Though human beings now have instant access to an endless amount of music in every style imaginable, it can often feel like streaming services are hell bent on narrowing our perspective instead of expanding it. Whether their recommendations come from algorithms or actual people, the results merely flatter our tastes, leading us to what Ben Ratliff calls “bottomless comfort zones” in his new book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty. For Ratliff, who has written about pop and jazz for the New York Times for the last two decades, this is a serious problem. But he’s got some ideas on how to solve it.

Every Song Ever is made up of 20 essays that break things down not by genre but by sound, making unlikely musical connections and encouraging listeners to think about what they’re hearing with fresh ears. A chapter on the utility of speed in music connects the dots between jazz pianist Bud Powell, 19th-century classical composer Franz Liszt, and OutKast, explaining that fleetness is “best heard as an expression of joy, and best played when it seems to have no practical purpose.” When Ratliff writes about slowness, he offers more than a playlist full of drone metal or slowcore by illuminating how the music of (supposedly) unrelated artists including Marvin Gaye, Dmitri Shostakovich, Robert Johnson, and DJ Screw uses crawling tempos to “take life in thoroughly, without missing the details.”

Since most of Every Song Ever is based on observations of sound rather than cultural context or artist biography, the book can feel heady and philosophical. But Ratliff continually brings things down to Earth, thanks in part to his inclusive spirit and his masterful way of translating music through words. This exquisite language serves as a guide, revealing new ways to look at old favorites and spurring on explorations into songs unknown.

Pitchfork: When it comes to navigating streaming services, it seems like there’s a battle between algorithms and human curation going on right now. But this book seems to disregard both of those as generally unhelpful while offering a third way based on sound.

Ben Ratliff: This is the moment when we should be thinking about this in the big picture, because if you really like one of these streaming services you may be using it for the rest of your life, and it’s going to be the primary way you hear anything new. You’re going to come to depend on it—that’s the business model. But since we have so much individual agency, I wanted to write about what forms that agency can take: What does it mean to really appreciate listening widely such that you have to reorient yourself with each song? When I’m able to listen that way, it feels really creative and expands my sense of being. It feels healthy. But when I listen along the comfortable contours of what I know and who I’ve been, I don’t learn anything. I don’t grow. So, since we can grow, why not try?

I recognize how brilliant some of the music data people are. My experiences with Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists can be so shockingly personal, and you think, “Wow, they really got me.” But they’ve got you according to a reductive—albeit clever—profile of who they think you are.

Pitchfork: Was there a recent Spotify recommendation that struck you in that way?

BR: Yeah. Life Without Buildings’ “The Leanover.” I had no idea what it was, but I really liked it. It connected with some things that I like about music—a certain kind of wordiness, density, or an unexpected way of singing—but I thought, Where did that come from?

Pitchfork: But you didn’t feel satisfied that they got it right?

BR: Not really. It just felt like a safe, cool choice to throw at me because they know that I sometimes like to listen to little-known records and post-punk. I listen to Bach and music from that time period as much as anything else through Spotify, but they never give me anything like that. And the only jazz they throw in is somehow related to rock, dance, or electronic. I wonder about that. There is some coolness profile that’s at work here; they want us to feel cool. And I suppose that’s great. But I feel sized-up and reduced a little bit.

Pitchfork: Do you think the general music fan wants to actively seek out the kinds of genre-spanning, sound-based connections you make in the book?

BR: I don’t know what they want. If I did, I would be a streaming service. All I can do is write about how encountering music that you don’t really know very well and understanding that it too is about you can be a powerful feeling. It’s a good solution to this situation of having it all available to us. The idea that hums in the background of the book is how I don’t think genre is that important anymore. Lately, I’ve come to understand that there is a difference between genre and tradition in music. I like tradition a lot—it is inherently about growth and moving through time. But genre is a static idea. Genre is for merchants and spectators; tradition is for involved listeners and musicians.

I don’t want to be a specialist. I want to be able to write about music in the larger sense, even getting to the point of asking questions like, “Why do we even make music in the first place?” For me, it’s really thrilling to see to Slayer and Nick Drake, or Shostakovich and DJ Screw, dealt with by the same yardstick. I feel like these people are generally kept apart for a reason, which has to do with sizing listeners up and selling to them. And as long as listening is served up to you by external forces based on notions of genre or other reductive categories, we have a problem. But it doesn’t always need to be that way.

It’s possible that streaming services will take up this problem and try to deliver real surprise as opposed to slight variations on what you already know. But that seems like a hard task. It’s probably best achieved individually, by your own will and desire to grow as a listener.

Pitchfork: One of the main questions you ask at the beginning of the book is: “How can we listen to music with purpose?” Which made me wonder, do you think having access to an overwhelming amount of music ultimately encourages or rejects musical engagement at large?

BR: I don’t think the current situation makes people listen to an individual song with less intensity. For instance, when the Rihanna record [Anti] came out, a few of the first commentators said, “Meh, this all over the place,” and then you heard people saying, “This is great.” And clearly they were talking from a position of deep engagement; it didn’t matter how they heard it. You can listen deeply and authentically to a given piece of music by holding your phone up to your head or even hearing it in passing on the street. So it’s not like we’re listening with less intensity to any piece of music. What I mean about listening with purpose is following trails that might lead us to magical places that we haven’t noticed before.

Pitchfork: Do you think all the ancillary pomp and circumstance around recent albums by Rihanna or Kanye is distracting people from the act of listening to the music?

BR: I don’t know about that. With both Rihanna and Kanye, the way they released their albums both felt like authentic manifestations of who they are: the off-handed Rihanna thing versus the all-over-the-place, disruptive Kanye thing. And that affects how you listen. In the book, I try to approach everything by describing music mostly as sound. There are a lot of other considerations that are important about music, but I’m basically dealing with sound.

Pitchfork: That idea of sound-first criticism seems like a subtly radical strategy at this point, because a lot of music writing nowadays often puts surrounding cultural factors first. As a music critic, I sometimes feel intimidated writing strictly about sound because there aren’t as many things to grab onto.

BR: But in a way it’s easier, because it’s just you and the sound, and you’re going to interact with that sound in a certain way. That’s your story, and nobody else is going to take that away from you. As a writer, you want to have some original position, and, for me, the way in is usually through the ears. I don’t look at description as a duty. At its best, it’s almost a ritual—you can make the essence of this thing rise up out of the writing. It’s a really old strategy that goes back to what the Greeks called Ekphrasis, which is this idea that if you describe something really deeply, the thing magically appears. That’s what I’m trying to pursue.

Pitchfork: Do you think that idea of outside culture acting as a main point of contact for music writers is more prevalent now than it was before?

BR: [Music critic] Greg Tate was just telling me that when he started writing for the Village Voice in the early ’80s, writers really loved the challenge of writing about an album without addressing the music at all. It was a Lester Bangs thing to do, to a certain extent, a wild stunt. And it was subversive because it was going against some stuffy obligations to describe certain things about a record. So I don’t think it’s that new. But I do think the fact that I’ve written about jazz a lot probably has something to do with wanting to really bear down on the music itself first. But it’s not an either/or thing—the culture that creates a piece of music is really important and should be dealt with. I just think there is a lot of information right there in the music that shouldn’t be ignored.

Originally posted on PITCHFORK.COM