Book 61 - Ben Ratliff "Every Song Ever"
Ben Ratliff "Every Song Ever" (Penguin)
What an exasperating annoying book! Don't get me wrong. Ratliff knows pretty much everything there is to know about music. And apparently, he spends all day and night listening to it because there is nothing, and I mean that literally, that he seems to have not listened to it. A typical paragraph might mention Beethoven, death metal, and gangster rap. And it is that kind of know-it-all attitude. This smugness shines through almost every paragraph of this collection of essays about various aspects of music, such as virtuosity or loudness. In each case, Ratliff rambles through a mind-boggling series of examples of what he is talking about and tries to make some sort of a point. What type of point is difficult to say in some cases, because his style of writing is so overdone, so full of obscure words and even vaguer ideas (maybe not to him) that it makes you want to throw the book up against the wall. Nevertheless, you will probably persist, because amidst all the verbosity, there is the opportunity to discover some gems, such as Faure's Piano Quintets, or Mark E. Smith and the Fall, or the incredible guitarist Paco de Lucia.
This book's biggest failure is to live up to its title. There is an incredible cornucopia of great stuff on streaming services, YouTube, and other places. Ratliff doesn't provide any reasonable help to an intelligent listener in knowing where to start or how to prioritize. Instead, he does a lifetime, frequently incomprehensible brain dump. Someone should have taken an editor's pen or maybe an axe to this one.
What an exasperating annoying book! Don't get me wrong. Ratliff knows pretty much everything there is to know about music. And apparently, he spends all day and night listening to it because there is nothing, and I mean that literally, that he seems to have not listened to it. A typical paragraph might mention Beethoven, death metal, and gangster rap. And it is that kind of know-it-all attitude. This smugness shines through almost every paragraph of this collection of essays about various aspects of music, such as virtuosity or loudness. In each case, Ratliff rambles through a mind-boggling series of examples of what he is talking about and tries to make some sort of a point. What type of point is difficult to say in some cases, because his style of writing is so overdone, so full of obscure words and even vaguer ideas (maybe not to him) that it makes you want to throw the book up against the wall. Nevertheless, you will probably persist, because amidst all the verbosity, there is the opportunity to discover some gems, such as Faure's Piano Quintets, or Mark E. Smith and the Fall, or the incredible guitarist Paco de Lucia.
This book's biggest failure is to live up to its title. There is an incredible cornucopia of great stuff on streaming services, YouTube, and other places. Ratliff doesn't provide any reasonable help to an intelligent listener in knowing where to start or how to prioritize. Instead, he does a lifetime, frequently incomprehensible brain dump. Someone should have taken an editor's pen or maybe an axe to this one.