Ear fatigue over distance

“As I listen, here is the listener I propose: someone who is theoretically interested in everything, and not disappointed when that interest dims; a discerner learning to question the terms of their discernment; someone trying to know less so they can know more.” 

That quote is from Ben Ratliff’s new book Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening. While that title makes it seem like a bit of Murakami-ish vibe writing about matching your pace to the beat of jazz or timing your splits to line up with the movements of Mahler 5, Ratliff's approach is more philosophical. Taking an unspoken cue from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, Ratliff treats running as an improvisational performance given by himself for himself, then uses that as a way to reflect on how one moves not only through an individual piece of music, but through music as a general phenomenon. The idea is that while we're taken to believe that the infrastructural guides of the city grid/park trail on the one hand and the commercial record industry on the other define the limits of what you can do with your feet and your ears, reality is much bigger, and so much more interesting, than that.

Ratliff is a brilliant writer. In the liner notes for the Ornette Coleman box set Atlantic put out a decade or so ago, he refers to the famously difficult Free Jazz as "booty music" because of the way it moves and shakes and follows a kind of kinetic bodily logic. I like that kind of thing; I like the idea that our bodies can guide us through music that we've come to think of as intellectual or that we assume has a high barrier to entry. 

Actually doing this, though, is another matter. The unfamiliar or the discordant (whether musically or contextually) is uncomfortable, and it’s not hard to feel that discomfort as a form of pain, rather than a unique experience in itself—much in the same way that running, especially at distance, produces a discomfort that the runner has to accept as a unique experience rather than a problem to solve or evade. I find all of this very difficult. I’m a little baffled that Ratliff can put in eight miles while listening to Laurel Halo. I’m also jealous that Ratliff can put in eight miles while listening to Laurel Halo. 

A few weeks ago, on a group chat called Trent Reggsnor (fka Wuss Bets), one of my besties asked if we’d ever read anything about what’s going on when our favorite music doesn’t do anything for us. My understanding of “favorite” music as a category melted away a long time ago; with that framework gone, I’ve been able to wander more freely through genres and styles and scenes feeling less concerned with the depth of my reaction to the music than I am with what kind of mark the music makes as it skids off my surface. What I mean by that is that music at some point became one long asynchronous experience for me, like a city whose grid I ignore, if you want to be generous about this experience, or like an infinitely scrolling social media feed if you want to make me feel a little bad. It’s very rare, at this point, for music to penetrate deeply and take up a space in my heart that has historically been reserved for music that touches me deeply and to which I return regularly. That space, too, has shrunk over time, and it only seems to have room for one or two artists at once. With that cavity more or less always filled, everything else rolls right over me, sometimes delightfully, sometimes without my noticing.

This sounds pessimistic, and I guess it is, but this is something that I generally like about myself. A decade or so ago, I interviewed Ken Shipley and Rob Sevier from Numero Group at their offices in Chicago and felt, for the first time in my life, profoundly aware of how little I knew about music. I had a few Numero collections at that point and understood what they were all about as a label. In case you're not familiar, Numero had at that time made its name on painstakingly researched and lovingly put-together compilations of rare soul music, barely-issued funk, forgotten R&B, and weirdo basement gospel. Their packaging presented the music as living and vibrant, their instantly timeless logo a kind of seal of approval. It was a form of canon-making, kind of, in that the entire project felt like a rebuke of the idea that we all already knew what all the best music made in the 1970s had been. You could put on a Good God! compilation and think, Actually, this is good. 

As I interviewed the two of them, it slowly and horrifyingly dawned on me that this meant their sole authority when it came to taste was their own. They could tell what they liked. They could pick it out. They could listen to a song free from any context and determine how they felt about it. (Now I can see that obscurity is its own context, and that it can provide a much more powerful kind of charge than official approval can. But I didn't know that then.) To me, relating to music this way felt both insane and impossible. How was anyone able to sift through thousands of self-released gospel records and differentiate between the good and the bad? The sheer number of songs out there would make the process functionally impossible. I suspected that everything would turn out to be "pretty good," which is how much music sounded to me (and usually still does). It didn't occur to me that that might be the point, that you might lose yourself in that forest of gospel records and enjoy the feeling. Tens of thousands of songs and they're all pretty good; what a miracle; just listen.

When I put on a new song, I was always aware of some kind of context; it was always framed by its reputation, even if it was the band’s first single. I wasn’t sure if I could properly hear music that existed outside of what its context told me about it. Ken and Rob told me that they didn’t even dig for records anymore (“digging is over” is the quote I remember), that they were chasing rumors of records they’d heard through their networks. They had bought an old desk from someone and found a reference to a record on an index card in one of the drawers and were then desperate to hear it. Again, I know now that this a way of supercharging the experience of listening to said rumored record once you’ve found it. But at the time, what I saw as a pure, direct encounter with a record scared the shit out of me. I always had to file these songs somewhere, and my cabinets were sorted by acclaim. 

Once they're filed away, it's easy to pretend or at least hope that we won't have to re-file. But as with anything else, we encounter music in the present and in the present only. It can feel nice to pretend otherwise, that the I who is listening to a favorite record from high school—I'll say 311's Grassroots—is the same I who listened to it in 2002. It suggests continuity, if not in the music itself then in who we are (as if all we are and have been is the I who listens to 311, as if even my listening to 311 isn't now affected by 25 years of other musical loves, absorbing and reflecting other people's opinions about them, writing about them, somehow being tight enough with them now that SA Martinez texted me Merry Christmas this year) (or, more simply, as if memory is pure). 

This has been an exceptionally difficult year. The present is difficult to bear, and the future is, at this point, literally impossible for me to imagine. It’s not a good time and it’s not easy to imagine a better time. So I find myself casting backwards without really meaning to, because you do ultimately have to exist somewhere. I would think—or at least hope—that the music I’ve always loved would provide some kind of relief at a time like this, but I’ve found that the opposite has been mostly true. While I’m stuck in the past, my encounter with the music that defined my younger life feels freshly intolerable. This has often been the case for me—to return to an old fave sometimes feels like a failure of imagination on my part—but this feels different.

“From time to time,” Ratliff writes, “I listen to something I know very well, but essentially I always want to get somewhere new with it, somewhere that is elsewhere. I do not particularly want to listen in order to put myself back into some memorable time of peace or impressionability.” I read this line a week or so ago and rolled my eyes and said fuck off, give me a break and thought fuck me, that's the only way I listen, I am so weak. Ratliff's reasoning for moving forward, he says, is that he's afraid of getting stuck in the past, and it occurs to me now that this may be what's happening for me when "Mayonaise" no longer makes me cry on my way home from laser hair removal. Maybe there's something in me, some higher part of my psyche, that knows that the person who formed memories with music years and years ago no longer functionally exists, and that to seek that person out now would be to put the present me—different not only in gender but in temperament, ethics, experience, and so on—in jeopardy. Why allow what I've been building to become a unfinished ruin?

What makes this difficult—and I think this may be what my friend was trying to get at, too—is that this is a subconscious thing. It’s strange to go to a place you once went for comfort only to find that the cushions are worn out and the air is stale. It’s disorienting. And, if you’re the kind of person who keeps moving around in their listening, who only rarely parks over an album or artist and really draws some kind of emotional sustenance out of them, you’re—I’m—likely having a ton of great aesthetic experiences but, I imagine, very few great emotional experiences.

I wonder, then: What does it mean at this point in my life to have favorite music? Is it a collection of artists and records that speak to something deep within me (the Grateful Dead, I Got Heaven), or is it things that end up hanging around like long-term buds (Nine Inch Nails, Inlet)? These examples are all relevant right now and have been for a little while, but I know they'll cycle out at some point. There were stretches in my mid-30s when I couldn't listen to anything but John Coltrane. When I play him now, it still sounds great—it's not like he stops being John Coltrane—but I no longer feel like his sax is guiding my nervous system. For most of 2022 and 2023, if I needed to hear something to get me through my commute, Live Through This never failed. When I play it now, it feels worn out and illegible, a quarter that's been put through the slot too many times. I can feel the process happening with the Dead, though a good “Morning Dew” will still fuck me up on the right kind of day.

This isn’t unusual; everyone falls in and out of love with music. But my need for music sometimes feels greater than its ability to provide. Or maybe it’s that I’ve mapped out the way to find the music that I need too thoroughly, which leaves me with less time for anticipation, lessening the impact of the payoff. Or maybe I spend too much time looking at the map and still haven't figured out how let the music tell me if I like it.

Unless I'm trying to get to grips with a new genre, I don't really sort for acclaim anymore—I've become way too comfortable with how I feel about 311 for that—but I think I'm creating sub-canons of affect. Here is a collection of records that are new to me but that make me feel like I’m a teenager in 1997 again. Here is a long list of records that are the only thing worth listening to when I'm trying to write an academic paper. Here is the kind of music that makes me feel spooky. These canons then shift up or down in esteem for me depending on how I feel, how well-rested I am, how I’m dressed, how close to Halloween it is. 

Older music, things I fell in love with just because it sounded great and touched me deeply, tends to get stuck in the gears of this complicated apparatus. I’m in my car in the morning and I’m sleepy, so I think I need the commute music; I put on the commute music; the commute music sounds terrible; I cycle through the commute canon hoping something will take; nothing in the commute canon takes. Therefore nothing really feels right. I make my way up the 710 freeway in perpetual shuffle, cursing my perceived inability to stay with a record the whole way, half-enjoying the song I just asked Siri to put on and feeling bad that I “had to regress” to, like, “A Milli” just to get to work. And so on.

When I am in motion and when I am still, when I am in explore mode and when I’m trying to dig myself out of some hole, I want whatever record I put on to be exactly the right thing for the moment, which is something I assume I will know in the moment. But I have been listening to music and trying to understand myself for a long time now, and it's very rare that I'm able to pin a moment down with a meaning that sticks. Moods shift rapidly; moments are undefinable by nature; we can't really know ourselves until the moment has passed; we can't know the moment until the moment has passed. When everything is discordant, the best we can do in the present is to listen. Discordance doesn't always have to be uncomfortable. Your body can be tuned to noise.