Books of music criticism can be risky. There’s a fine line between thought-provoking opinions about the state of the art and sounding like the dishevelled bloke who plonks down next to you at the pub one night and starts banging on about King Crimson.
Music writing should be prickly, though. You want it to poke at you like a phonographic needle, challenging your assumptions and likes while hopefully exposing you to some groovy new sounds.
Dutch-born, Australia-raised, UK-based Michel Faber is best known for inventive novels like Under The Skin and The Book of Strange New Things. With Listen: On Music, Sound And Us he dives into nonfiction for a sweeping survey of how we engage with sound, in a work he calls “the book I’ve wanted to write all my life”.
So, what sets Faber’s work apart on a crowded section of the bookshelf? There’s a long tradition of so-called “stale, pale males” like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent and Greil Marcus holding forth with certainty about why Bob Dylan or Lou Reed or The Clash changed the world.
“There’s nothing more self-absorbed and tribal than music,” Faber writes.
What gives Listen an edge is Faber’s own wide-eared willingness to hear new things, questioning his own opinions and much of music criticism’s general vague ignorance of anything but friendly, English-language songs.
Listen is hardly a tightly controlled symphony. It’s more a shambling, hook-filled medley that dips into psychology, neurology, memoir and sociology, shuffling about like the movements in The Who’s A Quick One, While He’s Away. Everything from the Beatles and Kylie Minogue to whale song recordings get a mention.
Faber looks at how babies first discover music and how much of our taste is social conditioning. He explores how music interacts with our brain, how it evokes our past or can even reach people with dementia or other disabilities. He queries how a song can be heaven to one listener and utter garbage to another.
When he explores the wide world of popular music outside English that rarely gets the same attention as the latest Taylor Swift tune, he drops names like Alain Bashung, Herman van Veen and Czesław Niemen that are likely to get readers shuffling off to the internet to have a listen. Music lovers do want a book like this to turn them on to new things, and here’s where Listen is at its best.
Faber is a man of strong views – the vinyl revival, the Beach Boys and all of classical music come under fire – but he has an engaging voice that repeatedly comes right up to the edge of unbearable snobbiness and backs away before things get ugly.
He presents himself as a firm iconoclast, with a taste for avant-garde noise and the “transcendent pleasures” of sounds like “a sonorous industrial growl” outside his house that turns out to be the screech of an underlubricated crane at work. He also admits with disarming candidness that he doesn’t understand nostalgia and “my life has no soundtrack”.
For some, the sprawl of Listen may lack focus. Faber admits it was cut down from a much bigger book, and seams sometimes show. A too-long section of casual interviews with minority artists discussing the overwhelming whiteness of Rolling Stone’s hallowed top album lists falls rather flat. It’s a noble stab at debating representation but feels too awkwardly shoehorned in.
Far more than our taste in movies or books, the music we love is our billboard to the world, announcing who we are or who we’d like to be. “For grown-ups, music is a battleground of identity and allegiance,” Faber writes.
He notes that older generations grew up “with the notion of the record reviewer as a higher class of listener than you”. The internet has smashed those temples of critical authority and Faber attempts to grapple with the lightning speed at which TikTok and YouTube are changing everything.
For a late-middle-age listener like himself – he’s 63 – Faber says a point comes when you realise that you’ll never quite be able to catch up to it all: “The future is here and you’re not part of it.” Music isn’t a race to be won.
In the end, Faber admits, “nobody can get to the bottom of music”. In a book filled with fierce contrarianism and thought-provoking factoids, his ultimate message is that it’s okay to love whatever we love to hear, whether it’s Captain Beefheart or the hottest new K-pop. That’s a philosophy worth listening to.
