![]() ![]() The principal jazz critic of the New York Times for the past 20 years, Ratliff is equally comfortable with hip-hop, punk, classical music and many of the idioms gathered under the heading of world music. “At the very least we should try to listen better than we are being listened to.” “Algorithms are listening to us,” he observes. “It had a limited run in the human brain, probably 1930 to 2010 … It is not only a way of buying, owning and arranging music-related objects and experiences in one’s life, but also a distinct way of listening.” Ratliff’s interest is in exploring other, newer ways of listening in the age of Spotify. “We can pretty much wave bye bye to the completist-music-collector impulse,” Ben Ratliff writes in Every Song Ever. ![]() That no one who is now under, say, 35 years of age is likely to feel such a compulsion represents an important saving of both money and living space. Whereas the desire to own every 45 released on the Motown label in its first 10 years had once been a hopeless dream, a very expensive and carefully curated series of multi-disc sets brought that ambition within reach. Eventually, when the record industry was almost on its last legs, it spotted my generation’s continuing weakness and found ways to feed it. But it made it seem obligatory to possess the complete works not only of the obvious people – in my case Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Terry Riley and so on – but also of figures cherished for their obscurity. That rigour always seemed a slightly perverse response to music of black American origin, the spontaneity and informality of which had set postwar Britain free from a set of inherited cultural restraints. Suddenly stripped of context, the music was just there to be appreciated for itself, in the moment, in the way we apprehend it before knowledge sets up filters to shape our responses.įor a member of a generation of enthusiasts accustomed to collecting and classifying music with a librarian’s rigour, this came as a shock. So I learned to relinquish the lifelong urge to fit every piece of music into an ever-expanding taxonomy. I couldn’t go out and buy it, or fit it neatly into the organogram of musical evolution that all serious fans carry around in their heads. ![]() That interesting record that had already started when I tuned in? It would forever remain a mystery. I t was in the days when a particular jazz radio station consistently failed to back-announce many of the tracks it played that I began to consider the possibility that I had spent my entire life listening to recorded music in the wrong way. ![]()
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