Reading this book will change the way you listen. I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.
What a strong opening! I picked this one up from the library. It turned out to be a rather engaging read. The sort of thing that I can easily read fifty page of without noticing. At the end of the introduction, Michel Faber notes that he’d been wanting to write this book for his whole life. It shows.
I must come clean and admit that this book is for me. Music is my oldest love, and Listen is the book I’ve wanted to write all my life.
Throughout the book, Michel has a pleasant sense of humour. He notes that he watched the music video of Madame Rêve at two in the morning, and then has a footnote to say: “Probably. I’ve not kept diligent records of the exact times I watched music videos thirty years ago.”
Michel cites a lot of YouTube videos. He goes in depth on the analysis of comments, and quotes many many commenters. Initially, this felt a little bit low-brow or trashy. But then, it grew on me. This is a guy writing about his journey through music, and YouTube has a tonne of music. It felt like getting a personal tour of his listening, in just the same way that me and my friends share music.
There were a lot of notable passages.
Here is a pair of passages inspired by watching a sing-along group for little kids. The parents were put at ease, and didn’t mind singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star because there were a bunch of kids around.
I’ve noticed that all sorts of social anxieties are soothed or surpressed when there are little kids in the room.
Allow young kids to be present at political debates, academic lectures, literary awards, and in TV newsrooms, business conferences, fashion parties, war strategy headquarters – any context where illustions myst be rigoroushl maintained and nercours people are under pressure to deny and disguise their humanity. I have a hunch that many of those occasions would turn out much better all around if a child was free to interject “That’s my daddy!” or “Are you ticklish?” or “I done poo!”
Another nice quote about music and kids, this one from a chapter about people’s mistaken views that vinyl is superior or more natural.
You want truly “natural” music-making? Sing lullabies to your children or go to evensong at your local church.
On another note about children, this time in the context of women being especially ashamed about singing “incorrectly”.
If it’s true — as many anthropologists surmise — that the earliest examples of human singing were lullabies sung to infants, it’s especially sad that women in our competitive, performance-oriented cultures are so often ashamed of the musical noises they make. It would be a wicked irony indeed if the people who felt disqualified from breaking into song were those who invented singing in the first place.
Or this one after a discussion of the effect of music to bring people back from strokes.
Speech is a pushover, but the music in us is damn near impossible to kill.
My favourite section of the book, The Kind of Things That Hegemony Just Can’t Buy, concerns the absolute domination of popular music by anglophone bands and the separate issue of the close-mindedness of the Anglosphere to popular music in languages other than English. This chapter really opened my eyes to issues that I didn’t even know existed. These issues are close my heart as an Esperantist and an internationalist.
This linguistic disadvantage [monolingualism], which stops me from speaking authoritatively about bands whose names I often can’t even pronounce, may be one of the reasons why Anglo folks who profess to love all kinds of music so seldom bother to investigate outside the Anglosphere.
But just think: this is the same hurdle that faces the Hungarian who is curious about Bowie, or the Greek who likes the sound of Public Enemy. And their response? They learn a bit of English — enough, at least, to enthuse about what they’ve found.
A nice quote from Louisa Young:
All these membranes [between genres] are semipermeable, even though things don’t pass through them equally both ways, or at the same time, or same speed, or with the same effect. Music is a soup, not a filing system.
At one point, Faber prods you to listen to Richard Dawson’s Jogging. He doggedly goes at it for several pages. Asking questions like: “Why haven’t you listened to it yet?” And, eventually, I listened to it. It didn’t really land for me, but I liked the insistence of the ask. The repetition and prodding was a neat rhetorical move.
Michel only cries to this version of A Proper Sort of Gardner by June Tabor. The lyrics are astounding.
Once upon a time I found a garden,
Picked the brightest things that I could see;
An apron full of Mr Harding’s flowers,
I didn’t know that he was watching me.
Straight away my mother ran to tell him
Wondering what he would say or do.
Mr Harding smiled and said, “She’s just a little child;
I knew that she’d be picking them for you.”By the fire dad would tell me stories.
One of them concerned a garden too,
Where the lion and the lamb lay down together
And every lovely fruit and flower grew.
The gardener sent his children in to play there,
Rejoicing in the brightness of the day,
But when they went exploring and took a fruit to taste
He cursed them both and sent them on their way.Even then I realised in my childish mind
That he wasn’t a proper gardener of the Mr Harding kind.Mr Harding’s garden was all taken
By lesser men with concrete in their minds.
Factory chimneys grew instead of daisies,
No butterflies from that assembly line.
My mother faded faster than a flower,
Dad sat in the darkness and cried.
Mr Harding moves a little slower than before,
But still he tends the grave where they both lie.Wherever it is they’ve gone to I hope that they will find
A proper sort of garden of the Mr Harding kind.The foolish woman sometimes feels despairing
And thinks it seems so very hard to find.
The child tries to plant a little everywhere she goes
That special love of the Mr Harding kind.Someday when I’m older maybe I will find
That I’ve grown into a gardener of the Mr Harding kind.\
Another chapter that I really enjoyed was According to Whom? about the coverage of female musicians on Wikipedia. I hadn’t realized how skewed the editor demographics of Wikipedia are in favour of men in their twenties and retirement. He ends this chapter with a nice note about how he hopes this will all get better:
All I will say is that I hope that by the time Listen falls out of print, much of what I’ve said in this chapter will be obsolete, superseded, a relic of a bygone era.
And the book ends on a very liberating and empowering note.
Be kind, try to treat your loved ones right, notice the moon sometimes, be grateful for the gift of incarnation.
The final words are great.
You are a born appreciator. Live with it. Appreciate.
This review was written at De Mello Coffee.
Thanks for the great cold drink, De Mello!
Published: Jun 26, 2024
Last Modified: Jul 13, 2024
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