Run the Song
Writing About Running About Listening
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory exploration of the relationship between music and running by one of our foremost music writers
Out the front door, across the street, down the hill, and into Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This is how Ben Ratliff’s runs started most days of the week for about a decade. Sometimes listening to music, not always. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, he began taking notes about what he listened to. He wondered if a body in motion, his body, was helping him to listen better to the motion in music.
He runs through the woods, along the Hudson River, and into the lowlands of the Bronx. He encounters newly erected fences for an intended FEMA field hospital, and demonstrations against racial violence. His runs, and the notes that result from them, vary in length just as the songs he listens to do: seventies soul, jazz, hardcore punk, string quartets, Éliane Radigue’s slow-change electronics, Carnatic singing, DJ sets, piano music of all kinds, Sade, Fred Astaire, and Ice Spice.
Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he’s listening to—let’s run it, he’ll say. And with that, the reader in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this humdrum collection, New York Times jazz critic Ratliff (Every Song Ever) meditates on listening to music while on his jogs around Van Cortlandt Park near his home in the Bronx. One entry recounts how listening to Charlie Parker's committed if imperfect performance on "Lover Man," recorded while the saxophonist was going through heroin withdrawal, steeled Ratliff's resolve to keep running while recovering from a foot injury, and another compares his winding route through the neighborhood of Kingsbridge to the "circular" movements of composer Sofia Gubaidulina's first string quartet. The author offers plenty of astute observations on an eclectic variety of musicians, but his conclusions are largely uninteresting. For instance, Ratliff suggests that post-punk band Dry Cleaning's practice of making front woman Florence Shaw's whispered vocals unnaturally loud in the mix above the raucous instrumentals creates the impression of an artificial, impossible "space," only for him to opine that he finds the effect unpleasantly incongruous while running. Other claims feel nebulous, as when he contends that running while listening helps him "engage with the music's forward patterns" and "discern the way music operates in space and time." These meandering musings struggle to find the beat.
