That’s my first question for anyone who doesn’t like a song that I love. I mean, if I love it, every other human with a working set of ears and an open mind should at least be able to enjoy it and get why I’d want to ramble on about the bass line’s backstory for ten minutes … right?
“Did you try playing it as loud as you’d play your favorite song to your favorite people while on your favorite drug?”
And I don’t ask to be a dick, though I get that it sort of paints me as one, I ask because it’s a question I pose to myself before passing judgement on any piece of music, be it by the Black Sabbaths, Squarepushers, and B.I.G.s of the world, or the Gershwins, Carpenters, and Nick Drakes. They’re crafting mountain ranges of sound, but, if you don’t play it loud, you’re only hearing speed bumps.
“Like, did you crank it up so loud that you half expected George Wendt to storm into the room yelling at you to turn it down like you were Macaulay Culkin in the classic, but ridiculous, intro to the “Black & White” music video?”
Cause if the answer’s “no”, then what are we even talking about? You can’t say you don’t like it if you haven’t even heard it. And if you haven’t heard it loud, you haven’t heard it all.
See, when you listen to something at a decibel that comes anywhere close to what you might call “reasonable” or, god forbid, “background”, you’re listening to something the musician never intended you to hear. You’re abridging the waveforms and then judging them. You’re judging a city by its airport and a state by its highways. When the artist first came up with the song, it was so loud in their head that it drowned out the rest of the world, and when they closed their eyes while listening to that final mix, it’s a pretty good bet the music was blasting.
Now you don’t have to crank your Glen Gould records to the point that the background hiss sounds like an instrument in itself, just to the point that his piano is in the room with you. Music started as something that was necessarily played live, with the musician determining the volume for everyone who would ever hear it right there and then. The fact that you can even control the volume is an unintended consequence of electronics manufacturers trying to perfect their products, not musicians trying to perfect theirs, and, so long as we’re trying to judge the music and not the stereo equipment, it only makes sense to give it a real honest to goodness shot; a shot that can’t be compared to wearing dark sunglasses to an art show or trying to read a book from across the room.
But the choice is yours. Do you want to hear it how its lord intended or do you want to see how soft your stereo can go? Like I said, I know it paints me as a dick, but this is the question I have to ask myself every day.
