Listen! These days everyone is telling you to listen, how to listen, why it’s important to listen. Active listening, deep listening, the art of listening: for a fee – sometimes a large fee – life-body-spirit magi will teach you how to refine your ears. Listen to your gut, they say. Your breathing. To others, too, the excluded. Listening is not just self-care; it’s ethics, social engagement, imaginative reparation. Often listening is more cant than action: it’s what every other politician promises to their constituents, what CEOs vow to do when their employees get uppity.
Listening is a passion of novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber. In his house, he reveals, there’s a whole room devoted to cassettes, vinyl, archived MP3s; when he goes round to other people’s homes he often squats down to peer at his hosts’ CD collections. An early novella, The Courage Consort (2002), followed an experimental vocal ensemble on a concert tour of Belgium, and featured riffs on auditorium acoustics, allusions to composers such as Cathy Berberian and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and outbursts from the group leader in which he complained: “I didn’t cast my boat out on the dangerous sea of a cappella music to sing Obla-di, Obla-da to a crowd of funny philistines in funny hats.”
Listen, Faber declares early on, “is the book I’ve wanted to write all my life”. Reading it, he believes, “will change the way you listen”. Other publications on music exist, but they’re not as deep or as truthful as his own. This is because they’re designed to “help you bond more securely with the artists or genres you’re already bonded with, making you feel part of a clique of the enlightened”. Even worse, many music books “are a glorified display of the stuff the author owns”. Their writers give the impression that “failing to appreciate an important musical deity is a cause for shame”.
Is this true? Faber doesn’t give many examples. He’s more comfortable with assertions than arguments. What “really” happens when we hear music? It has “nothing” to do with the sounds themselves. Biography is more important: “The way you were raised, the way you were pushed down, the voice you were given or denied, the people you’ve met or avoided.” Biology too: “The brain that floats in your skull, contoured like a cauliflower but as squishy as marmalade, sensitive to every stimulus.” It’s a striking simile more than it is an original insight; not a few writers in recent years – among them Susan Rogers and Daniel Levitin – have used cognitive neuroscience to demystify sound.
Faber flatters his readers as thick-skinned voyagers willing to “be challenged and not get pissed off or defensive”. An early chapter deals with his tinnitus, which he says made him aware of his “organic nature”, and that he is of “the same category of creature as the roadkill on the streets, the once-living contents of my spaghetti marinara”. Unborn babies, exposed to “veins and arteries that are pumping like a factory”, are exposed to sounds akin to the “grey zone of avant-garde electronica called Industrial”. Infants’ responses to new sounds can be visceral: hearing Astor Piazzolla “at the wrong moment is a spoon loaded with mashed vegetables at your closed mouth”. All too soon the book cracks and decomposes, becoming little more than a series of disassociated riffs, bromides and sofa-grumbles. A venue’s acoustics affect the way we hear bands’ music. Vinyl doesn’t contain more information than other formats. Who needs pop critics? Charity shops hold lots of Val Doonican records. Beyoncé calls herself a singer? She mimes on stage! People don’t really care about culture: “Music is the accessory, and the clothes and grooming are the main thing.” There are windy references to “modern mega-capitalist society”, an “artsy café”, a “hipster cardigan”. If the Bad Sex award were ever to be extended to nonfiction, Faber’s description of the Royal Festival Hall would surely win: “When a crescendo climaxes, the classical lover craves a bit of sonic afterglow, a post-orgasmic throb in the auditory canals.”
Often Faber comes across like the bastard child of Oswald Spengler and Rick from The Young Ones. He claims the people who read his books are “an elite minority”, superior to the goons who are happy to make do with Take a Break or What’s on TV. He refers to “the average person’s taste”, “the facile music that everyone around me seems to like”, “a proletarian family from Barnsley”. “The masses,” he opines, “do not relish being jolted, disturbed and discomfited.” Why is Miles Davis’s 1959 LP Kind of Blue so popular? Because most purchasers “feel they should own at least one jazz album”.
Faber is keen on Diamanda Galás, Einstürzende Neubauten, Coil – ambitious, sometimes attritional artists who produce non-easy-listening music. Why? He doesn’t give the impression it’s down to biology or biography. He describes himself as “an aesthete”, and frequently mentions the value of listening to sound for its own sake. Perhaps, like Kate Molleson did in Sound Within Sound: A History of Radical Twentieth Century Composers (2022), he could have tried to describe some of the innovative music he’s into? He’s happier taking potshots at Observer readers who “cravenly pretended that they were into Nick Drake before the Volkswagen advertisement”. Later, in a chapter about why British audiences only listen to English-language pop, he patronises his own readers by claiming “You’ll almost certainly know Jacques Brel. Not to the extent of owning any of his records, mind.”
Most cringeworthy is a chapter about best-album polls in the course of which he realises that “all four Beatles were white”, the Beach Boys too, and – stop the clock – so is he. There’s a “demographic who might feel more excluded from the conversation than me – people who aren’t white”. To redress this he approaches “a few people of colour” – one of them a “culture management coach” who was born in the same year Revolver and Pet Sounds were released – and asks them how they feel about Revolver featuring so highly in Mojo lists, about Sloop John B being a version of a Bahamian folk song, of Womad being founded by Peter Gabriel. Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner recently came under fire for celebrating an all-white, all-male rock pantheon in his book The Masters. But even that is preferable to Faber’s clunking “inclusivity”.
Faber talks, repeatedly, about the difficulties he faced in cutting his manuscript down to publishable size. There are traces of other, more rewarding books here. One, hinted at in phrases such as “my neurodivergent brain”, reminds me of Jonty Claypole’s superb Words Fail Us: In Defence of Disfluency, which explores the creative ways in which artists can incorporate their “disabilities” into their work.
Another is when Faber visits public libraries and care homes to witness sessions in which people with dementia or mobility issues use music to access semi-dormant parts of themselves. At one of these, a woman bursts into tears when her husband plays her Spandau Ballet’s True on an iPod. It’s a lovely passage compassionately observed – until Faber feels obliged to say that he hates the band and especially the song, which is “empty and smug”. That charge should really be directed at Listen.
• Listen: On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
