Listen to Michel Faber…Or Else

Michel Faber’s provocative new book Listen: On Music, Sound and Us comes across pretty much as a dare to the reader and a challenge to most every other music book extant.

“Reading this book will change the way you listen,” Faber posits at the onset. “I’m not hear to change your mind about Dusty Springfield, Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.”

Ok, then…

As I’m sure Faber intended, Listen is both infuriating and engaging. Here’s the thing, though: As the book goes on – and Faber does go on – it’s 400+ pages and he says it was once “a much, much bigger book” – there are more than a few discursive elements. And it tilts toward the latter, while not vanquishing the former. But had I not been reviewing it, would I have stopped after 50?  Probably.

Anyone who positions himself as a music critic–and I’m one of them–assumes a certain authority (audacious arrogance?), implicitly stating what you believe about this or that band is right and true. Critics can parcel out praise and pans willy-nilly. Voluminous or scathing.

Faber, 63, is not a music critic per se. The Dutch-born, Australia-raised writer, formerly based in Scotland and now living in the south of England, is a novelist. His seven novels include the 2002 best-seller The Crimson Petal and the White.

Faber says Listen  “is the book I always wanted to write” and he functions as a music critic, historian, polemicist, and interviewer discussing virtually every genre or sub-genre of music at some point. One main argument is that many people listen to music not for what the music is, but how it connects them to their “tribe,” bolstering their chosen identity. Saying at the onset that he doesn’t need to–and won’t–name his favorite bands, he proceeds to drop zillions of genre-spanning names, from the obscure to the mega-famous, in making his points.

The names spill out: Haysi Fantayzee, Chopin, The Clash, The Sweet, Coil, Miles Davis, Handel, Richard Thompson, Kylie Minogue and Morrissey. He won’t tell you how these artists are important to me or if he even cares about them, but he does know a lot about them (and maybe really does care despite it all). He clearly likes pop, the angular side of punk, the avant-garde, the atonal, the noise-rock and, try as he might, never could cotton much to classical music.

By packing his book with these references, he reminds you, subtly or not, that he knows his stuff as he pumps up or dismisses various groups or trends. But then, as is his wont throughout, he says it doesn’t matter. Faber likes nothing so much as making a convincing argument and then reversing course with an equally compelling counter-argument. Clever bastard, but infuriating, too.

‘Listen’ is not so much about how people made music, what its creators felt, or what inspired them; it is, he says, about “you,” how you consume it, why you consume it, what affects you to make your choices, the part it plays in your life. Along the way, he writes about fashion, capitalism, white writers waxing on authoritatively about Black musicians, “poverty disenfranchisement,” and how so many of us ride the UK-to-US axis with our music choices, but rarely take ventures to non-Anglo sources.

There’s also a chapter about people for whom music plays no part in their lives. He does so non-pejoratively as he tackles “music anhedonia” – or people for whom music – any music – gives no pleasure. That’s about five percent of the world Faber says, citing scientific research. But then, he reasons if you bought or otherwise read his book and were in the process of reading it, you likely belong to the 95 percent who at least like some music. Further, he states that you’re probably a white male between 30 and 65, given that’s the demo for most music books. (Under 30s don’t read; over 65s need all they need to know by now, thank you very much.)

It begins with how infants and toddlers perceive music – ah, the innocence of extreme youth before we learn what is cool and what is not cool. Faber takes the music of Enya – once a paragon of Celtic mystery – which he now hears as hold music on telephones, and figures that is truly its just place. (I disagree; Enya is forever.) Faber argues, not wrongly, about artists where the public perception on cool is ever-shifting (Madonna, Taylor Swift, Minogue, U2) and how what we like is invariably influenced by what our “tribe” (friends, peers) like and how awful it can be to feel out of step with that group.

Faber also gets into how music often functions in society. How important music is to most of us, or how much do we think it is? How often do we put on music solely for that pleasure? Infrequently. Do we play it at maximum volume? Not much. More often it’s a backdrop to what we’re doing. We hear music in movies, in grocery stores, at airports. It surrounds us when we don’t even think about it.

Rock critics? Who needs ‘em? My argument would be a critic can raise points fans may not have considered or at the least start a conversation in a reader’s mind or pique curiosity. But Faber has a particularly devastating, and not necessarily inaccurate, take on what I’ve done for four-plus decades. With pretty much everything available for free now, do you really need a posturing gate-keeper to tip you off to what’s good, steer you away from what’s bad and so forth?

But when Faber steps into the rock critic mode he can be pretty devastating, too. Consider his take on hair metal progenitors and degenerates Motley Crue (in a chapter on Wikipedia, particularly its lack of feminine or feminist input): “Motley Crue were the trailblazers here, taking the Rolling Stones template of plowing through each town’s pretty young girls and customizing it to remove any trace of musical talent, sensorial style or rakish charm – butting straight to the ruthless seizure of teen pussy, fresh gash, kneeling bitch and all the heroin, cocaine, Jack Daniels and projectile vomit a poodle-haired man would want.”

In the age of streaming, many vinyl buyers are fetishists who may purchase it but listen infrequently, if at all. Sometimes, the albums are collectors’ items, remaining in the shrink wrap. Most of the records (or CDs or tapes or whatever medium) end up gathering dust on shelves, until they’re packed off and sold or, more likely given their paltry value, given to charity shops.

And, in this streaming age: What are albums? And does anyone ever listen to them in their entirety?

Faber cites stats about how few times people listen to albums they purchased–Peter Gabriel says in 1987 that average was 1.2 times–and in general we buy the record because it’s the rage (in our little world or the wider expanse), play it, but then shelve it and forget about it as time marches on, trends and tastes changing.

One important point Faber makes is about how a consumer manifests interest in music . When he checks YouTube comments about songs, he finds often the chatter is not about the music per se but what the music meant to the listener at a certain time in his or her life. And they often perceive that time as better than now. Looking back to their 20s, people were far more passionate about their music and had more time to devote to it. They clung to that music as reminders of who they once were and what they once did with their clique of like-minded fans. It’s indulging in nostalgia, which Faber claims he has no interest in whatsoever, owing, in part, to what he calls a horrible upbringing in Australia. He came from a broken home with an abusive father, who he calls a Nazi.

We also learn he was once a nurse, he has tinnitus (quite possibly begun by a 130 dB Birthday Party concert, which made him deaf for a week), suffers migraines, is a widower, his wife Eva having died of cancer. He’s essentially a self-described hermit who can be sociable when called upon. Faber says he is “on the [autism] spectrum – obviously way out on the Asperger’s end.” He says he has avoided incorporating his miserable, tumultuous upbringing into his novels but does touch upon it here, if only to say it’s in the past, doesn’t matter; thus, no lookbacks for him.

Except, of course, throughout this book he does look back. Maybe to be done with it, but he’s certainly taken a lot of notes along the way and they spill out here in Listen. It is, I have to admit, mostly useful analysis.

Did he change my mind about my mind? Not exactly, but he planted some ideas in there I’d not considered and went into greater detail on others I already had in my head.