Music critic Ben Ratliff's book "Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening" which came out last month from Graywolf Press, is, as the title suggests, about running and listening to music. Each of the book's 39 chapters is an essay about a run near his home by Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and the critical notes on the music he listened to while he ran—why did Ice Spice switch from second to third person in the first couplet of "Munch"? How did musical history change when Elmo Hope, Arsenio Rodriguez, and Thelonious Monk moved near each other in the Southwest Bronx in the 1940s?
Even he initially questioned the validity of turning what amounts to a (deeply engaged and researched) personal diary of listening into an entire book. What made Ratliff sure about writing "Run the Song"?
"I think writers have to really trust when they become possessed with a feeling that they just have to write this thing in order to figure out something. Or at least I do, because I don't get it that often anymore," he told Hell Gate. Until 2016, Ratliff was a jazz and pop critic at the New York Times, and since he left that post, he has been teaching writing and criticism to students at NYU (including me, once). That something he was trying to figure out, he discovered, was music's "quality of motion," which running allowed him to access.
"The thing about critics is that part of their brief is to sort, categorize, label, fix within history, assess, do all those things that can be very helpful for people to understand all the moving parts of culture," Ratliff said. "But the part of music that I felt I never gave quite enough attention to, and which I, in a way, was often being discouraged from paying too much attention to, was its actual swirling insides."
But the thing about getting your whole body into it, as Ratliff does when he runs, is you can't avoid those "swirling insides." He discovered that running and listening, and really paying attention to the music—rather than just using the music "as a tool to make time pass"—allowed him to actually hear music better. "And this seemed astonishing, because what else would a music critic want more? It seemed surreal," he said.
"The reason I was hearing it better, and I had to write for a while to come to an understanding of this, was that what I really wanted to understand most about music was its quality of motion," Ratliff said. "It was easier for me to grasp the core of it: What I seek in music is a feeling of eternity, the suggestion that this song could potentially go on forever."
Ratliff learned that the moments you get a peek of the sublime, as he did through running the songs, are actually when you should stop shutting up, and start writing.
The setting of his runs played a key role, he said. Ratliff first went to Van Cortlandt when he was a teenager in the '80s, to watch his brother's track meets. "It's awe-inspiringly open, which is rare in New York City. In fact, it forces you to have different kinds of thoughts when you're around it," he said of the park.
As an adult who moved to the Bronx to raise his family, he saw the park's chaos. "It wasn't designed all at once. So it's not whole, in a way," Ratliff told me. "You have to run across wire fences, or you have to go over or under a highway. You have to go through parts that are crunchy and crusty and dirty and unattractive, but you can do it, and it makes you think about reconnecting parts of the city that really should be connected." This is particularly true in the Bronx, he noted, given all of the borough's highways.
Because Ratliff runs exclusively in the morning, he doesn't go out four nights a week anymore. But while he doesn't get FOMO, he has a "fear of not hearing about things," and keeps a list in his head of gigs he'll never even go to. As he put it, it's like having books on your shelves that you haven't read: "It reminds you of your ambitions."
And so here he is, still pointing you toward the best shit. Put your running shoes on and make your way to these events.