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Clearance: Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty
What does it mean to listen in the digital era? Today, new technologies make it possible to roam instantly and experimentally across musical languages and generations, from Detroit techno to jam bands to baroque operaāor to dive deeper into the set of tastes that we already have. Either way, we can listen to nearly anything, at any time. The possibilities in this new age of listening overturn old assumptions about what it means to properly appreciate musicāto be an āeducatedā listener.
InĀ Every Song Ever, the veteranĀ New York TimesĀ music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. As familiar subdivisions like ārockā and ājazzā matter less and less and musicās accessible past becomes longer and broader, listeners can put aside the intentions of composers and musicians and engage music afresh, on their own terms. Ratliff isolates signal musical traitsāsuch as repetition, speed, and virtuosityāand traces them across wildly diverse recordings to reveal unexpected connections. When we listen for slowness, for instance, we may detect surprising affinities between the drone metal of Sunn O))), the mixtape manipulations of DJ Screw, Sarah Vaughan singing āLover Man,ā and the final works of Shostakovich. And if we listen for closeness, we might notice how the tight harmonies of bluegrass vocals illuminate the virtuosic synchrony of John Coltraneās quartet. Ratliff also goes in search of āthe perfect momentā; considers what it means to hear emotion by sampling the complex sadness that powers the music of Nick Drake and Slayer; and examines the meaning of certain common behaviors, such as the impulse to document and possess the entire performance history of the Grateful Dead.
Encompassing the sounds of five continents and several centuries, Ratliffās book is an artful work of criticism and a lesson in open-mindedness. It is a definitive field guide to our radically altered musical habitat.
InĀ Every Song Ever, the veteranĀ New York TimesĀ music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. As familiar subdivisions like ārockā and ājazzā matter less and less and musicās accessible past becomes longer and broader, listeners can put aside the intentions of composers and musicians and engage music afresh, on their own terms. Ratliff isolates signal musical traitsāsuch as repetition, speed, and virtuosityāand traces them across wildly diverse recordings to reveal unexpected connections. When we listen for slowness, for instance, we may detect surprising affinities between the drone metal of Sunn O))), the mixtape manipulations of DJ Screw, Sarah Vaughan singing āLover Man,ā and the final works of Shostakovich. And if we listen for closeness, we might notice how the tight harmonies of bluegrass vocals illuminate the virtuosic synchrony of John Coltraneās quartet. Ratliff also goes in search of āthe perfect momentā; considers what it means to hear emotion by sampling the complex sadness that powers the music of Nick Drake and Slayer; and examines the meaning of certain common behaviors, such as the impulse to document and possess the entire performance history of the Grateful Dead.
Encompassing the sounds of five continents and several centuries, Ratliffās book is an artful work of criticism and a lesson in open-mindedness. It is a definitive field guide to our radically altered musical habitat.
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What does it mean to listen in the digital era? Today, new technologies make it possible to roam instantly and experimentally across musical languages and generations, from Detroit techno to jam bands to baroque operaāor to dive deeper into the set of tastes that we already have. Either way, we can listen to nearly anything, at any time. The possibilities in this new age of listening overturn old assumptions about what it means to properly appreciate musicāto be an āeducatedā listener.
InĀ Every Song Ever, the veteranĀ New York TimesĀ music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. As familiar subdivisions like ārockā and ājazzā matter less and less and musicās accessible past becomes longer and broader, listeners can put aside the intentions of composers and musicians and engage music afresh, on their own terms. Ratliff isolates signal musical traitsāsuch as repetition, speed, and virtuosityāand traces them across wildly diverse recordings to reveal unexpected connections. When we listen for slowness, for instance, we may detect surprising affinities between the drone metal of Sunn O))), the mixtape manipulations of DJ Screw, Sarah Vaughan singing āLover Man,ā and the final works of Shostakovich. And if we listen for closeness, we might notice how the tight harmonies of bluegrass vocals illuminate the virtuosic synchrony of John Coltraneās quartet. Ratliff also goes in search of āthe perfect momentā; considers what it means to hear emotion by sampling the complex sadness that powers the music of Nick Drake and Slayer; and examines the meaning of certain common behaviors, such as the impulse to document and possess the entire performance history of the Grateful Dead.
Encompassing the sounds of five continents and several centuries, Ratliffās book is an artful work of criticism and a lesson in open-mindedness. It is a definitive field guide to our radically altered musical habitat.
InĀ Every Song Ever, the veteranĀ New York TimesĀ music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. As familiar subdivisions like ārockā and ājazzā matter less and less and musicās accessible past becomes longer and broader, listeners can put aside the intentions of composers and musicians and engage music afresh, on their own terms. Ratliff isolates signal musical traitsāsuch as repetition, speed, and virtuosityāand traces them across wildly diverse recordings to reveal unexpected connections. When we listen for slowness, for instance, we may detect surprising affinities between the drone metal of Sunn O))), the mixtape manipulations of DJ Screw, Sarah Vaughan singing āLover Man,ā and the final works of Shostakovich. And if we listen for closeness, we might notice how the tight harmonies of bluegrass vocals illuminate the virtuosic synchrony of John Coltraneās quartet. Ratliff also goes in search of āthe perfect momentā; considers what it means to hear emotion by sampling the complex sadness that powers the music of Nick Drake and Slayer; and examines the meaning of certain common behaviors, such as the impulse to document and possess the entire performance history of the Grateful Dead.
Encompassing the sounds of five continents and several centuries, Ratliffās book is an artful work of criticism and a lesson in open-mindedness. It is a definitive field guide to our radically altered musical habitat.
