A01=Ben Ratliff
Author_Ben Ratliff
Category=AVC
Category=DNBF
Category=DNL
Category=SZE
Category=WZ
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_sports-fitness
Product details
- ISBN 9781644453285
- Weight: 322g
- Dimensions: 143 x 213mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Graywolf Press,U.S.
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Out the front door, across the street, down the hill, and into Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This is how Ben Ratliff’s runs started most days of the week for about a decade. Sometimes listening to music, not always. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, he began taking notes about what he listened to. He wondered if a body in motion, his body, was helping him to listen better to the motion in music.
He runs through the woods, along the Hudson River, and into the lowlands of the Bronx. He encounters newly erected fences for an intended FEMA field hospital, and demonstrations against racial violence. His runs, and the notes that result from them, vary in length just as the songs he listens to do: seventies soul, jazz, hardcore punk, string quartets, Éliane Radigue’s slow-change electronics, Carnatic singing, DJ sets, piano music of all kinds, Sade, Fred Astaire, and Ice Spice.
Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he’s listening to - let’s run it, he’ll say. And with that, the reader in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.
Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A former music critic for the New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.
