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Like Minutemen's "the punchline" (18 songs in 16 minutes; this one is often listed as an EP because it runs on 45 rpm but I find that silly; these are *songs*, just very short, if it was like 6 songs and the rest was interludes, I could agree) or, even worse, Dwarves ''Blood, guts and pussy'' which is only like 12 minutes but has 13 songs or so? I just don't think it's right to call these EP's, despite their length.
One *could* make a point for the first D.R.I. record which has 22 songs in like 16 minutes but was initially released as a 33 RPM 7". In that case, the *format* makes it an EP but all reissues were on 12" so IMO, it became an LP then.
So basically, in order to determine something as an Ep or Lp, you'd ahve to consider:
*the context of genre. Four jazz songs (post be-bop) are obviously not the same thing as four punk-songs. *the format *the length *the ''Nature'' of the songs in the context of genre explained above. What I mean is that, say, if we are dealing with remixes, acappellas, a bunch of interludes, instrumentals of vocal tracks etc., that needs to be considered as well.
This is a complex issue and one I never truly "got" but I don't consider Illmatic an EP simply because 40 minutes and nine songs (I'm not counting the intro) just isn't ''too short'' by *previously* established Hip-Hop standards. Even then, it was not THAT short, it was some years later where things started to go crazy with time and songs in Hip-Hop but now, wer'e back to shorter albums generally so I don't see the point of recontextualizing it as an EP...
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