Listening Closely: On Ben Ratliff’s “Run the Song”

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When I run, I do not listen to music. This might seem strange, because I listen to music when I do almost anything else: writing, cooking, cleaning, walking the dog. But I like the spaciousness of my brain when I run, the way my thoughts jostle with the repetitive motion. I might notice a blue jay and remember the feeder outside my childhood home; I might think through a sentence I’ve written and time the stressed syllables to my footfalls. I don’t mean to suggest that my thoughts are always interesting when I run. I’m often thinking of nothing—an emptiness that feels hard to achieve with headphones in. Running without music creates open space, an increasingly rare sensation in a world of screens and digital stimuli and perpetually worsening news. When I see people running with headphones, I’ll admit, I judge them a little: I think, Why not take a break from the music? Can’t you spend thirty minutes in silence with your thoughts?  

The music critic Ben Ratliff runs and listens nearly every day, a practice he chronicles in his new book Run The Song: Writing about Running about Listening. When I picked up the book, I was ready to argue with him, to pen a screed demanding his headphones come out. But Ratliff’s goal, it turns out, is not to persuade the reader to listen to music while running. “I don’t think anyone needs to argue for running while listening to music, since so many people already do it,” he writes. “I only want to consider what running and listening have to do with each other.” The project is loose and intuitive: Ratliff preplans neither his runs nor his music. He listens to recommendations from friends or whatever comes to him “a minute before leaving the apartment.” Ratliff frequently tells the reader what his book isn’t doing: it “is not about optimal music for running,” and it is not “about optimal earphones.” When Ratliff makes a claim, he qualifies it; he seems instinctively skeptical of grand pronouncements. 

Nonetheless his goals for the book are, in fact, a bit grand. Midway through, he admits that he has become “less and less interested in what the former standard modes of music criticism look like.” Much music writing, he points out, “could have been written with the writer’s having had access only to a lyrics sheet, a press release, and a transcript of an interview with the musician talking about the meaning and intent of their work, but not the actual music itself.” As a former jazz and pop critic at The New York Times–a position he held for twenty years until 2016–Ratliff is certainly familiar with the “standard modes,” and the question of how to move beyond them toward criticism that focuses on the “music itself” has personal stakes. Run the Song provides a map for what this sort of fresh criticism might look like. 

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Ratliff’s first challenge, if he’s going to blaze a new trail, is to find a suitable structure. He was “trained in the unit of the record review,” but now has “some doubt” about the form, as well as “doubt about the unit of the record.” It’s not only reviews that rely on this unit; one thinks of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, those ever-multiplying pocket-sized volumes which each tell the story of one record, from Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew to AC/DC’s Highway To Hell. For other books of music criticism, the unit might be an artist––as for Ratliff’s earlier book, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound––or a genre, like twentieth-century classical music for Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. Some recent books, like Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song or Jeff Tweedy’s World Within One Song, are organized around the unit of the song. 

In a category of its own, Run the Song structures its chapters around Ratliff’s runs. Sometimes, the structure is straightforward: in an early chapter, Ratliff runs and listens to one album, Allen Toussaint’s Toussaint, homing in on certain songs, certain moments. Although the chapter is interspersed with reminders of the run—a description of a “working-class neighborhood in Yonkers,” a “rough trail” with “old broken pavement and “sharp stones”—this section remains not so unlike the dreaded record review. Ratliff takes more risks in his next chapter. It begins with Mal Waldron, the jazz pianist, before moving on to  Eric Dolphy’s At the Five Spot, a record on which Waldron plays. Ratliff compares Waldron’s simple, repetitive solos to the act of running itself:

I’m running through a city-country trail deep in the park, with rocks and roots and old, pitted pavement. And now here comes Mal Waldron, feeling every rock in the trail: “Yes, I’m here; that’s interesting; that’s interesting too; what happens if you turn that over; I’m going to move these stones over to the left; time to make an adjustment; the ground is wet here; I see some planks over a streambed; perhaps I’ll get my shoes slightly wet; the swamp-rot smell is pleasing; I am continuing to go forward.”

Here, the run not only provides Ratliff with a structure but a useful metaphor, too—a way to dramatize and visualize the way Waldron solos. From here, Ratliff’s train of thought jumps—much like mine does when I run—and he describes a “movement-performance piece” by Yvonne Rainer, We Shall Run. He later returns to the work of Yvonne Rainer; and, some fifty pages on, he listens to Waldron again. This repetition seems to grow out of Ratliff’s choice of structure, repetition being native to the activity of running. 

Ratliff’s structure, though, comes with its own challenges. While the associative leaps can be thrilling, they also disorient the reader. At one point, several paragraphs into an analysis of Septology––the series of seven novels by Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse––I had to stop and look back: how, exactly, did we get here again? The book’s repetition, too, is a risk. Perhaps the only thing more boring than running––and I say this as a runner––is listening to someone tell you about their runs. Ratliff is aware of this risk: he can’t stand running magazines, he admits. Undoubtedly, Ratliff’s writing on running is miles ahead of what you might find in Runner’s World, filled with vivid details: “Saturday morning laundry smells” and “microclimates of cannabis smoke.” But the runs inevitably blur together, as runs do, and these passages rarely achieve the vividness of Ratliff’s writing on music. Running has unlocked something for Ratliff as a listener, but the form is also a limited one that can sometimes wear the reader out. 

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This winter, I aimed to listen to more long songs––anything from Destroyer’s “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker (eight-and-a-half minutes) to Steve Reich’s Drumming (four parts, fifty-six minutes). The goal was to carve out space, to listen in a more focused way. My list contains dozens of songs; months later, I’ve listened to maybe fifteen of them. Reading Run the Song, I’ve come to think one reason I haven’t made more progress has been my insistence on sitting and listening in the living room, doing nothing. By listening on his runs, Ratliff finds space for music that many listeners struggle to sit through: a four-hour DJ set by Theo Parrish; an eighty-four-minute piece of “slow-change music” by Éliane Radigue; the baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann’s Twelve Fantasias for Transverse Flute Without Bass. In one of the sections on Waldron, Ratliff listens twice to “The Prophet,” a twenty-one-minute-long song. This leads him to ruminate on his eagerness to tackle long songs and other difficult music: “When I run with music,” he writes, “I know I’ll be listening for a while, without stopping… and so I find it easy to listen in larger expanses.” If Ratliff were trying to persuade readers to listen to music while running, this would be good evidence for his argument.  

Writing about long songs and other difficult music—with no lyrics, unfamiliar structures, and little for the average listener to grasp––impels Ratliff to marshal all his powers of close listening and description. Ratliff almost never resorts to technical language, instead finding images and metaphors that surprise and delight. Parrish’s DJ set, Ratliff writes, moves “through long passages of great joy, but always with some turbulence: awkwardness, roughness, bumpiness, fragmented phrase repetition.” Radigue’s music “brings the map closer and closer to your face, until your expertise at recognizing landmarks is no longer of use.” And baroque music, like Telemann’s, “is exciting to the extent that it seems to come from pushing forward relentlessly, beyond what can be predicted.” Again and again, Ratliff makes readers feel like they are listening alongside him. 

It’s in these descriptive passages that Ratliff’s writing pushes into new territory of what music criticism can do. One default move in the sort of review I imagine Ratliff disdaining is to name-check other artists as a way to evoke someone’s sound. When I click on the most recent track review on Pitchfork—one of a song by Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band—the two-paragraph-long piece spends its opening sentences comparing Davis to the late David Berman, a comparison that isn’t much use if you’ve never listened to Silver Jews or Purple Mountains. The subsequent description of the music is limited to stock language, much of it frustratingly vague: we are told the song is a “metaphysical, existential, heartbreaking country song” and its writing is “lived-in and generous.” Compare this to Ratliff on C.H.E.W., the Chicago hardcore band, and their singer Doris Jean: 

Intensely alive, she feels for small openings, places to bounce and pivot, ways to continue skipping and swinging through it, at speed! A song ends and demands that another one follow it immediately. 

That first sentence’s rhythm, marked by short, punchy clauses, imitates the sound and speed of the music and helps the reader imagine Jean’s singing, which Ratliff describes as “flung matter, hard and intense.” Ratliff mentions the English punk band Discharge for comparison, but only in order to introduce their “D-beat”: a skipping beat, like “an old folk or rock-and-roll two-beat rhythm…but twice as fast, and with a skip or a stutter to add swing before the fourth beat.” Later, Ratliff describes C.H.E.W.’s songs as “short, modular blasts of slate-gray sound that could conceivably go on forever.” I don’t usually listen to hardcore, but, reading this passage, I feel I understand its appeal. Perhaps more importantly—and more impressively—I have a clear sense of how these songs sound.   

It isn’t possible, of course, to only “write about the music itself”: in the passage on C.H.E.W., Ratliff also considers the “ethos of hardcore,” and how this might connect to the band’s brief life and sudden disappearance. Generally, though, the book is light on biography. This is obviously by design: discussing musical structure, Ratliff admits a “discomfort with narrative and ‘containers’” and a resentment of plot. It’s a revealing moment that helps explain Ratliff’s focus on close listening.

Interestingly, though, when Ratliff does move beyond the music––as in one section, when he explores the lives of the jazz musicians Arsenio Rodríguez and Thelonious Monk, who lived near each other in the Bronx––it’s a bit of a relief to leave behind the relative abstraction of close listening for the solidity of street names, years and dates, wives and daughters and sisters and friends. In its incorporation of biography, this chapter is one of the book’s most traditional, and it’s also one of the most absorbing. 

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, said Elvis Costello or Laurie Anderson or Martin Mull–depending on whom you ask. Or, as Ratliff puts it: “Music is difficult to write about, for the simple reason that it must always be caught up with.” Ratliff’s writing itself can be hard to catch up with, but for those who stay with him, the rewards are substantial––not unlike the natural high at the end of a run. In the end, one need not put in headphones on a run to follow Ratliff’s example. One needs only to listen closely, to pay attention to “the motion of music.”