Every Song Ever is a brilliant guide to listening to music in this new environment, where concentration must become aware of itself as its criteria shift abruptly from genre to genre, composer to composer, culture to culture. Ratliff proposes a 'language' that will allow such lateral moves between unlike compositions ... Every Song Ever is made possible by the world it describes. Nobody could have drawn these lines before free, or cheap, streaming; and once you’ve read about them in Ratliff’s book, you can listen (a playlist is appended helpfully to every chapter). If you upload the playlist to Spotify and choose the right settings, the playlist will grow while you sleep, as other users add their own fast, slow, repetitive, loud, or silent songs.
In Every Song Ever, Ratliff offers readers and listeners 20 different 'ways to listen' that amount to a dizzying tour through musicology, social science, personal reflections, and descriptive prose. Enjoying the book is less a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Ratliff’s conclusions, as engaging with his ambitious approach toward music appreciation and coming to one’s own judgments.
In concept, Every Song Ever can’t help but evoke the stereotype of the High Fidelity record-store clerk enamored with the obscure yet conversant in the popular, and prone to over-the-top displays of his expertise. Each chapter comes with a playlist, many of which might seem like parodies of eclecticism ... Yet Ratliff plumbs his mental library not to show off but to show how you, too, can be this omnivorous. He wants to offer all readers a way to appreciate, even love, songs that no right-functioning recommendation engine would ever put in their earbuds.
It’s [the] occasional glimpses into Ratliff’s own idiosyncratic responses to music that are the book’s best moments ... The book meanders and muses, providing plenty of space for readers to wonder about their own fixations, to remain ambivalent about questions of genre or history and abide by their own deeply personal and far superior classification systems instead. It’s best to think of Every Song Ever as a series of moods and provocations rather than a book to be read straight through.
If Every Song Ever has an overarching theme, it is an injunction to open your ears! Music, or a component of music like repetition or pitch, is around us all the time, even 'the distinct blasts of the commuter train whistle down by the river.' In his smart, provocative introduction Ratliff reminds us that we live in a different musical universe now, at least as regards the multitude of digital delivery systems and platforms along with the fact that 'every song ever' is downloadable: total access around the clock.
In 20 beautifully rendered essays on subjects like repetition, slowness, speed, sadness, virtuosity, improvisation, loudness, and intimacy, Ratliff establishes provocative and thoroughly unexpected connections between genres of music that the average listener – or even the sophisticated one – would not have perceived.
Mr. Ratliff leans toward nontechnical terms and unshowy language, which he then nudges toward the profound or revealing. Sometimes that works brilliantly. Other times, the effect falls somewhere between cute and clever ... A larger problem with Every Song Ever is that its premise starts to fade from view — starts to seem like a pretext, in fact, for a fragmented miscellany of meditations on music that Mr. Ratliff likes.
Each chapter ends with a playlist of the music he discusses as evidence for his ideas. Given the easy availability of all of these, the reader is able to immediately listen to everything that has been discussed, allowing one to actually hear the ideas as he frames them. This multimedia aspect of Every Song Ever creates an added dynamic to the text, exposing one to a wider soundscape.
Sometimes he seems to want to use the book as a pretext for gathering up every piece of music he has ever loved and finding a theory to make collective sense of it all. Occasionally losing himself in his own reveries, he can lapse into the bafflingly obvious. More often, as in his description of Eric Dolphy’s alto saxophone improvisation on Charles Mingus’s version of 'Stormy Weather', his deep listening can produce passages of sensitivity and precision.
Ratliff’s encyclopedic references might overwhelm even well-listened fans, but one quickly adapts to his method of exploration within the book. Through 20 listening-focused essays, Ratliff rarely addresses genre, historical context or even the character of the musicians. Instead, he explores themes like speed, repetition, improvisation and closeness, allowing him to jump between decades of recorded history with quick-fire examples.
