Sasha Frere-Jones
Sounds to run by: in his fifth book, Ben Ratliff triangulates the rhythms of music, the mind, and the moving body.
Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, by Ben Ratliff, Graywolf Press, 237 pages, $18
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How do we escape the prison house of language? Music does it, much of the time, and sometimes, dialectically, language disables itself, which critic Ben Ratliff knows. In his New York Times columns and books, especially on John Coltrane and thriving inside the cloud of digital music, Ratliff has been a reliably close listener. He focuses, better than almost anyone, on what music is actually doing and on how his brain and soul respond: a moral feedback loop. What Ratliff provides in Run the Song, his fifth book, is a sort-of-diary that flirts with becoming-memoir by giving us a linear capture of what happens to his mind when he listens while running.
Run the Song is a calm reboot of the day job, a critique of critique. “I write music criticism, but in some ways I betray it,” he says, “because I am wary of misconstruing it by containing it.” This is about seeing the music-self-world triad, something any decent critic tries to navigate honestly. “I run with music to help me merge with the external world, but I am sometimes using it to help me define myself against it,” he says, adding that “to run is to be out in the world, but also to be alone.” The more often critique allows a smaller, vulnerable subject, the further it gets from the fascism of authority and the gross sport-like matrix of rankings. Ratliff uses running to get closer to people and music—a rich and unstable circuit that should never be hardened for the sake of convenience—by taking his existence as a person seriously, something running demands.
Ratliff began running “skeptically” in 2012, when a friend in Maine lured him into an activity they called “going around the island.” He runs around Van Cortlandt Park, at Two Hundred Forty-Second Street in the Bronx, and also through its surroundings, sometimes navigating traffic and fences to find the space to run “for a while, without stopping, into the unforeseen future.” He tells us, “I find it easy to listen in larger expanses,” and this pairs well with longer tracks, like Jimi Hendrix’s version of “Machine Gun” recorded at the Fillmore East. (I am a slow but aspirational runner. Partly because listening to music was my job for a period of time that I don’t like to think about, I listen to nothing but my own thoughts and my breathing when I run, hoping I will be thinking about nothing at all by the time I have ground out four miles in ninety minutes.) After channeling a John Berger essay called “Field” (which is about a field), Ratliff confronts the Van Cortlandt Field he laps and arrives at a place far from critique: “I also know I can listen to anything in this field, and that the field is the song because the song becomes the field, or makes the field real to me. I know that I am listening to the field as I am listening to the song. Which really means I am listening to my own movement around or amid the field. In this way, the running is the song.” What Ratliff does here is not modest, even if the book wears emotional modesty as its own windbreaker. He is restoring both the spiritual and somatic nature of music back to the recordings of that music.
Sometimes Ratliff is listening to music and unpacking it, but often the music is an aid to thinking, because it “develops.” The musicians who make it “can’t entirely know the music’s outcome for itself, themselves, or you.” In contradistinction to the visual, the aural “leaves room for doubt or a second thought” and invites you “to attend to the thing you do not yet understand.” A pleasant rhythm develops, as the reader begins to anticipate whether Ratliff will run into a thought-thought or a book-thought or a music-thought or what, exactly.
While running to the Ohio Players album Pleasure, Ratliff notes that the music has led him to think about “the implications of counterpoint and the repeated signature, long-distance looking, love, death, appropriation, adulthood and maturity, ‘fun’ (better with the quotation marks), the condition of moving-toward, and headlong fluency.” Before this, though, Ratliff offers a distinct thought, one that has nothing to do with music. He admits that he “might be running from something,” which he likes. “I do feel a constant need to distance myself from some old assumption or reflex or sentimental attachment,” he writes, which is in many ways the golden bed a critic dies in. A boss of mine once asked why the critics “in the back of the book” tended to calcify. He knew the answer, though. That comic jig of your favorite film critic is what people come to expect and is also the reflex Ratliff mentions, that one that makes you spiritually numb and culturally irrelevant.
Ratliff notes the well-known story of saxophonist Sonny Rollins quitting performance (and cancelling his phone service—a ghost of digital detox to come) and practicing for a year and a half on the walkway of the Manhattan Bridge. Upon his return, Rollins recorded hours and hours of music during a two-week engagement at the Village Gate in 1962. Listening to this box set, Ratliff gives us a concentrated dose of the book’s logic. He chooses “tracks with titles of no significance to me, such as ‘Untitled Original A #2.’ ” As he reacts in real time, he imagines the audience doing the same. “Were they thinking, ‘This famous person may not be any good’?” How rarely do we see articulated this very common thought that almost every human, critic or not, has during a show? Not because you are that elite breed of person, the “hater,” but because, as Ratliff asks, “Were many people wondering whether they knew anything about anything?” This is all of us, running through our own lives wondering why we have chosen to do anything, including going to a concert, sometimes a supremely odd and alienating arrangement of people. And when Ratliff brings the listener and the critic and musician together, he takes the stakes as genuine: “It occurs to me that if you spend a year and half doing something as hostile toward outgoing, transactional, organized show business as cutting off your phone service and playing into wind and traffic noises, you must have a period during that time of honestly wondering whether you want to go back.” Is running a way of not going back for Ratliff?
After a welcome digression on the disgusting, insane people who volunteer to run alongside you—an unwelcome violation of the project where we are “all solo performers playing Debussy on our routes”—Ratliff runs to “the stillest, quietest, calmest music” he can think of, which is shakuhachi (bamboo flute) music recorded by Takahashi Kuzan. “Within a minute of listening to the record you feel you are hearing a life’s work basically compressed within each phrase,” he writes, “and expressed through a medium of very limited output.” He goes on for another two paragraphs, though he knows he doesn’t need to. This is a kind of criticism that doesn’t exist in magazines and newspapers—one woven into and expressive of the fabric of daily life. There are not stars or thumbs-up or digits attached to these observations, and the main framing here is not the release schedule, but whether or not Ratliff thought the sounds were close enough to silence, an actually interesting metric.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).