on the cover…hmm…)
I remember Nirvana’s Nevermind album as the first one I had that had a secret track on it. Good track, too.
The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” has a short “hidden track” at the end because that’s the way the original LP was made.
The bog-standard “hidden” tracks can’t really be called hidden, because the CD will always play them if left to its own devices. (Which can still give you quite a fright if there’s a long gap, say 20 minutes, and you’d forgotten the CD is still playing and had dozed off…)
The real sneaky ones, which are only present on one CD that I own, are hidden before the beginning of the first track.
1977 by Ash is the album in question (there’s also a standard hidden track at the end). To hear the two tracks at the beginning, you have to use the search button to rewind back past the beginning of track 1, and stop at the appropriate time to let it play normally. If you rewind too far, the CD stops and you have to try again (on my CD player, at least).
Anyone know of any other CDs that have these “super-hidden” tracks?
“Songs in the Key of X”, which is a sort of soundtrack for the X-Files, has a couple of tracks hidden before track 1.
There are actually hints on the cover, something along the lines of “Chris Carter would like to remind you that 0 is a number too”. I didn’t actually get that, though, and I only discovered them when I tried to rip the CD to mp3 (Ob Disclaimer: I own this disc and all other discs that I rip) and the first track wound up being about 4 minutes longer than it was supposed to be, and had these songs that I’d never heard before on it.
It appears that like many computer things, CDs start numbering tracks at zero, but in order to not confuse consumers, most cd players automatically start at 1.
And I believe Monty Python had an album with three sides: one side had two grooves concentric (if that’s the correct term for two spirals) pressed into it.
Matching Tie and Handkerchief – I have a copy somewhere.
This page was the best I could find, but it’s four years old. I have a Tab Benoit CD with an interview in the negative minutes of track 1, like the one you mention by Ash. The CD cover gives instructions for how to listen to it. The list I linked to has the Ash CD, but missed the ones at the beginning.
That’s funny, on weird al’s Off the Deep End, the last song goes on for about 10 minutes of silence and then theres a few seconds of loud screaming and breaking things. Scared the heck out of me, due to the exact scenario you describe.
The reason stated for the hidden track on Nirvana’s Nevermind was to annoy a friend of their’s that had a CD changer. According to an interview disc I had, they did it so that it would take forever to change to another CD. It’s actually part of the last track. The one’s on Nine Inch Nails Broken disc are tracks 98 and 99.
Since this is about music I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.
Factory Showroom by TMBG
There’s a hidden track in the album “The New Sound Of The Venezuelan Gozadera” of “Los Amigos Invisibles”.
It’s a song you can’t put in the album because it’s a pure joke.
I seem to recall Alannis Morissette’s (or however she spells it) big breakthrough album… ‘Jagged Little Pill?’… anyway, that one had an unlisted track at the end, after a significant chunk of dead air. Something about her comitting a stalker-like B&E on some ex-boyfriend of hers, or summat like that. Pretty much a 180 from the rest of the material on that one.
Also, wasn’t there an instrumental not-quite-a-song at the end of Def Leppard’s Pyromania? Just this weird drum machine track, repeated endlessly. That one was on the cassette.
[sub]Another worn out tape I’ll have to track down and replace with a CD, one year or another.[/sub]
The story about “Green” by R.E.M.–
The “4” is a typo. Notice how close 4 and r are on the qwerty keyboard. When Michael Stipe was typing out the track list, he typed 4 by mistake. In the spirit of the group’s strange creativity, they let it “Stand” (har! I kill me).
My favorite hidden track: at the end of “Evaporated” on Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five, a couple minutes after the song ends you get this: “Yeah, I got your hidden track right here. Ben Folds is a fucking asshole!”
Cracker’s “Kerosene Hat” has three “hidden” tracks: Euro Trash Girl, I Ride My Bike, and Kerosene Hat (Demo).
On the Scorpions CD Face The Heat, the last and hidden track is the band doing an old Elvis ballad. I don’t know what it’s called, but I love it.