What fills your silences?

Like most of us, I get most of my music via streaming platforms. It seems like the whole world is at my fingertips — (almost) any song I’d ever want, right there in my pocket. But I’ve been feeling a growing disquietude about the way I listen. What does it mean to “listen” to music — to really listen? What kind of attention does that require? What does music discovery mean when it’s primarily driven by tech corporations, rather than by human interest? What does music mean to us as individuals and as a community? I turned to books to try to find an answer. In these pages, I found some of the anxieties I’ve been feeling reflected, and so many new ways to understand what music does.

I listen to most of my music on Spotify, but I didn’t really know much about the platform. In Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly writes about Spotify from multiple angles: from the perspective of artistes, record labels, Spotify execs, and listeners. Across its pages, it becomes clear that Spotify endangers so much of what we should be holding safe: our taste, our data privacy, the labour and compensation of artists and workers, and the way we discover music. Most striking for me is Pelly’s assertion that the majority of Spotify listeners are ‘passive listeners,’ people for whom music is just a background activity, where each song blends seamlessly and forgettably into the next. This passivity is what Spotify breeds, and then thrives on — “consumers” for whom the individual merit of a song makes minimal difference, and artists who must adapt to Spotify’s new rules, regardless of what they want to make. In the attention economy, where websites are vying for our scrolls, likes, and streams, choosing where to put our time, energy, and money is vitally important to keep art alive.

Moving back a few decades is Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, which I read in advance of James Mangold’s film adaptation, A Complete Unknown. This is the story of Bob Dylan’s infamous Newport Folk Festival performance in 1965, where he shocked musicians and audience alike by playing with a fully amplified band. But it isn’t really the story of Bob Dylan and his mentor Pete Seeger as much as it is an exploration of what led to that moment. This is a thoughtfully written book, which I found much more illuminating of a time and a culture — of music, protest, and ideology — than it is of any one individual. However much Seeger’s and Dylan’s understanding of the music they made differed, they clearly both believed in its power — to reach an audience, send a message, or tell a story, but also to move the listener in some way.

Much closer home is the writer Amit Chaudhuri. In his early novel Afternoon Raag, I was struck by how music infiltrated descriptions of everyday happenings: in a crowded café, people hunched over and unbent to make room for each other “in regular accordion-like time.” Curious, I picked up his book Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music, a hybrid memoir that traces his love for North Indian classical music. This is something I have essentially no knowledge of, but I found myself hooked. Chaudhuri weaves a web of references from Satyajit Ray to Rabindranath Tagore to Bob Dylan, explaining the intricacies of the music while also reflecting on the nature of language, time, and practice. There’s so much importance, Chaudhuri reminds us, in paying attention to the sounds that fill silences, to meander from the point, to allow music and sound to challenge us and change our minds.

Liz Pelly uses a lovely phrase to talk about what music can do: it can “evoke ephemeral unknowns,” and give form to emotions and ideas that are perhaps otherwise inexpressible. Listening to music is often a personal experience; an insular activity, or perhaps something we don’t really think about at all. But these books remind us that in the best times, music isn’t a one-to-one relationship, but a way to open ourselves up to the world at large, if we know how to listen.

The writer is an author and illustrator. 

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.