Listening the Right way

[twentysixdollars]

Having read through Ian G's typically chest-pounding plaint (and runaway's hilarious misuse of the quote function in response) in the Trading, Polling thread, a question struck me as worth asking.

Ian essentially excoriated me (and anyone else who has seen fit to dismiss Amazing Grace) for listening to the record 'wrong', or, at least ,in the 'wrong' way. (Which, I assume, has something to do with my habit of wrapping my headphones round my buttocks, or someone else's). And this begs the question: Is there a Right way to listen to music? Is there a wrong one?

Afficionados generally say that 'difficult' music has to be listened to over and over till it 'settles in' and its full brilliance can be revealed, if it's there. But I've found that listening to just about anything enough times can lead to at least a degree of enjoyment or involvement. So that puts the lie to the 'play twice before listening' dogma. There's also those that argue that music is best appreciated in the dark, alone, without distractions: and yet I've always found this frightfully boring, and, regardless, most popular music is made with an eye to a certain environment - be it a boudoir or a buddhist temple. Therefore the second approach is mooted. There's yet a third camp that says that headphones kill immersion and atmosphere and that speakers are the way to go: but it takes very expensive speaker set-ups to reproduce the clarity and illusion of depth of even cheap portable headsets. So we'll call that approach impractical if not necessarily nonsensical.

Music, in its least romantic form, essentially relies on the careful establishment and deviation from patterns to retain interest. Since the functional human brain is if anything a pattern recognition device, isn't it likely that the 'complexity' of 'difficult' improvised music is of our own creation or attribution? I used to hate Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear but lately (in the past few years, that is) I've been playing it endlessly. Had I been listening to it 'wrong' in my youth, or did years of trying to understand it somehow give birth to appreciation?

[runaway]

I think the "right way" to listen to music is different for every individual.
For me, personally, it can be in the car, in front of the 'pooter or (before I had kids) poised in front of my foo foo sound system in the quiet of my living room.
I think the "settling in" factor is worth discussing. Often times if I like something straight away (the Vines, the Hives, the Strokes, the White Stripes) then the music doesn't have much staying power and I've forgotten about it in a month or so (see aforementioned bands). Of course this isn't always the case; sometimes I like something and I continue to like it and even love it in the years to come (Suicide, Stooges, Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy). On the other hand, some music takes time for me to absorb and fully appreciate. I remember listening to the Orb's U.F.O.R.B when it first came out, I thought it was complete crap. Luckily I gave it another chance or two and have gleefully purchased every subsequent release.
I will say that I was smitten, if not completely overwhelmed, from the first moment that the needle hit the vinyl of my copy of Playing With Fire.......

[david109]

Now here's an intriguing topic. No ... there WAS an intriguing topic, now here's a slew of thought after a shite day.

I can remember reading an interview with Jason from America in 1998, in which the interviewer tried asking Jason if there was a particular 'mindset' he got into when he listened to music, and in short, what, if anything, he had to 'do' to enjoy music. (In fact, I'm wondering if this was the interview $26 once mentioned he took with Jason in his days as an arts hack, if only because there's a painfully turgid diversion into a muso-discussion on the latest ups and downs in the Chicago harmonica scene --- Oh only joking old boy, just ensuring that I get a reply .) Anyhoo, Jason was in diversionary form, and didn't give much of an answer as I remember, if only to say something like 'you have to just let the music come to you'.

And it’s only such a laissez faire approach that I can think of in relation to the question. There are so many variables impacting upon whether you enjoy and get off to music or not, that any single method or theory towards listening to music - such as the ones $26 briefly muses, headphones, loud, dance to it, and so on - are likely to be confounded. I find I can get back home one day and switch something on, and the hairs on the back of my neck are straight up, I flop back et al ... then another day, I get back, do the same, and I'm restless and the music does nothing. Likewise, one afternoon it might be rapture-in-the-bedroom to Aphex Twin, then by the evening, its only flipping Morrissey that gets me. WHY ME YOU FUCKERS??

Has anyone found a consistent way to get off to music? Can anyone say they can listen to the same track regularly and experience the same enjoyment each time? I'd suggest not, and it's what affects those differences in experience each time which is so curious, and probably ineffable and illusive too.

It's something that has exercised Jason n Sonic isn't it - I can remember Jason often rehearsed in interviews that a drum beat slower that your heart rate relaxes you, and a beat faster excites and stimulates you; and then going on to ponder with the interviewer what the full range of reactions music could induce in us might be, considering how much more complex the human brain is than simply an instrument of 'excitement' and 'relaxation'.

And what about the question that is the corollary to the question $26 posed? If we presume for a moment that good music is music that impresses upon you and invokes some kind of reaction or involvement, then is there such a thing as music that is essentially and necessarily 'good'? Is there a collection of music that is guaranteed to affect you like that, and on the other hand, is there some music that just can't, and is therefore necessarily 'bad'?

Can you split music up like that? If you don't like and are left cold and unimpressed by music just defined as 'good', are you listening 'wrong', e.g. all those fools who don't like Amazing Grace?? (As a quick point of fairness, Ian G didn't really suggest that back in the first place.) Or hay-ho do we just resign ourselves to thinking that we each have different tastes, and that music is 'good' for some people, and 'bad' for others, and that its all a matter of opinion? Terribly fashionable point of postmodern-view nowadays, but not really satisfactory? Any alternatives?

Or perhaps we should sack any attempt to discuss music with a scientific and cold analysis (a la $26's mention of the brain's 'pattern recognition', or, God-forbid, that bumph found on the inlay of Sp3's Dreamweapon written by La Monte Young - quick reference to it: " .... weaving the ageless quotients of the Tortoise in the tapestry of Eternal Music" ... manically throttles himself to escape all this madness ...). Instead, shouldn't we just leave it to wishy-washy prose and expression?

Bleh OK?

[natty]

I don't think there is a'right' way to listen to music. It will affect you differently in different mindsets and different settings. I wouldn't say that any one is particularly 'right'... You'll get something from it whatever, even if it's just a feeling of indifference.

[twentysixdollars]

I can remember reading an interview with Jason from America in 1998, in which the interviewer tried asking Jason if there was a particular 'mindset' he got into when he listened to music, and in short, what, if anything, he had to 'do' to enjoy music. (In fact, I'm wondering if this was the interview $26 once mentioned he took with Jason in his days as an arts hack, if only because there's a painfully turgid diversion into a muso-discussion on the latest ups and downs in the Chicago harmonica scene --- Oh only joking old boy, just ensuring that I get a reply .) Anyhoo, Jason was in diversionary form, and didn't give much of an answer as I remember, if only to say something like 'you have to just let the music come to you'.

I'll respond to the rest of your post later this evening but I thought I'd just get this out of the way first: as I have mentioned elsewhere the article I wrote either never got published or got published in a very expurgated form (I forget which) and that particular piece just ain't mine! I'll be damned if I knew anything about the "Chicago harmonica scene" either.

[runaway]

Didn't Spector use to mix-down on a really bad mono speaker, so he could hear what it would sound like in a car (in the old days).

I believe it was Raspberries producer Jimmy Ienner who did that.

[twentysixdollars]

Didn't Spector use to mix-down on a really bad mono speaker, so he could hear what it would sound like in a car (in the old days).

I believe it was Raspberries producer Jimmy Ienner who did that.

If he did, he stole the idea from Brian Wilson - or, more accurately, the Beach Boys as a whole, since they started doing this in 1963 and continued to do so well into the mid 70s. It's a technique that accounts for why Fun Fun Fun sounds so incredible on a cheap AM car radio. So Bza was pretty close.

Now as for the rest of David's post. All very interesting stuff. Most of what you mention is along the lines of what I alluded to. What constitutes a 'good' record, indeed, if most of us have never encountered one that we wanted to hear every moment of every day. I may love the Gaye album I mentioned earlier, but played after Joan Baez's second album, it seems very gauche indeed and is hard to adjust to. Of course I can't imagine having sex to Aphex Twin either, and that doubly underscores the subjectivity we've been alluding to.

For my part music has always been an on-the-headphones wandering around somewhere appropriate to the music - there is city music and suburb music and country music, and I have never been let down by my choices. Of course a hermetic music-only session - one of those "sensory deprivation" listens mentioned in my post - is usually done first to work out the best environs for whatever record is in question. I've never been a postmodernist, and I very much believe in an objective reality that we persons have glimmers of, and so I would begin to question whether listening to a record out of this 'proper' context would be enough to make it 'bad', for the listener at least, at that moment. To what extent does art have its own existence? Or is it strictly to be apprehended? I'd like to think it's the former, but the latter seems (contrary to all I've said and all I'd like to believe) the most reasonable critical approach.

[david109]

<<$26: Of course I can't imagine having sex to Aphex Twin either, and that doubly underscores the subjectivity we've been alluding to. >>

-- Oh Jesus, I didn't mean that, I meant 'rapture' in a more general sense. Can't actually imagine anything more off-putting than an Aphex Twin track twanging and drilling around in the background...

But while on the subject, how about what dear-old Muscles mentioned in the Trading/ Polling thread?

<<MUSCLES: As mind numbing and appalling as this is...I like you, try and stick by him because his MUSIC has brought me to the FIREPLACE with a tight lipped CHICK with a HOT ASS more times then i care to remember... >>

-- Has any Lothario round these parts ever managed to procure sex via spiritualized? How is it to be done? As evidence of oneself's gentle, emotional and malleable center (perhaps here you could utilise The Slide Song at the fireplace, or any gospel number, as the eyes go mistily portentous). Or maybe you could emphasise the tragic nature of yourself, the yearning that's tearing you apart and that she just can't resist (put on Things'll Never be the Same here folks, or Ladies & Gentlemen we are floating in space). Or how 'bout the I'm-a-romanticly-narcotic-mess ticket, so popular with some of the peers round here - check The 12 Steps or Medication, and make sure the said narcotics are strategically placed around the beside, perhaps close to some fancy and in-fashion lit. or music, and grease up one's hair. I.E. 'I'm burning the candle at both ends baby, but I'm still dead cool'.

Guaranteed way into her pants? 'N what about his? Or is it all foolish adolescent despair a la Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers/ by Martin Amis???

I shall investigate, and so should you

[twentysixdollars]

-- Has any Lothario round these parts ever managed to procure sex via spiritualized? I shall investigate, and so should you

I have definitely used Pure Phase on occasion, but I stopped after having kicked a number of nasty habits for fear it would put both of us to sleep (call it the steady encroachment of middle age). I used Let It Come Down as post-lovemaking material around the time it was released, which led to my anecdote about flinging someone else's underpants across the room during the Straight and the Narrow. Lazer Guided Melodies might have been used for this purpose too back in the day but memory fails me. Amazing Grace is defiantly unsexy and I don't think any of the five or six times anyone's listened to it have been in any way connected with sex.

[will this do?]

hmmm...I remember getting some fish & finger pie the day I got 'Loveless'...generally these days the only 'soundtrack' might tend to be the shipping forecast (Fisher, Dogger, German Bight slowly rising, good), Test Match Special (afternoon action - with breaks for tea and 'bad light'), or the Archer's omnibus (American readers will be scratching their heads now, no doubt)...but only if the radio alarm is out of reach.

[ORBITAL]

Yep. LGM worked a treat for me.
Top record for humpin would have to be Airs Moon Safari IMHO

[runaway]

Didn't Spector use to mix-down on a really bad mono speaker, so he could hear what it would sound like in a car (in the old days).

I believe it was Raspberries producer Jimmy Ienner who did that.

If he did, he stole the idea from Brian Wilson - or, more accurately, the Beach Boys as a whole, since they started doing this in 1963 and continued to do so well into the mid 70s. It's a technique that accounts for why Fun Fun Fun sounds so incredible on a cheap AM car radio. So Bza was pretty close.

My sources may be incorrect. I remember reading something to that effect in Trouser Press in about, oh.....1977.

As for sex and music; nobody does it for me like Cannibal Corpse

[twentysixdollars]

I'm not suggesting the Berries didn't do this, but I will say that most people agree that the technique was invented for Fun Fun Fun - to make a record impossible to not be excited by, especially in light of the Beatles' steady encroachment on the Beach Boys' market share. It was used well into the Holland period but probably abandoned thereafter, and with fits and starts wherein it wasn't used.

[ursa]

this is a cool thread.
when i think of that term"listening to it right"i think more along the lines of what are you listening for.are you lookin for a beat or some deep seated meaning?some people listen to music while wondering what thier peers will think ,and make judgements on the music that way.i will sometimes think a song isnt punk enough...then years later hear the subtle power in the backing section or whatever,and fall in love.other peoples hype can greatly affect how we listen to music,and alter our expectations.
what ya gonna do by the small faces or suns goin down by the outsiders are 2 examples for me of songs that always have the same hold on me,and i always react the same way to them.

[mbv]

hmmm...I remember getting some fish & finger pie the day I got 'Loveless'...generally these days the only 'soundtrack' might tend to be the shipping forecast (Fisher, Dogger, German Bight slowly rising, good), Test Match Special (afternoon action - with breaks for tea and 'bad light'), or the Archer's omnibus (American readers will be scratching their heads now, no doubt)...but only if the radio alarm is out of reach.

but do you listen to the shipping forecast "in the right way"? sometimes it works, sometimes it's boring... I guess it all depends on your mood. Aggers does it for me tho'.

[sly saxon]

I prefer Blowers to Aggers, if there's a choice...

[Starfish]

The Aggers/Jonners laughing fit is still the funniest piece of radio of all time, in my opinion. Had me in tears first time I heard it.

Blowers makes too many mistakes, almost with every sentence he utters. You have to watch the pictures at the same time as his commentary to find out if he's telling the truth (my dear old thing).