Of Note 017: Quick Reads Inspired by Ben Ratliff's Run The Song
Howdy folks!
Typically, I highlight a couple of feature length stories each month, but not this time. This month, I read Ben Ratliff’s Run The Song: Writing About Running About Listening, which is made up of 39 short essays. I found the other pieces resonating with me this month were also all pretty short.
So in this edition of Of Note, I’m going to jump right to the list of shorter works, things that you can read in about 10 minutes or less, but will still make an impact.
The Short List
If you’re a regular reader, you know that Hanif Abdurraqib is regularly featured and one of my favorite writers. His published music writing is few and far between these days and his record reviews are even less frequent. So to see him take the time to review the new Racing Mount Pleasant record in The New Yorker, I knew it must be something special. I love the way he captures the hard-to-describe brilliance of the records: “By the end of the album, you may walk away feeling a sense of catharsis without any conclusive statement of closure.”
I haven’t yet linked to work by Gary Saurez of Cabbageshiphop.com, but I've been a long-time fan. His critique of Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele 2 connects larger challenges with feeding the “IP beast” as well the difficulties capturing the magic of an original when you don’t have the original cast.
Carl Wilson reflects on the new Devo documentary and how their “less programmatic and more absurdist” approach to protest and politics make them unique and “the original Chumbawamba.”
In the New Yorker, William Robin uses the release of a new box set of Terry Riley’s “In C” as an opportunity to tell the story of “When the Man Tried to Sell Minimalism to the Counterculture." Whether you’re new to Riley or a long-time fan, this is worth your while.
If you haven’t noticed, emo is back (if it ever left). Grant Sharples combines review and profile into one at Paste to reveal more about one of the bigger bands in the scene, Hot Mulligan, and their fourth record. What stuck out is how he gets real about a “sobriety record”: “When it’s woven into an album’s promotional narrative, it’s often framed as a period of enlightenment for the artist, in which everything comes into view clearer than before. But rarely do such narratives admit that, frankly, it can also be pretty damn scary.”
You’ve likely already read a ton about Water From Your Eyes. I’ve linked to stories before and their new record is going to be on just about everyone’s year-end lists. I really dug Molly Mary O’Brien’s review for i enjoy music, including this killer opening: “If I could describe the new Water From Your Eyes album It's A Beautiful Place I would say it lives at the intersection of art and technology. No, no, I am just kidding—it lives at the intersection of Pure Moods and Guitar Hero.”
Over at Hearing Things, Dylan Green’s The Producers series, where he interviews his “favorite producers discuss[ing] their favorite music production”, is a real gem. If what you want is thoughtful musicians describing what they love about certain sounds, this is one for you. Check out the latest edition with Ovrkast: “The piano’s tryna peek through the drums and the drums are like, No, shut the fuck up.”
Book of the Month: Run The Song: Writing About Running About Listening by Ben Ratliff
Ben Ratliff has set a standard for music writing and critique since he started writing about pop and jazz for the New York Times in 1996. I’ve read him quite a bit, including his previous book Every Song Ever in 2016.
He is one of those writers I’ve enjoyed in spurts, but reading his writing also made me feel like I was back in grad school. I had to work at it. It was writing that made me feel forced to take notes and look up words and references. That’s not a bad thing! But I personally never found myself getting lost in the writing.
That’s not the case with Run the Song. This is Ratliff’s most personal and most free writing yet. Each of the 39 essays stands alone (though there is plenty of crossover, especially toward the end of the book) and captures thoughts he had while running and listening to music. The subjects are less ponderous and more emotional than usual for Ratliff.
If you were to sum it up, Ratliff is questioning the practice that has made him known. What is the role of a critic? Essay 17 in particular:
It is not important for critics to establish a finite truth or absolute values. We don’t need to win in that way. But we can move closer to clarity by means of questions, metaphors, descriptions, interpretations, and understanding the subject’s origin and connections, none of which necessarily add up to what is understood as an opinion.
He goes on to describe a knuckleball, a strange pitch in baseball with no rotation, and suggests a method of writing much the same:
When possible, I would like to write in this hard way, without making words spin, and not being too sure of how they will land.
In the same essay, he describes the challenge of writing about music in a way that made me think “Yes!” This is why I love music writing and find it so impressive:
Music is difficult to write about, for the simple reason that it must always be caught up with. Music moves from here to there; it is running away from us. The fact that it runs away from us is a crazy source of joy but also of displeasure: a song can drive you crazy, or beguile you, or perplex you, or threaten you. For this reason, many ignore its motion, or are asked to, and write about music (or are asked to) as if it were a finite historical event, which has to mean something; it’s better if that something can be sharpened to a weapon-like point…the best writing about any art — and the best art too — is generally the kind that stretches toward the limits of its capabilities, and that points, at least, toward what a writer or an artist can’t quite express.
One more for the road
Lia Kohl, a Chicago-based cellist and experimentalist who I’ve been seeing play around town with just about everyone, has a lovely little newsletter — mostly reports on what she’s been up to and some stray thoughts — and the latest issue about her travels to Mexico features this lovely little bit:
Various small noises
Whistles at the Teotithuacan Pyramids: people buying and selling them, playing them throughout the ancient structures. My friend Whitney talks about how field recording can be a study of acoustic resonance through time, and hearing the acoustics of the pyramids activated in this way was so wonderful.
The tamale guy on his bicycle every evening, even in the rain (he had a big umbrella and a raincoat):“tamales Oaxaqueños!”.
Standing very still in between dunes, listening to grass move in the wind. How rare to only hear one sound.
Thank you for reading! See you next month! On time!
Justin Anderson-Weber
