On the importance of listening to music very fucking loud.
Last week I was at a friend’s studio in Mexico City. He showed me some of the new shit he’d been working on and it sounded great. A kind of folky, middle-eastern vibe, like if that band Beirut actually came from Beirut. Anyways, after he played me his new album, I wanted to play him mine, he pressed play but kept the volume on middle eastern-folk levels, about a quarter of his speakers’ ability. When I asked him about it, he said that’s how he listens to all music. All the time. This made me realize that a lot of the people I know that don’t fuck with rap or electronic music like that, usually listen to it through weak ass speakers and miss out on the sensory experience that this kind of music actually contains. Of course acoustic guitars and tambourines are going to sound great coming out of your laptop speakers, they don’t demand any power to convey their message. But modern electronic and rap music do. So I had to have a conversation with him that inspired this article; Rap is supposed to be listened to loudly. Very fucking loud(ly).
He told me something like “But see, I don’t want to hurt my ears, I just want to listen to the music for the content of it and its message, I don’t need it to be loud to appreciate it, blah blah blah”
Ok, fair point, here’s what’s wrong with that, tho: Everything.
Most music out there is built around two elements; there’s sound and there’s lyrics (or melody, in case it’s instrumental music), rap, however, introduces and relies heavily on a third element that I call “punch”. The sound of the bass and the kick is designed to occupy physical space. It uses the sound waves not only to convey a message but to create a massage. This music is not designed only for your ears to enjoy; it’s for your entire body to be involved in the experience. If you played Anti Up to a deaf person, chances are he or she would still get lit as fuck. Because even if this human can’t hear M.O.P.’s tales of robbing rich dudes in Brownsville, that bass line is still demanding a response from the body, that kick is making this hypothetical deaf dude (or girl) want to smash things and get money.
Even listening to it with headphones I think is not enough. It’s a great experience, but a different one, you’re only letting the vibrations do their thing to your ears and head, as opposed to bumping it in a car, a studio or the club, where your whole body is surrounded by the frequencies and getting massaged on a molecular level.
Another thing you should keep in mind is that most of the music that you’re hearing was created, mixed and mastered through very loud speakers, so part of the artist’s intent within the song can only be experienced through loudness. So listening to it on your tiny iPhone speaker or your laptop is like looking at a work of art on your phone or a pamphlet. Sure, you’re “getting the message” but you’ll never fully grasp the texture the artist intended to create unless you look at it in the media it was created for.
I guess what I’m really trying to say here is, get some decent speakers, turn them up to eleven and learn to enjoy rap music as the multi-dimensional experience that it is.