anti-post-genre

Ben Ratliff

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

New York Times, February 17 2016

By Simon Reynolds

Complaining that there’s too much good art and entertainment being made at the moment seems churlish — how could that be a problem? Yet it’s undeniable that there is something curiously oppressive about the current bounty, something paralyzing about our ease of access to it. Television is one field where what ought to be a boon feels increasingly like a bane: With scores of new shows each season, keeping up with what’s good gets to seem like a chore. If anything, the overload in music feels even more unmanageable.

Ben Ratliff’s new book is a remedial intervention for the problem of being able to “hear nearly everything, almost whenever, almost wherever, often for free.” “Every Song Ever” is framed as a set of strategies to counter the confusion and appetite loss that can afflict music fans as they try to navigate what feels like a cross between a maze and a banquet: the overflowing riches offered by streaming services like Spotify, unofficial archives like YouTube, music-sharing blogs and other instant-access sources of sound.

Rather than rely on traditional signposts like genre borders or artist biography, Mr. Ratliff, a music critic for The New York Times, proposes new routes across the teeming landscape: modes of attentive listening based on concepts or musical properties. Some, like slowness, speed, stillness and density, are fairly easy to grasp; others, like discrepancy and transmission, are more elusive.

Close listening is Mr. Ratliff’s forte. When he gets right inside what a musician is doing in a particular recording or performance, and describes how that affects your body or perceptions, the results are usually lovely and illuminating. His studies of James Brown’s “Ain’t It Funky Now,” Sleep’s “Dopesmoker,” and the work of João Gilberto and Curtis Mayfield, are precise but never clinical.

The chapter “Getting Clear,” dealing with “audio space” as conjured on records by producers and engineers as well as by players, is particularly vivid, covering artists as various as the Grateful Dead, Roy Haynes, Pink Floyd, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Miley Cyrus. Mr. Ratliff fulfills the injunction of Manfred Eicher, the founder and in-house producer of the ECM label, to “think of your ears as eyes.”

Another absorbing chapter deals with participatory discrepancies, a concept coined by the musicologist Charles Keil to describe the minute imprecisions in a performance that create a group’s distinctive feel. Mr. Ratliff advises that the best way to hear a classic rumba album by Totico Arango and Patato Valdés is “through headphones, at night, walking through heavy crowds in Times Square, smelling street food, visually processing the lights.” That’s because the music in your ears will mirror the external environment: “nothing happens in perfect synch or in a straight line”; instead there’s a mesh of “flickering, jostling particulars.”

Mr. Ratliff leans toward nontechnical terms and unshowy language, which he then nudges toward the profound or revealing. Sometimes that works brilliantly: a passage on the Allman Brothers and the glory of bands with two drummers likens the role of Jaimoe to “a housepainter doing touch-ups, not on the second day of work but as the first coat is applied.” Other times, the effect falls somewhere between cute and clever, as when he tries to account for why virtuosos are so often religious: “Perhaps they can’t contain their own pride and gratitude, or they can’t house the gigantic battery needed to power it. They need an external storage space for it, and they call it God.”

A larger problem with “Every Song Ever” is that its premise starts to fade from view — starts to seem like a pretext, in fact, for a fragmented miscellany of meditations on music that Mr. Ratliff likes. That’s fine as far as it goes, and readers will often find themselves propelled to YouTube or Spotify to hear what he’s writing about.

But I wasn’t convinced that the nomadic modes of engagement with music Mr. Ratliff advocates would necessarily help anyone grapple with the quandaries of listening in an overloaded era. His categories are so open-ended that they might even increase your sense of disorientating plenitude. They seem more like exercises you might do after having listened to a hugely varied amount of music over the course of a lifetime.

Mr. Ratliff is both wary and weary of genre, which, near the start of the book, he asserts is “a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less.” Genre terms, though, mostly emerge organically out of communities of musicians and fans. Although Mr. Ratliff announces early on that he’ll refrain from using genre language wherever possible, in practice he nearly always identifies music using those tags: as bebop, happy hard-core, flamenco, dark ambient, nyabinghi.

Genre terms are useful, perhaps even indispensable; they tell you something. The self-consciously genre-crossing critic — just like the self-consciously genre-blending musician — depends on style boundaries precisely so as to transgress them and achieve desired sensations of liberation, discovery, and an airy cosmopolitan feeling of rising above the rooted and local.

Mr. Ratliff uses terms like “comfort zone” as negative concepts, implying that listening widely is virtuous, or at least good for you, promoting a suppleness of sensibility. But fanatical relationships with a particular sound or scene can be just as engaged, just as rewarding. Metal fiends, for instance, find an infinite array of subtle shades in what seems like undifferentiated monotony to non-initiates.

This sort of patriotic adherence to genre is something that Mr. Ratliff believes is on the way out, historically. Which may be true, but is that a good thing? The roaming listener who samples across the genrescape is more often than not harvesting musical fruits that were generated by narrowly focused and dedicated purists.

It remains debatable whether there is a right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy way to listen to music. Being an omnivore doesn’t even guarantee increased enjoyment. There are people who derive endless delight listening to just one kind of music, or even a single artist, as Mr. Ratliff acknowledges in a section about people he has encountered who have all-consuming obsessions for Frank Zappa or the Grateful Dead’s live recordings. Conversely, one of the downsides of the age of plenty is that the more widely you listen outside your well-worn grooves, the more frequently you’ll experience disappointment, distaste or just indifference. More is less.

[reposted this apropos of absolutely nothing - honest!]