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

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

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

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

by Ben Ratliff

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Overview

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 opera—or 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 music—to be an “educated” listener.
In Every Song Ever, the veteran New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. As familiar subdivisions like “rock” and “jazz” matter less and less and music’s 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 traits—such as repetition, speed, and virtuosity—and 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 “Lover Man,” 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 Coltrane’s quartet. Ratliff also goes in search of “the perfect moment”; 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, Ratliff’s 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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250117991
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 02/14/2017
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 717,469
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996. He has written three books: The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (2008); Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). He lives with his wife and two sons in the Bronx.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 Let Me Concentrate!: Repetition 13

2 Past Present Future: Slowness 25

3 Draft Me!: Speed 39

4 What If We Both Should Want More?: Transmission 49

5 We Don't Need No Music: Quiet/Silence/Intimacy 59

6 Church Bell Tone: Stubbornness and the Single Note 71

7 Elevation: Virtuosity 81

8 Blue Rules: Sadness 91

9 Getting Clear: Audio Space 101

10 Purple, Green, Turquoise: Endless Inventory 111

11 I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know: Wasteful Authority 125

12 Granite and Fog: Density 139

13 As It First Looks: Improvisation 149

14 Eyeball to Eyeball: Closeness 161

15 Just a Little Bit: Loudness 171

16 R.S.V.P.: Discrepancy 183

17 I Still Believe I Hear: Memory and Historical Truth 195

18 On the Waves: Linking 207

19 Mi Gente: Community and Exclusivity 217

20 Slowly Fading out of Sight: The Perfect Moment 227

Sources 237

Acknowledgments 241

Index 243

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