Ben Rayner

Music is a Reason to Live

As pop music critic for the Toronto Star, Ben Rayner boldly delivers his views week to week, drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of modern music. Occasionally readers might feel outraged by his comments. Most of the time he offers new reasons to visit iTunes or the record store. In the age of mass online authorship covering every nook and cranny of the music world, it is heartening to know that there is still someone at the centre of the whirlwind to set the bar high.

The heart of his presence at the Toronto Star is a regular spot called Ben Rayner’s Reasons to Live. In the column he draws on new music from Canada and beyond, dusts off old gems, and frequently introduces readers to something fresh from the live music circuit. His wit and discerning ear are always much in evidence.

When asked about the origins of Reasons to Live, the scribe reflects on his upbringing. “Music is a reason to live for me. It’s my favourite thing! Without it my life would be a lot less interesting. I was brought up in a house full of music – my dad is a music teacher – so a house full of instruments, a house full of records and high-end stereo equipment. It’s just always been a part of my life, and a vital part.”

Shortly after birth in Colchester, England, Rayner moved as an infant to Glovertown, Newfoundland, remaining there until the age of six when his family relocated to St. George, New Brunswick. He left to study journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, perhaps influenced by his mother, a reporter. Straight out of school he wound up working at the Ottawa Sun, a placement that lasted two years. His first job interview with the Star proved fruitless, but he made an impression. When the paper hired a second music critic in the late nineties, he got the position.

On a rainy spring day recently in Toronto, Ben Rayner sat down with Canadian Interviews to talk about life at a major newspaper. It is interesting to hear from him in a slightly different setting. He offers his thoughts on digital music, his process for determining which artists to feature, and the cultural infrastructure that has developed across the country to support independent musicians. Just as one encounters when absorbing his written work, in conversation his cultural references are quirky and far-reaching. He revels in the obscure but is also willing to highlight the mainstream artists of the day.

Quite fascinating is the commentary Rayner provides on the state of Canadian politics. In the context of a discussion of the grant system in Canada and the scarcity of provocative political songwriting, the veteran journalist laments the policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the tiresome nature of our political culture. “I’m on the record dozens of times saying how fucking boring it is, but what is there to get behind?” he asks. “I hate Stephen Harper, the whole abortion thing and pulling Pride funding. I hate that shit. It’s really insidious and evil. But I don’t really like anybody – that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in! There’s nobody to vote for.”

Thankfully there is plenty of excellent music to help liven up the public discourse in Canada, and a passionate music critic at the Toronto Star to serve as a guide.

CI: At the end of March I did an interview with Hawksley Workman. He put out two albums this year: Meat, which was released in conventional format, and Milk, which he released online, adding a new song to his website every couple of weeks. He made the point to me that he didn’t really think there had been a ‘spiritual shift’ yet – that there had not been a spiritual shift to digital music – and that some journalists and reviewers won’t even consider anything unless it comes as a traditional album. What is your view at this point?

BR: I am one of these people who never stopped buying vinyl, and I like CDs. I don’t like the ephemeral quality of digital. I don’t like the thinness of the sound. I’ve only had an iPod because I got one for free for judging the Polaris. I was on the Polaris Grand Jury last year – and Fucked Up won!

I am old enough, at thirty-five, that I want something tangible in my hands. It’s a sound thing. I’m not fussy. I’m not one of those twat audiophiles. I have tons of Joy Division bootlegs that sound like they were recorded on a Walkman underneath someone’s coat! But I find the disposability of digital music a little disconcerting. A friend of mine once said, ‘I would delete two thousand songs from my hard drive in a second, but I would never throw out my records’.

So I don’t like how it’s devalued music. I think it’s awesome that you can hear bands. I love going to MySpace and finding stuff like that. I’m not against it, but I am sad that it has supplanted the other. That’s the way it always marches. It’s always like we’re onto the next thing and that unnecessarily means the end of the other formats. I don’t understand why you can’t have these all co-exist. ‘The death of the CD!’ You know what? I don’t mind CDs. I think they sound good, and it’s a good storage medium. If something happens to that hard drive, I don’t care how backed up my USB key is. It’s not the same as having a record.

Same thing: I don’t want to listen to music on the computer. I don’t like making the computer the centre of my life. I’m not on Facebook. I’m not on Twitter. I think it’s all a drive to get people to buy more bandwidth and bigger computers. At the end of the day, there is a technological and commercial imperative behind this stuff. It’s great that I have fifteen hundred songs in my pocket, but I haven’t spiritually shifted.

CI: So when someone sends you something and says ‘this is our new album, it is all streaming through our website’, you are game for that?

BR: Oh yeah, I’ll listen to it, but it’s just not my preferred way. I’ve never made that shift to wanting to listen to music on the computer. I would rather burn it onto a CD or buy it. It’s just a mental thing with me, I think, a lot of it. I was collecting records when I was seven or eight years old and just never let that go. I like Hawksley’s records, though, Meat and Milk. They’re good.

CI: When I went to talk to him I had never met him, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but we had a great time.

BR: He’s a neat guy. I’ve met him a few times. I’m quite fond of him.

CI: In the same vein, the job of the music journalist, I think, has become a little more complex in that the music can come from a lot of different directions. Record companies can send press releases and actual music at times, and then also you get random MySpace pages and websites sent to you. One has to sift through all this stuff. For me, it still comes down to seeing someone perform live; that’s when I decide if it’s something that I can get onboard with. What is your process of sifting through?

BR: There are live acts and there are recording bands. I love Massive Attack but they’re shit every time I see them live, although I can’t blame the last show – it was the Sound Academy, not them. And I love Tricky’s records. Pre-Millennium Tension, Maxinquaye, and Nearly God – some of my favourite albums of all-time, but he’s shit live. Then there are bands like Pissed Jeans. I don’t necessarily want to play that record all the time, but I would follow them to the ends of the earth! Or The Jesus Lizard; nobody really needs to listen to The Jesus Lizard.

A lot of it for me with music is experiential, but at the same time I like to hole up with a record. I go both ways. I see enough shows that I go through periods where I just want to stay home in complete silence! So I don’t necessarily hold it against someone if they can make a really good record and they don’t put on a good live show. Then you have those other bands where you judge against the live show, like The Constantines. I like their first two albums a lot, but they’re one of those bands where it’s so much about the live experience. They are always struggling to live up to their live shows. For me there is a time and place for both. I love a band that can do both, obviously, like Radiohead or something. …

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Ben Rayner’s top concerts to catch in Toronto, summer 2010, in no particular order:

The National (Massey Hall, June 8-9), Pavement, Broken Social Scene, Band of Horses, Beach House, Timber Timbre (Olympic Island, June 19), Metric, Passion Pit, Holy Fuck (Molson Amphitheatre, July 9), Lady Gaga (Air Canada Centre, July 11-12), City & Colour, Tegan & Sara (Molson Amphitheatre, August 28)

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CI: Most of the time when I come across your articles online, I’ve noticed that there is not typically, at least in my memory, the comment board on the bottom where people come on and put up their observations.

BR: Is there not? I don’t read the paper online. People are scared of me! They probably took it down. People just email me all the time, really nasty things. Our ombudsman won’t let us write nasty things back anymore!

CI: That’s what I was wondering. People are passionate about their music. I thought maybe it was something that the paper just didn’t want to moderate.

BR: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I must ask someone about that. I didn’t realize about the comment boards – I thought they were usually up on everything.

CI: Well, I haven’t seen them on your articles. I know other journalists that I’ve spoken to just hate them, and see the comments as sort of the equivalent of being in a play and asking the audience to come up on stage.

BR: Oh, I love it! What puts me in a more privileged position than anybody else? That’s what I always say to people when they write me angry letters: ‘this isn’t a judgement of your personality. I’m not saying that you violated some rule of propriety by enjoying a Hedley show, or that you’re an idiot’. That is what I always stress. It’s my opinion. I’m fortunate enough to be able to air my opinion. It’s a starting point for discussion. I have critics who I read that I passionately disagree with, but that’s why you read critics. You have people who you trust, and you have people who outrage you. There’s room for both! You can gauge against that.

I am never personally offended when someone says that they didn’t like the new National record. I don’t feel the need to write a letter and say ‘you’re an idiot!’ We all get that letter: ‘were you at the same show I was at?’ We get that one all the time, which says ‘I was at the same show, and that’s certainly not what I saw! Why didn’t they send a fan!’ I never understand why people are personally insulted. I can usually talk them down. I can be very persuasive. …

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Ben Rayner’s favourite live music venues in Toronto, in no particular order:

Lee’s Palace, The Phoenix, The Dakota Tavern

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CI: Late last year I did an interview with Jason Schneider, the music journalist based in Waterloo. He wrote a book called Whispering Pines.

BR: Yeah, I’ve talked to Jason before.

CI: The title Whispering Pines comes from the Richard Manuel song, and in the book Jason identified in the singer-songwriters from the sixties and seventies era, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and the rest, this profound sense of loneliness and isolation in a lot of their music. A couple of weeks back I read a review that you did of the new Broken Social Scene album. It reminded me of Jason mentioning this changing tide with the Arts & Crafts group, these music collectives, groups of musicians that rotate in and out of different bands. Anyway, I never really thought of it, but I thought it was this interesting change from the older idea of being isolated – lonely singer-songwriters coming out of Canada and trying to get out of Canada – and now almost to combat that there are these huge music collectives.

BR: Well, the obvious thing is the socialist idea: we work together and we’ll make this happen. But that comes out of the fact that you kind of have to make your own scene here. Arts & Crafts or Paper Bag or Six Shooter – they are all part of this parallel infrastructure that has come up. The foundation was laid for a long time by people my age or a little older. There were a bunch of people at labels and in bands, and at the writing level in Toronto anyway, and there was a core of support for stuff that was not ‘label’. It has always been here in Toronto, but all of a sudden Canada-wide this thing happened, just a network city to city, I think, where stuff that wasn’t Econoline Crush or Our Lady Peace could find an outlet and find support.

There was just a critical mass of people to push it a little bit, and enough of a sense of pride of place. You had The Hip – and Our Lady Peace too, for that matter – bands selling tremendous amounts of records in Canada. There was actually a scene in this country. In order to get that done, you had to have pockets of people. You had to build a network of supporters. I think that’s where all this stuff comes from: the need to foster your own little perfect universe. Nobody was going to do it for you. It’s Canada! We were never going to get Warner Music to do it. …

Also we are, at just the level of background radio, a moderately socialist country, despite our present government’s attempts to just run roughshod over everything that makes Canada Canadian! You sort of take care of your own here, which can lead to a bit of ‘cliqueiness’. That’s the other accusation that you’ll hear. People who aren’t in with the ‘in-crowd’ tend to resent the other crowd.

There are still a lot of lonely singer-songwriters though.

CI: Sure, but the two things seem to be running parallel now.

BR: There’s a lot of mixing and matching in bands in this country. You really notice it in Montréal or Toronto, or Halifax is a really good example. St. John’s, Newfoundland is amazing. There are hundreds of bands there that you’ll never see play out of there. That city has tons of live music. Everywhere there is live music all the time, but it never really leaves the Rock.

CI: You were mentioning that, despite our current government, there is a socialist element to the country, including an extensive grant system for artists. There are times when I wonder, as much as it has helped to foster these little communities across the country, whether it also imposes some limitations on what people write about. You don’t get a lot of outwardly political songwriting in Canada.

BR: It’s the people who administer those grants – that’s the thing, especially when you have a government that is as disinterested in culture as ours, as ours has been for years actually. Not since Trudeau really has anyone given a shit. Let’s be honest! Harper’s the first where you hear, ‘why are we giving money to bands with names like Holy Fuck?’ That’s the first time that I’ve ever heard any kind of censorship. …

I don’t think it affects stuff so much. The weird thing about some of the grants like FACTOR is that a lot of that goes to rewarding people who’ve already succeeded. You’ll get the grant if you’ve already sold a hundred thousand records. But my buddy administers this radio star-maker fund and he basically gets to give money to bands that he likes. He’s one of these people with great taste and he believes in the music. I get the vibe that a lot of the people administering these things are pretty decent souls, at least on the music side. I never hear people complain in music. You’ll hear it from people in publishing. I’ve got a friend who is a publisher, and I hear it from her: ‘it’s got to be unreadable to get a grant!’

Getting into politics is fucking boring. I think that’s why nobody does. You have more Canadian bands writing about American politics because Canadian politics is boring as shit. What are you going to write about – a song about free trade or something? Furnaceface did a good one: remember ‘Nobody To Vote For’? That was fifteen years ago!

CI: It is a striking contrast when you look at the Obama election and how so many people lined up behind him musically. Not everyone – there were a few on the other side. In Canada there is the odd singer-songwriter who will go out and stump along with a politician, but there is a definite separation.

BR: Exclaim! does those Q and A things, and ‘what should people shut up about?’ was one of the questions. Someone – I forget who it was – said ‘Canadian politics; they should stop making comedy shows about it.’ Again, that’s exactly what I always think! I’m on the record dozens of times saying how fucking boring it is, but what is there to get behind? I hate Stephen Harper, the whole abortion thing and pulling Pride funding. I hate that shit. It’s really insidious and evil. But I don’t really like anybody – that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in! There is nobody to vote for. I think maybe that has something to do with it. You need a lightning rod issue, but are you going to write a song about the Wheat Board? D.O.A. probably did! They would support a meatpacker’s strike! So you get small pockets. There are some very political bands, but they’re usually marginal.

CI: I find that most of the time bands just pick a single issue, if there happens to be one.

BR: Like Broken Social Scene – one of their benefit shows was ‘let’s ban plastic bags!’ It’s nothing contentious. I would love to see, just to raise some hackles, a stridently pro-life stance by a band, just to cause some shit! I would love to get people riled up.

CI: You don’t get the sense that they would then lose their grant?

BR: Well, I would hope they would. That would be me imposing censorship!

CI: Last area that I wanted to mention, given your connection to Newfoundland and the fact that you were out at the Junos; I thought, more than a typical year, the Junos covered a fair bit of ground.

BR: It was pretty respectable this year, right? Even Michael Bublé I don’t hate, or Drake – they’re not hateful. They’re not really my thing, but they strike me as the sort of people where the industry says ‘ah, well done!’ Which is what it’s about. But I like that Metric was too big for them to ignore anymore. I felt that was actually kind of gracious of the Academy to say, ‘alright Metric, you’re part of this club now’. And the fact that K’naan got a couple – it was actually credit where credit is due. It’s still about rewarding success, but those are actually hard-fought. Nobody gets to that level, nobody gets to be Michael Bublé, without hard work. That’s a fallacy.

Date of Interview: 05/13/2010
Location: Jersey Giant, Toronto, ON
Link: www.thestar.com