With His New Book ‘Run the Song,’ Ben Ratliff Searches for an Eternal Music

Takahashi Kuzan’s Take No Hibiki is not your typical running music. There’s no discernible tempo or arc. It’s quiet. And it’s exceedingly spare. The album features Kuzan—a master of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute made of bamboo—playing his instrument with slow, painstaking intention. Each trembling note lingers, expressing tenacity and frailty; Kuzan was likely in his 80s when he recorded the album. The music seems more suited to soundtrack a cleansing sound bath than a 10K run.

For Ben Ratliff, whose new book Run the Song reimagines our relationship between running and listening, that’s the whole point. “Music is so much about the breath as the thing that animates or extinguishes a body, and that’s relevant to running,” he tells me, talking about how the sound of Kuzan breathing into the flute pushed him to charge up hills during his regular morning runs in and around the Bronx. “As I run, I’m listening for life force, and I definitely find it there.”

Now in his mid-50s and a professor at New York University, Ratliff has made a full career out of that search for musical vitality. He grew up on hardcore punk before becoming an authority in the world of jazz, publishing a guide to the genre (which I have personally referred to countless times) in 2002. Between 1996 and 2016, he was a music critic at The New York Times, where he covered everything from ZZ Top to Lady Gaga to jazz pianist Jason Moran. His expertise is dauntingly wide and deep, though his writing is always welcoming, never aloof. With his 2017 book Every Song Ever, Ratliff combated the ways streaming algorithms prohibit our curiosity by merely serving us more of what we already like; it presented a path to opening up our ears to find the less obvious, but more rewarding, connections between the loudness of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Little Richard, or the speed of Bud Powell and Outkast.

Run the Song is imbued with a similar spirit as it breaks down the music of everyone from Beethoven to Sade to Ice Spice to the DJ and producer Theo Parrish, and how such sounds fit into Ratliff’s regular practice of running. Unlike almost every other book about running, this one doesn’t offer tips to perfect your stride or break personal records. (“I can’t stand runner’s magazines,” Ratliff writes.) Its aims are more meaningful than that, more philosophical. “Here is the runner I propose: enthusiastic but with no claim to expertise,” he offers early in the book. “If there is a way to run nearly every day without being an athlete, I’m going to find it.” Listening is intrinsic to that quest.

At its core, Run the Song is a brilliant example of the power—and necessity—of music criticism, coming at a time when the form feels especially endangered. One of Ratliff’s superpowers as a writer is his way with description of sound and style. To pick one example out of hundreds, here’s Ratliff on the way jazz drummer Ed Blackwell used his cymbals: “there but almost not there, his hi-hat swing on the two and four, his unforced maintenance on the ride cymbal, as if he were watering it, maybe while looking the other way.” Even if you’ve never heard of Blackwell, that image of casual mastery still cuts through.

There’s also an ethical framework embedded in the book, one that moves beyond the trappings of hyper-consumerism and derides the way technology attempts to extinguish our humanity. On Alice Coltrane, he writes, “All her music carries a drift not of commerce or entertainment but of daily practice.” For Ratliff, this is the highest of compliments. In our conversation below, the writer talks about how Run the Song came to be, how his listening habits have changed over the years, and his ongoing quest for musical endlessness.  

Did you start thinking about this book during the pandemic?

Ben Ratliff: Yeah. I already had running as a practice, but when we all became isolated, and our joys in life became so slender, I started running a lot more. It was then that I realized: Oh, I can actually pay attention to music that I’m listening to instead of just using it as something to take my mind off the boringness of running, or something to set a pace. I don’t have to use it as a tool. I can actually use the running to listen better. It was such a simple realization. 

I was just thinking the other day about how kids go to bed and have these really wild wishes for something that might happen during the night, like they’ll grow several inches. As somebody who writes about music, I often have a fantasy that I will be able to listen better, like something will switch, and all of a sudden I’ll have this new power in an area that really matters to me. So it sort of was like that—I started thinking about getting close to the music itself in the running, either right alongside it, or even kind of becoming it. I didn’t really understand it, so I figured the only thing to do was to start writing about it.

Do you think of this kind of listening as a teachable skill?

I’m reluctant to do that, but there’s a couple of ways in which it could be helpful for some people. Even though lots of people like to dance to music, the relationship between making music and the body is still a little bit under-analyzed. And in terms of writing, most writers are 70 percent brain and 30 percent body, and I found that doing this really helped me to become aware of my physical body and even to think about sentences while running. 

I think about music as ritual. I think about my daily running as a ritual. And I often think about writing about music, particularly description, as a kind of ritual. And the more ritual-ish it can feel, the better it will be. By ritual, I just mean an activity that one does not necessarily for any material gain or for a fixed outcome, but for reasons beyond what the eye can see, and for reasons that one has faith in. For me, describing is an act of ritual, which somehow acts in response to the ritual that’s taking place in the music. It all connects.

But I’m a little wary of the book being a guide for how to listen, just because everybody does it their own way. I don’t want to think about running or listening or writing this book as a means to an end—that idea holds a lot of significance for me, especially now, at this stage of life.

Have you always felt that way, as far as listening or music not being a means to an end?

No. In my 20s, I was interested in the idea of albums, documents, record collections, taste. And then I kind of got over it. And also, what do you do with the fact that thousands of records are coming your way every year? Do you keep them? What is your relationship with all that stuff? Does your head become a giant library? Do you essentially become interested in categorizing documents, or do you start to have a larger idea of music that exceeds the documents? That’s finally where I started going. I thought a lot about the idea of an endless music, an eternal music, music that never stops. I do my best to think about endlessness as an ideal.

With music, there’s always something you want to know better. And because music is so connected to identity, when you finally do hear something new to you and come to grips with it, then you become a person who knows about that music. It’s like a new description of yourself. I’ve always been excited by that. It’s the promise of actually being able to change.

While writing this book, I started getting into listening to troves. The Jimi Hendrix Fillmore East box set is more than five hours long, and you can live in it. You can hear four or five different versions of “Machine Gun,” and they’re different in micro and macro ways. It resists being a defined, brokered, negotiated thing. That song is like a gesture that you can put a lot into. And I was trying to think about running that way too: I don’t want it to be the same thing every day and I don’t want to be doing it for the same reason every day. I want it to be infinitely changeable.

When you talk about musical endlessness and changeability, it makes me think of jam bands—though none of them are mentioned in the book.

No.

What do you think of them in general?

I don’t really listen to jam bands, and I don’t think about them much. They’re just a very poor derivative of something that comes from West Africa. [laughs] I like the premise, but usually I don’t like them aesthetically. The closest I came to listening to something like that during these years that I was writing about was the Miles Davis live stuff from the early ’70s. I had some really great experiences running with that. 

More and more I’m really scared of running when it’s icy. Parts of the Van Cortlandt Park woods are not very easy to plow or clean up, so I’m taking a risk when I go run there in the winter. There was one time I went running through the woods on a day when I could have really hurt myself, and I was listening to one of those Miles Davis records. It was a live performance of pieces that assume the form of a suite, and it was such an intense experience—so vivid and dangerous, and I was paying minute attention to everywhere I was going to make sure my feet didn’t land in the wrong places. When I got home I looked at the title of those suites, and one of them was called “Foot Fooler,” and I thought, Wow, that’s amazing.

There’s a great line in the book where you’re writing about these ideas of endlessness and ritual: “The acknowledgement of my ongoingness should be unlocked and inefficient—lest it turn, somehow, into an optimizing force, or worse yet, an acknowledgement of my uniqueness.” I found it funny, just because it’s such an un-American idea to not want to acknowledge what sets you apart.

The ethos of my family was kind of like, How embarrassing it is to be around somebody who is really fucking stoked on how special they are. So maybe I was thinking about that. But maybe it had to do with the idea of uniqueness in the consumer sense. Streaming services, among many other commercial entities, want to tempt us with this idea that we are actually unique, and only they understand our uniqueness, and that’s why we will subscribe to their service until we die. The more you focus on a goal, the more you are focusing on an ideal you, which often means a sellable you.

In the book, you make a point of writing about music without leaning on an artist’s narrative or biography, and so many of your descriptions and analogies are just amazing. This one about Thelonious Monk really struck me: “Many of his songs, and certainly his solos, reduce to a basic unit of functionality, like a three-legged stool, but painted in colors that shout across the room.” How do you zero in on a description like that?

I’m looking for an idea that doesn’t bore me, or that even makes me wonder, What do I mean by that? The older you get as a writer, the more sensitive you get to cliche and you begin to, in fact, feel revolted by them. So it’s a little bit of just staying away from what’s revolting.

There’s also a certain kind of dry description of music that I don’t like, where you’re describing something in genre terms, or you’re using safe adjectives. I’m sure that that line about Monk came to me while I was running, because the things that occur to you when you’re in motion are like dream images.

Do you ever stop running to write something down?

No. I do talk to myself a fair amount while running, and I only remember something by saying it over and over. Because it’s terrible to forget something great.

You currently teach classes about writing and listening at NYU, and in the book you note that students “often talk about music as insulation from the world, rather than talk about music as a world in itself.” Do you feel like that’s different from how your generation listened when they were younger?

This is all anecdotal and not conclusive, but as a teacher I’ve noticed a couple of shifts in the ways people listen over the last 10 years. There’s a lot more people who have their headphones on at all times, which creates a very deep relationship with whatever it is that you listen to, but it also makes music the buffer, the protector. And there’s this thing of listening to the same song over and over—hundreds of times, sometimes—that makes music connected to forms of compulsion. There’s always been obsessions, but it could be that the obsessions have become a bit narrower. The idea of exploring one’s own anxiety and neuroses and illness has become much more of a part of life too, and maybe a relationship with music goes along with that.

Do you think music has become an extension of those anxieties or a remedy for them?

It could go either way. I’m worried about the using of headphones to keep out the world, or to be safe. The other stuff doesn’t worry me. It’s just the way things are going.

Could you also say that listening to an eight-CD box set…

[laughs] That there’s a little obsession there?

Maybe a little!

I’m really interested in the ways students listen these days. There’s another thing too, this sense of not wanting to listen to something that’s going to make you feel anxiety; anxiety is the enemy, because it’s always there, so do what you can to lessen it. I notice a real unwillingness in students to encounter or to stay with music that seems like it might provoke anxiety. I really feel for them, because there’s a lot to be anxious about. But I think I want to be detonated in that way myself. I want to encounter something that messes with my defenses or scrambles my coordinates.

The other day I went running with a bootleg of a Sonic Youth show at the Smart Bar in Chicago from 1985 that I’d never listened to before. It reminded me of the first time I saw Sonic Youth, which was around 1983, and it was a really memorable night, because I didn’t have any vocabulary for what they were doing. It really shook me up. I’ve had very few experiences like that, where it’s like, There may not be anything else in the world like this. Those experiences probably shouldn’t happen every day, but I’d like to have more of that.

That leads me to another idea that you talk about in the book: nostalgia. You write, “If I listen to honor the past, my conscience warns me, I might stay there and never return.” When it comes to listening to new music, once people hit a certain age, they often revert to what they’re comfortable with. But by covering so many different styles from different eras and different parts of the world in your writing, you’re suggesting that people can keep discovering as they get older, and that they don’t have to keep going back to what they know. It’s that endlessness idea again.

Having an intense interest in a record from 1961 doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re fetishizing the past. Maybe you’re considering the past as present, or maybe you’re just listening deeply. Good music critics don’t fetishize the past, period. That’s all there is to it. You keep moving and you always know that the kids are usually correct. Sometimes they’re not, but usually they are, and you’re going to be more and more wrong in your assumptions. As long as you understand that, I don’t think there’s any particular danger in going and listening again to something that you know and like, either from the past or your past, especially if you’re wanting to find something new in it for yourself.

To me, one of the most moving parts of the book is when you write about the perseverance of journeyman jazz pianist Mal Waldron, who wasn’t the flashiest player but always got the job done. While writing about him, you say, “This is a time to be thinking about the long game and to look back at those who practiced the long game well.” Why do you feel like it’s so important to think about the long game right now?

Trump—I’m saying that word as shorthand for how every day there’s 10 new outrages that could really send you going in loops and make you despair. The only good response I can come up with is long-term thinking and knowing that today is just today. You have to keep imagining five years from now, 10 years from now. You have to keep imagining a future. That’s the challenge so many of us are facing: How to imagine the future. And ongoingness. It doesn’t have to be heroic. It doesn’t have to have an attractive storyline. You just keep moving and imagine that you are a person who will keep moving. It’s a way to make things feel better.