Talking Heads' Fear of Music
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Date: 2012-04-19 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Art; Music
Description: It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music" - and everything spins outward from that one moment. Jonathan Lethem treats Fear of Music (the third album by the Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky and fun. He scratches obsessively at the album's songs, guitars, rhythms, lyrics, packaging, downtown ori
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

FEAR OF MUSIC

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut

These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice

A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK)

Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)

We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork

For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com

For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Fear of Music

Jonathan Lethem

Continuum International Publishing Group

80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com

© Jonathan Lethem, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lethem, Jonathan.

Talking Heads’ Fear of music / by Jonathan Lethem.

p. cm. -- (33 1/3)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2100-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4411-2100-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Talking Heads (Musical group). Fear of music. I. Title.

ML421.T27L47 2012

782.421660922--dc23

2012003060

ISBN: 978-1-4411-3292-5

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For

Joel Simon

Donna Jones

& Philip Price

“The war has been based on a crass error. Men have been mistaken for machines.”

Hugo Ball

“The earth is the most remarkable of all museums: everything that has every happened on it is exhibited in situ. From its ‘lunar beginnings’ to this very moment, every tremor left its mark as an archeological gesture. We leaf through the pages of a global past whose factuality can’t be simulated … some day we will learn to decode this earth we trample on, deciphering every little bit of evidence on it in order to make sense of it by reassembling cosmic history through our planet by carefully inspecting it as a dinosaur bone of the infinite.”

Malcolm De Chazal, Sens-Plastique

“A man has barricaded himself inside of his house. However, he is not armed, and nobody is paying any attention to him.”

George Carlin

Warning: Contents under pressure of interpretation. User may suffer unwanted effects vis-à-vis a cherished cultural token — possibly including sensations of demystification, or its opposite, mystification.

Recommendation: While using this product, actually listening to the record is strongly indicated. I don’t mean just on those crappy little speakers built into your computer, either. And turn it up, for fuck’s sake.

Prelude I: Talking Heads Have a New Album. It’s Called Fear of Music

In the summer of 1979, in New York City, a fifteen-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom heard a voice speaking to him over his radio. The voice said: “Talking Heads have a new album. It’s called Fear of Music.” The voice was that of David Byrne, the lead singer of the band Talking Heads. The voice had restricted itself deliberately to a halting and monotonous presentation, but the words, spoken softly, their speaker miked close, admitted a degree of tenderness — that high, reedy vulnerability this singer generally finds it hard to mask, even as he delights in masks, in vocal mummery.

Now, after a heartbeat interval — “dead air,” in radio jargon, and an enigma, on the terms of a 30-second radio spot meant to advertise a rock-and-roll record — the line repeats: “Talking Heads have a new album. It’s called Fear of Music.” The voice hasn’t altered its sense-neutralized, dead-but-still-warm delivery, but it’s been altered, by some force of distortion. A phase shifter? A vocoder? (A similarly sound-effected, flat-affected human voice would hit the charts, in 1981, with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”) Whatever the element, the illusion created is that of the voice multiplying into a swarm of ethereal clones, a chorale of electronic angels. The result is to both modulate and highlight the flat voice’s lonely presence in the foreground: if a man stumbling across a cold landscape is shadowed by flights of seraphim, but cannot join in their ascent, is he better off, or worse?

Eventually the voices begin to reverberate and echo, becoming like a tide caressing a pebble as it washes backwards and forwards simultaneously. “Talking Heads have a new album new album. It’s called Fear of Music Fear of Music. Talking Heads Talking Heads have a new album a new album Talking Heads it’s called Fear of Music it’s called Fear of Music.” The pebble of the singer’s spoken voice is smoothed or soothed away; the cipher transmission concludes without having varied once, nor repeated itself, not exactly. FM.102.7, WNEW (“Where Rock Lives”) resumed its regular broadcast, the soothing, informal voice of Vin Scelsa or Pete Fornatale or Jonathan Schwartz commanding the dial, hyping a Bruce Springsteen appearance on the King Biscuit Flour Hour, or setting up the new Randy Newman single “It’s Money That I Love.”

Flights of seraphim? Unlike any other piece of close description in this book, there’s likely no way to triangulate my paraphrase with your own ears. Don’t go fishing for this experience in the infosea; it isn’t there to be found. Those of us who received the original transmission have had to make do with our cargo cult recollections for three decades now, and counting.

Speaking of whom, what about the boy in his bedroom? Can’t we leave him where we found him? Need we contend with the burden of his awe and innocence, or may we hit eject? Nope, he’s along for this ride. In fact, sometimes, as I set out in this work, I find my present self slackening into passivity. Suddenly the keyboard’s entirely in that kid’s hands. In 2003 I wrote: “I played the third album by Talking Heads, called Fear of Music, to the point of destroying the vinyl, then replaced it with another copy. I memorized the lyrics, memorized the lyrics to other Talking Heads albums, saw Talking Heads play any chance I got … At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” Like everything I’ve ever said about Talking Heads, or about any other thing I’ve loved with such dreadful longing — there’s only a few — this looks to me completely inadequate, even in the extremeness of its claims, or especially for the extremeness of its claims. It’s untruthful in its bogus tone of retrospective consummation, its false finality. As though I’d imagined I could have left it at that!

That kid in his room: I’ve dragged him into the light of so many contexts he ought to be pictured by now as if blackened from head to toe with font. I want to leave him alone but I can’t quite yet, need his assistance for this one last run (last — hah!) on the fortress of his vulnerability. He’s essential to me, not only because he knows what it’s like never to have heard of Fear of Music and then to have heard it for the first time, but because he thereupon arranged himself in a posture of such abject identification with Fear of Music that he no longer can imagine who he’d be had he never heard it. Fear of Music wrote the boy, in other words. Which I suppose means that what you hold in your hands is a book Fear of Music wrote about itself.

Here’s more freight: letting that kid in, you’re bound to take aboard New York City too. Fair enough, that’s an unavoidable subject when discussing Fear of Music anyway. But for the boy in the room it’s personal. He hasn’t exactly lived all over this town, but the room in which he’s listening to the radio is a definite-brownstone in a maybe-ghetto. In 1979 and the years just following, the kid will visit CBGB’s plenty of times (though Talking Heads, like the other front-line performers associated with the club, had graduated to bigger venues before he’d stood any chance of seeing them there), and the Mudd Club, too.

And the boy knows fear. Whoever knows fear burns at Fear of Music’s touch.

But we’re ahead of ourselves. The boy hasn’t heard Fear of Music yet, just the words: “Fear” “Of” “Music”. (Is it “Fear-of” music? Of what would “fear-of” music consist? Is fear made of music? Can an album be afraid of itself?) For the signal peculiarity of the long-lost Fear of Music radio spot is that though it was a commercial for an album, it didn’t consist of any actual music. It was a map that not only wasn’t the territory, it didn’t consist of more than the word “map.” A connect-the-dot diagram with only one dot. An artifact inviting you to consider your own possible future encounter with a subsequent artifact. To presume to say more would have been to betray the spirit of not-yet-knowing which still shrouded, for the boy in room, merely the whole area of everything that matters most: cities, drugs, sex, music, memories, life.

Prelude II: Another Intermediary Artifact

The matte black cardboard sleeve within which the Fear of Music LP is housed features an odd decoration, made of raised, cross-hatched ridges. The design is more interesting to the fingertips than the eye. Like the radio advertisement, the album jacket practices the minimalist magic of arresting attention while withholding stimulus, or at least of falling short of what might be regarded as the ordinary standard of generosity for its form. The band’s name and the album’s title appear in dull caps, restrained within a rectangular box, as though stamped on as an unimaginative afterthought. This seems to restrict them — name and title — from interaction with the “real” jacket, which manifests in a sculptural range where language is destroyed: texture v. text. The subliminal implication being that the album truly ought to be nameless, perhaps a reply record to the Beatles’ White Album, or anticipation of Prince’s Black Album by a decade and a half. The design evokes a steel door or box, imprinted either for friction’s sake, or to repel graffiti or stickering. It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, and it isn’t, exactly, but it does command a chilly authority and yet at the same time suggest a desire to be stroked.

The wish to be impervious and impenetrable, yet still seductive to the flesh of others, isn’t rare, only (usually) unattainable by human beings, as opposed to monoliths, orgasmatrons, blarney stones and the like. The typical animal reaction, of course, is to reach out and cop a feel, like the apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The edifice of Fear of Music’s packaging takes this formula further. Rather than portraying a monolith, it becomes one, therefore turning you, with yearning fingertips, into the petitioning ape. As in a Kafka parable, you might wait at this door forever; it never opens. Not the first or last time buildings and people will be mixed up in this band’s lexicon: if “love is building on fire,” fear, apparently, is a building with its steel gate drawn down.

What the album jacket says that the radio spot also says is that this is a band that cares to examine the formal properties of even its most marginal emissions into the cultural stream: not only songs and albums, but the commercial detritus attaching to songs and albums. No surprise. They’re former art students, but not merely in the Mick Jagger or Paul Simonon “dropped out of art school” sense. The investment of artisty formal pressure on their music is a hallmark of what this band has on offer — has had on offer, from the start — as well as one of the tensions generating the band’s fruitful discomfort, and forecasting its eventual demise.

Also like a lot of assertively powerful artifacts — Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and various other minimalist monuments — the long-term status of the Fear of Music LP jacket is in truth subject to the depredations of entropy. So, in its physical evolution, the jacket carves out a relation to time. That’s to say, move Fear of Music in and out of a tightly packed shelf enough times and you’ll notice that the album’s upraised ridges are gradually being buffed clean of their pigment. These bared ridges grow increasingly prominent, so the jacket gains a new degree of visual intrigue even as it craps out. Are they little minnows, arcing from their black pond in an Esther Williams-style water ballet? Or is Fear of Music actually a woven basket?

I Zimbra

The sinuous crisis of “I Zimbra” attains maximum velocity before we’re prepared, a transmission in Morse code and stroboscopic scratch guitar thrusting us at once into the album’s future (dystopian) and the band’s future (utopian). In this double action it remains fundamentally impassive, discrete, impersonal — atopian. “I Zimbra” reaches beyond Fear of Music even as it opens a door into the record, makes an overture for it. Inscribing a seductive emergency state in our bodies while refusing to name a subject our minds can grasp, the song inoculates us with a “killed virus” version of Fear of Music that strengthens and sickens simultaneously. “I Zimbra” is untrustworthy. It compels the listener without bothering to persuade him. The formerly human band has mistaken itself for a machine in operation outside space, time, and mind. Or has it graduated and left us behind? No one’s saying. “I Zimbra” has its way with us, like sexual desire or fear itself, which enact themselves in a place beyond language.

Yet, mocking us, there is language, of a kind.

Gadget berry bomber clamored

Lazuli loony caloric cad jam

Ah! Bum berry glassily gland ride

He glassily tufty zebra—

Or so it might unfold, in the fool’s yearning spell-check of the ear — at least until corrected by the lyric sheet. For anyone demanding sense, or instructions on how to feel about the journey you’ve undertaken in dropping the phonograph’s needle on this particular record, here’s a Dada left hook to the jaw.

* * *

The mind making retrospective sense of the artwork is a liar. Or a lie. Unspooling expertise and arcana, the critic spins a web of knowingness that veils its manufacturer, a spider shy of the light. Now here you come, whistling down the bookstore aisle — “Always liked that record; wonder what he’s got to say about it?“ — to be enmeshed in the web of expertise. Before you blink, the spider’s remade you as his double, another presider over this mesh of opinions and trivia, which you’re free to brandish as your own. Or maybe not free, but imprisoned. Caught. Do you care to recall what it was like to hear “I Zimbra” before, like a scoop of ice cream rolled in chopped peanuts, I got my words all over (and embedded inside) it? Better retreat quick, friend.

At what point did I learn that Hugo Ball (1886–1927), German-born Dada poet and manifesto-writer, was the source of the crypto-tribal chanted nonsense syllables that pass for lyrics on “I Zimbra”? I can’t tell you. I do know this: I was, from the start, an inveterate inspector of credits, a curator of microdata. “H. Ball” as a co-composer (with D. Byrne and B. Eno) was there to be spotted on Fear of Music’s label, and I probably spotted him before too long. But I’m also certain of this: there was a before. For I remember, dimly, the collision of that knowledge with my primal distrust of the song’s refusal of meaning. I resolutely didn’t want this band to stop making sense.

The boy in his room demands we take this confession further, take the opportunity to say how, when in first inspecting More Songs About Buildings and Food’s label he discovered the names “A. Green and M. Hodges” credited with composition of his favorite punk rock hit of 1978, he tucked a throb of embarrassment behind a rapidly constructed tinfoil hat of knowingness: oh, sure, “Take Me to the River” was an old R&B or gospel song, makes sense. What a cool gesture on the part of his heroes! At the time the boy guessed the song was probably from the fifties or early sixties, had been funked up by Talking Heads. The boy recalls, with absolute clarity, going on to wonder to himself whether he’d ever know anything more about “A. Green and M. Hodges” than the fact they’d written the song.

Then again, a mere seven years (and seven thousand revolutions of emotion and taste) later, that boy — not such a boy now, but still enough of one to deserve the name — sat on a mattress with his college girlfriend and played her selected tracks from his complete collection of original-issue Al Green Hi Records LPs. Between tracks, in the manner of bragging how far he’d come, the boy retailed this exact saga of his innocence: that he’d once stared at a Talking Heads’ label and wondered whether he’d ever know who Al Green was. By that time, the boy found his old attachment to Talking Heads an awkward thing, incriminatingly callow, the residue of awkward origins. Meanwhile, his devotion to the works of Al Green seemed to him to define his worldliness. If you’d announced to that twenty year-old that a quarter-century on he’d be writing a book about Talking Heads, rather than one about Al Green, he’d have arched a skeptical eyebrow.

The point is how right and wrong you can be at once. And that the “information” is only as good as what your ears already know. Or not as good. Like a lot of people, when I — for I am that boy in that room — first heard it I thought “I Zimbra” sounded African. Not, I hasten to say, in the sense of African music as I presently know and revere it, for I didn’t know what African music sounded like. Rather, under the influence of the track’s conga drums, the singing to me sounded like fake-tribal-chanting in some African language, Swahili or Zulu or, worse, an invented ooga-booga tongue, an art-school highbrow’s version of the cannibal grunts and moans in The Cadets’ “Stranded in the Jungle.”

In as much, the resemblance embarrassed and bothered me, but I could never have articulated the botheration for many years to come. It was too personal. My disapproval of white-boys-acting-black had determined the plot of my life to that point, my schoolyard crises, musical and otherwise, and was the exact reason I’d fallen on non-blues-based punk or new wave bands with such exultant relief. Talking Heads were meant to epitomize my opportunities to construct a cool that pointed away from “the street,” and towards bookish things, but was still cool. I didn’t need them glancing at Africa, with or without quotation marks.

Later I’d learn that this band had conceived Fear of Music as a chance to close some of the distance between punk and disco. For me, though, it was for the best at the time that I hadn’t learned that fact, and that my aural defenses were good enough to keep me from hearing it. I needed Talking Heads to be a punk band, not a funk band. But in “I Zimbra” I couldn’t help hearing — as anyone would, and everyone did, at least in the retrospect of Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues — the homeopathic tincture, the minimum effective transformative dose, of all the funk to come.

This white band was going to have black people in it.

Maybe already did.

But that’s getting way, way ahead of ourselves, especially ahead of the boy in his room.

Brian Eno, the only acknowledged intruder on the “official quartet” of Talking Heads to this point, was British and bald, and played not drums or bass but keyboards, or sat geekishly behind a console. Talk about Trojan Horses!

Into this confusion plopped the clue: Hugo Ball. Finding “I Zimbra” credited in part to the dead Dada poet, I could modulate my worries about this turn to the African, but only a little. My ears were still telling me something, still anxiously parsing this harbinger of the band’s future (destined, of course, to consist of a series of collaborations with live black musicians, not dead Dada poets).

But what did it mean? Inquiring minds, licensed to overthinking by this band’s fundamentally cerebral founding premise — heads, talking, rather than bodies unhinged from self-consciousness on the dance floor — might be obligated to bear down on the thing. Hugo Ball’s poem, by deflecting meaning, accumulated speculative-interpretive force, like a Rorschach blot. Dada — European, collagistic, prone to manifestos and provocation, to sneering at history — made a fair bedfellow for punk. The song claimed a precursor in Dada’s guttural and spasmodic presentation, and its freedom from conventional logic, but also its tendency to the regimented and doctrinaire. Hugo Ball’s drill-sargeanty nonsense, and the immobile geometric armor he wore while presenting it onstage: these both satirized the human impulse to control human impulses, and exemplified the discipline needed to make that kind of artwork (if nothing else, a song or poem composed in an invented language foregrounds the labor of memorization that’s normally taken for granted in performance).

Still, 1916 Zurich is an awfully long way for a rock band to venture merely to authorize use of nonsense syllables. From well before the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” and long after the Police’s “Da Doo Doo Doo,” the rock lexicon abounds with blurts and grunts and gibberish of a zoological diversity. Some historically-minded folks place the very origin of the rock song-form in the realm of verbal hoo-ha: early rock-and-roll as a jubilant, irreverent expansion of the nonsense asides in vocal jazz and rhythm-and-blues, or of the kind of Pentecostal babbling-in-tongues recorded by John Lomax in the 1934 “Run Old Jeremiah”: “I gotta rock / You gotta rock / Wah wah ho / Wah wah wah ho.” The conventional reading of the nonsense lyric — or the James Brown grunt, or of jazz scatting — might be that the voice, seeking to reproduce the wild expressivity of the band’s instruments, finds it necessary to leave verbal meaning in the dust.

The vocal manner of “I Zimbra” stakes out a different turf. It distinguishes itself not only from the above-described premises for nonsense verbiage, but from Talking Heads’ previously established default conceptual-scheme, which goes something like this: freaked-out singer tests his anxieties, vulnerabilities, and yearnings against the bounds of a music that’s fierce and impassive in ways he can only dream of. The metronomic drumming and monolithically regular bass lines, the tight-wound guitar-and-keyboard figures, sometimes menacing, sometimes chipper, sometimes both, but always crucially less — or more — than human: on Talking Heads’ first two albums, the band frames David Byrne’s voice and lyrics as a fragile human entity locked into a ferocious exoskeletal structure, one driving him through confessions, passive-aggressive fits, and bemused homilies about work, love, art, and television.

That voice, when bored, sighs: stays human.

When alienated, reveals dread: stays human.

When angry, goes spastic: stays human.

It is only with “I Zimbra” that this voice inscribes its complicity with the machine or machines that bear it forward. Chanting in lockstep, the vocal of “I Zimbra” reveals and celebrates a new possibility of neurosis-free compliance to the music’s urgency. It’s not only nonsense, it’s impersonal. Nobody’s home. Or maybe it’s an undead lifelessness. Like a vampire, the song gazes in the mirror and finds nothing reflected; it dashes through the room before we’ve noticed it casts no shadow.

* * *

“I Zimbra,” considered as an envoi to Fear of Music, plays at refuting the album’s methodology before it even gets started, and at the same time clears the ground for that methodology’s deepest operations. For Fear of Music is all about its subject matter. Like a high school social studies teacher chalking a heading on a blackboard, the song titles function as “topics for discussion.” “I Zimbra” coughs into its fist and says “bullshit” to that plan: your pedagogy is all talk, perfesser, and talk is all nonsense.

The implicit “I” of the band, to this point, was nothing to sneeze at. The persona on Talking Heads ’77 and More Songs About Buildings and Food had been funny, neurotic, pretentious, and nerdishly intense — capable, variously, of Dylanesque break-up songs, anthems of mixed emotion, and deadpan self-help advisories which dare you to take them at face value. Yet in every case it tended to exhibit a “personality” — someone, whether you want to call him “David Byrne” or “Psycho Killer” or something else — who can be safely taken by the listener as either a portrait or a self-portrait.

What “I Zimbra” announces is the destruction of this individual limit to the band’s paranoiac worldview. This is a huge, if stealthy, gain for the album’s overarching authority. Our lives all feature air, paper, cities, mind, animals, memories, war, and so forth. “We dress like students, we dress like housewives …” Fear of Music will be a collective enunciation in which the listener is helplessly enmeshed or it will be nothing much — a “comedy album” (cf. Lester Bangs). By evaporating his individuality into the group-incantation of “I Zimbra” the singer prepares us, if only subconsciously, for our complicity with matters beyond any individual character’s neurotic grievances.

“I Zimbra”’s origin encodes Fear of Music’s motifs in one other sense: the Dada movement itself was a response to “life during wartime.” The European aftermath of the Great War seemed to dwarf all attempts at humane commemoration or remorse; trench warfare and mustard gas and shellshock were the language Hugo Ball and his fellow Dadaists sought to overwrite with their avant-gibberish.

* * *

If there’s any back door out of the future-shock corridor of “I Zimbra” it is proposed not by the singers, but by the bass player, who frequently seems to direct her instrument’s line into a rubbery skid toward this one-lane-highway’s ditch. The propulsive quorum — drums, guitar, and vocals — ignore her renegade proposal, pushing ever forward. The keyboard, gnarling in a neurotic collision with itself, never betrays the song’s pace, and so seems celebratory, a bow on the tightly wrapped package. This keyboard sound, ascending in jubilant dysfunction, concludes the track, boasting no exit, no exit, no exit. Relief comes not from within “I Zimbra”’s tensile structure, but from our easeful fall to the next song’s seeming amplitude and warmth. But look out.

Is Fear of Music a Talking Heads Record?

The opening few songs in Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads’ concert film, Stop Making Sense, reenact or allegorize the band’s early formation and later expansion: first the songwriter, alone with guitar and a beatbox, then bass player and drummer to form a rhythm section in support of him, then the keyboard player, who also plays second guitar. Expansion follows: conga players, back-up singers, a second bass, and a second keyboardist — yet anyone who cares for this band is meant to understand that the inner nougat, the band’s hard chewy center, is made complete when the fourth member appears on stage. Jerry Harrison, that fourth member, was actually added after Talking Heads had already declared themselves — and, as these things go, I do know at least one stone purist, happy privileged witness to a string of early gigs, who swears by the band as a threesome, claiming their ferocity and focus was irrevocably diluted by Harrison’s entry into Talking Heads — but he made it aboard in time for the first record. That’s good enough to qualify for a World Series share, or a plaque in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, should a band make it that far.

Brian Eno, the first “Fifth Head,” the aforementioned Trojan or stalking horse for all expansions to follow, doesn’t appear in Stop Making Sense.

A Talking Heads record? To the kid in the room, a stupid question. The quartet of the band, as presented on the first three records, and as would be reaffirmed by the back-to-basics (and post-Eno) Little Creatures, never, at the time of Fear of Music, seemed in the faintest doubt. Brian Eno was a producer. He hadn’t joined Devo, had he?

Yet as quickly as the band’s next album, Remain in Light (1980) and then the Byrne–Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) — two records as undeniable in their force and mystery as anything a listener could have wished — the original band’s integrity was partly conquered by another story. This went something like: a prodigy, a genius, outgrew, or anyway became impatient with, a context and a format — “rock band” and “pop song” — and at the same time, or as a result, began to separate himself from a group of friends, his bandmates. At the same time, the genius became infatuated with another genius, he who happened to be famously an outgrower too, specifically of the context and format of “rock band” and “pop song.”

Please understand: I’ve discovered that I’m uninterested in the personal historical facts in the matter at hand, no matter whether these would be labeled grievances or gossip or trivia or cultural history depending on the person or persons consulted or the angle or attitude of the accounts given. Any speculations I’ve framed here are from the perspective of someone invested — utterly and dangerously — in a work of art: Fear of Music. Such investment extends to a stake in the notion of that work’s implied author: in this case, Talking Heads.

When I say “implied author,” I mean of course not the ‘real’ Talking Heads, but the Talking Heads — or David Byrne, or Brian Eno — in my mind.

When I took on this perverse task, of writing a book with the same title as Fear of Music, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, nor how to begin doing it. My suspicion, though, was that the best value I could offer (to myself, I mean, for I was the only reader I could allow to matter) was to simply draw a circle on the page the exact size of an LP. Then to step inside, and put down in words exactly what I heard there.

I didn’t want to write about Fear of Music, I wanted to write Fear of Music.

Once begun, I found that the more I invited other stories inside that LP-sized circle — already so crowded with the enormity of the songs, plus the boy in his room who I’d discovered waiting to meet me there — the less I was able to make my own language for what I heard. In our age of information and access, getting off-line is already a commodity. (I write these words while using Freedom, a program I downloaded from the internet which temporarily kills the internet on my computer. I paid for it.) What’s less clearly valued (and impossible, I hope, to commodify) is the value of what Donald Barthelme called “not-knowing”: the manifold mercies of ignorance when setting out to do or say nearly anything.

Facts won’t do what I want them to.

Like any artist a part of what I want is to make my needful guesswork, my cherished misapprehensions, so persuasive and glorious that they become more valuable than any fact could ever be. In that pursuit, though I’ve had a stack of books at my elbow (listed in the endnotes), I’ve mostly used them to prime the well of my own biases. Otherwise, I’ve made it a point to undertake this work utilizing no direct sources whatsoever. Not only were no animals (or electric guitars) harmed, no one was interviewed in this effort beside myself — myself, and that kid in his room. Who are in many cases the same person, but at other times are not only two people but are complete fucking mysteries to one another.

Thus, in exclusive consultation with Selfipedia, allow me to declare that every once in a while rhetorical questions have definite answers. Of course Fear of Music is a Talking Heads record! Its permanent force and presence arise from the context and format of a rock band playing pop songs. The boy in the room was right never to question this.

What he couldn’t have known until Remain in Light and beyond, but what he then began to suspect and I have found myself troubling over ever since, is that in some ways it may be the last Talking Heads record. And that suspicion — that it is for the boy in his room not only the summit of the efforts of his favorite rock band, but a kind of too-sudden termination of those efforts (no matter how compelling some of the subsequent work done under the name seemed to him at the time, or later), the possibility that the secret of its terminal status is disclosed throughout the album in the form of a series of small but unmistakable fissures, in the form of tiny farewells, will be one of the subjects of this book.

Mind

One place this band has always excelled is in what a comic-book fan would call the “gutters” — the white space between panels on the page, and the implications created by the panels’ juxtaposition, which resides in that white space. Of course, songs on LPs always had pauses between them. What self-conscious Pop Art did to the comic-book panel was isolate it and put a frame around it. (As the Dadaists will tell you, it’s context that turns an artifact into art.) From then on, any artistically ambitious page of comic-book panels — or, if you accept my analogy, any album conscious of being more than a collection of singles (i.e. post-Sgt. Pepper’s, at latest) could be taken as the equivalent of a museum full not only of artworks but of transitions between artworks. These intervals are charged with the interference of residual vibration, smashed up against the arrival of new forms after an unspecified duration of anticipatory silence.

The heartbeat between the first and second track of Fear of Music is one of the best gutters in Talking Heads’ repertoire. Where “I Zimbra” is closeted, “Mind” blurts open. Guitars chime to declare an atmosphere of musical and mental spaciousness, but not a chilly spaciousness (at least by contrast to “I Zimbra”). Fleshier tonalities and a goofy call-and-response by the guitar and keyboard seem to present a humane invitation to the reasonable listener, whose presence — “you” — is now acknowledged, as is his/her native tongue. The elastic, plosive bass line has not only got the song firmly in its grip this time, the rhythm section seem to be the only players with a sense of the song’s plot.

Elsewhere, loose-jointed guitar figures evoke a marionette stumbling onstage, keyboard washes point straight to Sun Ra’s outer galaxies, and the singer’s gone all dreamy, humming and mumbling to himself when he’s not detailing his unguarded and tremulous desire to locate the magic ingredient that will “change your mind.” The proposition’s initially inviting; it might be gratifying to satisfy the yodely pining of the song’s narrator, who resembles, for an instant, anyway, the Hank Williams of “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)” or “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do” or “Half as Much.” We may find ourselves compelled, when those songs reach our hearts, to sing back: “I’ll change!” or “I still do!” or “I love you twice as much, you big dummy!” Where the album’s first song seemed to leapfrog beyond Fear of Music’s stated premises, at the start “Mind” seems to slip back, toward the manner of the two earlier Talking Heads’ records. A listener could reassure herself that this is just another alienated and neurotic take on the “first-person relationship complaint” song. This narrator is charismatic, so his petition is flattering. “Don’t give up!” the listener may wish to reply. “You’re changing my mind, I can feel it now!”

Yet “Mind” gets a second chance to make a first impression. As the pleasant contrast with “I Zimbra” fades in sonic memory, the song’s warmth abates too. Its invitation becomes steadily less promising — harder to imagine taking, and more baited than it initially appeared. The first thing that overtakes the song’s pleasant aura is a hostility deeper than can be cheerfully resolved within the song’s terms, if one takes it for a relationship song. The second thing that overtakes it is the suspicion that it can’t be taken for a relationship song. There’s a kind of M.C. Escher action of self-erasure in “Mind”’s inmost pattern, an unwinnable game between an uncertain number of players. The song has trapdoors in its pronoun structure: the “I–You” doesn’t persuade us, in the end. Or should I say that it doesn’t persuade you?

First, though, comes the matter of “Mind”’s placement as the start of a series: a Table of Contents that’s also a Table of Elements, or a list of Topics for Study. Mind, Paper, Cities, Air, Heaven, Electric Guitar, Animals, Drugs. (See also: Fear. Music.) The solitary nouns seem to propose a quarantine of sheer necessity: these items are too potent — especially for those of us enduring a background of fear, those living through wartime or sifting through memories that can’t wait — to deal with except in turn, in a series of scrupulous isolations. Taken individually, possibly we can make some useful sense of them. Like Mister Spock freshly landed on a strange new planet, we can use Fear of Music like a tricorder, to dissect the novelty and danger residing in things we take for granted, but shouldn’t: “’Mind’, Captain, appears to be an elusive projection generated by the biological brains of these creatures; a metaphor, really, for the self-narrating consciousness they experience but whose existence in themselves or others they may only assert or postulate, never prove.”

The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can’t trust what its light reveals. The song has a mind of its own! This narrator’s crazed muttering reveals that he’s preemptively bogged down in a suspiciously sticky relationship, both to “mind” and to “you,” the mind’s possessor — exasperated, fond, contemptuous, above all invested, obtrusively invested. Our leader’s more like Captain Kirk than Mr. Spock: he’s come to this crisis pre-deranged, too full of emotion.

What’s more, the conceptual quarantine between elements won’t hold. From the very first, recombinancy among these nouns is the order of the day: maybe “Drugs” will change “Mind” — no? Well, we’ve got some other stuff to try. But “you,” whoever you are, you’re not easy. Among the many things that won’t, it turns out, change “you”: time, money, drugs, religion, science and, finally “I,” which returns us to pronoun difficulties. Impossible not to notice, too, that the first pair of items fruitlessly applied to “your mind” — Time and Money — while not included as song titles on Fear of Music, do appear on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973), that unlikely and possibly embarrassing precedent for a concept-album anchored by generic nouns. This application of one element to another suggests Fear of Music’s silliest side, the album as a kind a kind of absurdist — or Dada? — kit-and-kaboodle. What if the animals tried to play the electric guitar? What if we gave them the drugs? Excuse me, my mind’s wandering. More germane may be the hiding-in-plain-sight noun, fear. It’s been proposed that “Fear of (signifier)” is the key to parsing the album: the “real” subject being fear of air, fear of drugs, fear of heaven, fear of cities and animals and so forth.

So — Fear of Mind? That gets closer to the song’s secret attitude, its slide into aggrieved mockery — hear how the word “mind” gets chewed like scenery in the song’s second and third acts, its validity as a positive human attribute cast in doubt. It almost sounds as if the term is being employed in sarcastic retort to an apology for a pedestrian collision, or rather to an apology that was expected but didn’t come: “Do you miiinnnd?” (A later Talking Heads song, “The Lady Don’t Mind,” repurposes the word exactly this way, defiantly, jubilantly. Having stopped making sense, you’re free not to mind, to lose your mind, even to … never mind.) Fear? Maybe. In my hearing, the longer this fellow hurls himself against its battened hatches, the more he resents the mind in question, or the fact of mind altogether.

“Mind,” like mind, is miasmic. (If only it had been called “Brain” instead, we might have something to properly dissect.) Is there a noun on this list less tangible? Air, like mind, is invisible, but, unlike mind, its existence can be easily demonstrated, and its absence would be immediately disastrous (if you lose your air, you know it, but that isn’t necessarily true for losing your mind). Heaven might seem as much or more a matter of faith — like mind, you’re free to dispute it as wholly imaginary — but every now and then we can agree with another person that this world may in fact be heaven, or at least some particular clearing in the woods might be, or a sublime meal, or a sexual epiphany. There’s never anything you can point out to another person and say: “This is mind, right here!” The more you press the case, the more the subject slips away. And yet it’s also everywhere. Or at least everywhere we look.

What a lousy start to our inventory! As the first in the album’s noun collection, “Mind” was probably a regrettable choice. Perhaps if mind exists at all, it’s a bourgeois vestige, best left behind like the burned notebooks in “Life During Wartime”: mind won’t help you survive. Worse, it raises the specter of solipsism: “It was all in his mind.”

* * *

“Everything seems to be up in the air at this point.” Here’s one of Fear of Music’s characteristically equivocal and tenuous “coping” statements, along with “still might be a chance that it might work out” (“Paper”); “some good points, some bad points” (“Cities”); and “it’ll be over in a minute or two” (“Drugs”). The counterpoint to panic isn’t a revelation of immanent deliverance or satisfaction, but rather the consoling notion that at least nothing’s final. Here’s the good news: Dreadful outcomes are far from certain! Much remains open to negotiation! This kind of blandly palliative remark is unusual, in rock ’n’ roll songs, which specializes in “hotter” expressions of rage, dread, or sorrow — traceable to the medium’s primary sources in blues, sermons, and overwrought teenage emotion. A prevalence of these moderate, forestalling, or placating phrases is one of this band’s true signatures.

Then again, “you’re not even listening to me.” Casual a joke as this may seem, if taken literally it’s one of the oddest uses of the second-person pronoun in pop, rivaled only by Carly Simon’s more blatant stunt, “You probably think this song is about you.” What both this and the Carly Simon lyrics accomplish is the instantaneous division of “you” from the song’s actual listener. If you’re hearing these words, they don’t apply to you, whereas drivers who don’t tailgate never see the words “If You Can Read This Bumper Sticker You’re Too Close.” In both cases the partition of you-the-subject from you-the-hearer enlists you-the-hearer on the side of the singer’s criticism. How dare you be so vain as to not even listen to this song about you … you, you, dirty rotten whoever-you-are.

Then again again, “you’re not even listening to me” is a lyric that mutates when the song moves from the studio to a live stage. It goes from a sort of truth — a singer recording a track is displaced, spacio-temporally, from his listener’s ear, even more so a songwriter jotting a line on a piece of paper — to an exuberant falsehood, one lampooning those within hearing range and in full-frontal view, the paying customers. Fear of Music is an album created by a largish-cult band with a modest live reputation playing gigs in clubs, but who were in the process of becoming major stars and a legendary live act giving concerts in arenas. Like this line, many of this claustrophobic album’s meanings were destined to transmute when shifted into the celebratory air of a mass event.

* * *

In traditional accounts (that’s to say, in Bob Dylan’s accounts), when a singer sings “you” he often means “me,” much as in dreams where the dreamer’s persona is projected onto another. Could “Mind” be a self-addressed stamped envelope? More particularly, is the singer addressing his own deafened mind? If we supposed that “You” and “I” were trapped in the same skull, it would at least explain the singer’s investment in the hopeless effort: “I need something to change YOU, mind.” The repetitions, and the mounting derangement, make this perhaps another portrait of a psycho killer standing before an occluded mirror (“You talkin’ to me? I don’t seen anyone else here”). Yet with what would he address his mind if not his mind? The answer appears: “It comes directly from my heart to you.” The entry of this other phantasmal body part — the human heart personified as a seat of emotion, rather than the blood-pumping workhorse of anatomy — is so unexpectedly cornpone that we may experience it as sardonic. “Winning hearts and minds,” you’ll recall, is a military goal, but here one heart claims access to another, while damnable mind goes on huddling in its lead-lined bunker.

Whether heart’s petition is sincere or mocking, “Mind” is the nearest this album comes to a love song, albeit a failed one. Perhaps that expectation needed trashing right up front: if “I Zimbra” wasn’t clear enough, here’s a literal demolition of anyone’s hopes for interpersonal communion. Happy now? “Paper” will mention a love affair dismissively (only paper, and some rays passed through), and, together with “Life During Wartime” — “no time for lovey-dovey” — plainly establishes that we can’t afford that sticky stuff anymore. So, if we sort these songs out into separate implicit-narrators, the singer troubling sentimentally over changing your mind may be, despite all his animus, and his tone of superiority, the most hapless in the album’s array. He’s a throwback, one caught with his mental pants down, apprehended in the very act of getting the Fear memo. Elsewhere, mostly, these narrators are pre-disenchanted, have already learned of the intransigence of formerly viable modes like dancing, talk, names, breathing, parties, nightclubs, etc. They’ve more often come to deliver bad news than to receive it.

* * *

The lunatic optimism of “Mind”’s ascending guitar pattern and squirting keyboard noises (sound effects for screwball-comedy chemists brewing novelties in a beaker) together with the chipper can-do-ism of the rhythm section, present a burbling wind-up toy that mistook itself for a machine of some great and important purpose. Really, the thing’s only bumping into walls (science, religion, whatever), righting itself, and continuing merrily nowhere. By the end the singer seems in on the joke, but that doesn’t mean the thing’s run down yet — the key was wound too tightly for that. He’s obliged to continue his fruitless search, which by its absurdist nature is unlikely to succeed but can never decisively fail, either. (If I can’t change your mind, then how can my ass follow?) Just after the 3-minute mark, and with nearly a minute remaining, relief of a sort comes in the form of a guitar part, one expulsive and obtrusive enough to dismantle, if not resolve, the song’s dilemma. The player rudely howls a pair of long, bent notes, then scratches convulsively to fill the measure before he can howl again. The result is alternately jeering and spastic — disdainful, then complicit. Hard to call it a solo, exactly, though like a lot of the rudimentary instrumental passages on the album it looks (in retrospect) like a placeholder for more elaborate adornments fellows like Adrian Belew and Bernie Worrell will offer in live renditions. Whether anything could improve on this guitar’s commentary, though, is unlikely. The song never recovers its mind. Since it never had one in the first place, we feel great.

Is Fear of Music a David Byrne Album?

I’ve referred, variously, to the singer, the songwriter, the guitar player, the narrator, and he. All of these are, approximately and most of the time, also a single human person named David Byrne. (The guitar player might sometimes be Jerry Harrison, or Brian Eno’s secret weapon, Robert Fripp). Talk about noun and pronoun difficulties! No matter your investment in the premise of a collective entity known as Talking Heads, we’re forced here to pause and admit that this band has a clear leader. Even the boy in his room knows this, in 1979. When, later, this band broke up, David Byrne was the apparent author of that rift, just as he’s hovering behind any notion of the “implicit author” of Fear of Music as a single artwork or set of songs. This shouldn’t necessarily be a difficulty: talking about Talking Heads while acknowledging David Byrne’s primacy. As with loads of other bands whose singer is also the chief songwriter — The Doors, say, or the CBGB-generation contemporaries, Television — much of the songs’ meaning flows through the personality, or at least the assumed persona, of the singer in question. And, if “everyone knows” that David Byrne’s solo work doesn’t merit comparison to his achievements working inside the Talking Heads apparatus (a received opinion I’m comfortable passing along so long as I confess I haven’t personally conducted the investigations that would bear it out as my own view), it’s worth saying that nobody would even bother making the same comparison with Jerry Harrison’s solo career, or Tina Weymouth’s. So let’s face facts: we’re crediting a tremendous amount of what we admire in Fear of Music to this individual person even as we tend to want to chide him — and bystanders whose view of the band’s career may seem to us superficial — for undervaluing the fertility of the group dynamic in creating what was presented under its collaborative auspices.

I’m still very much like that kid in his room, wishing for this mysterious collective unit to possess uncanny powers unknown to any individual human including themselves.

A fan’s romance with the notion of a band as a gestalt creative entity weirdly both extends and reverses the Romantic-Modernist ideal of the individual creator as possessor of a Promethean imperative. The “genius” exists so long as Lennon and McCartney & Co. — or the Go-Between’s’ Grant McClennan and Robert Forster, or Husker Du’s Bob Mould and Grant Hart, or ? and The Mysterians or whomever you may choose to romanticize — remain locked in one another’s orbit. This kind of “genius” is always humbled by the mortal fall into individualism (despite the fact that the individual participants may experience this change as analogous to the universal human experience of outgrowing one’s original family and venturing forth into the world-at-large, a comparison especially hard to dispute for those whose collaborators include Dave Davies or Dennis Wilson or Pop Staples).

My excuse for laboring at this subject is the suspicion that such anxieties swirl in the undertow of some of Fear of Music’s peculiar voicings. To put it in terms of a simple and completely irresponsible biographical speculation: it looks to me like David Byrne, the hyper-aware singer-songwriter-bandleader, feeling the Talking Heads’ project moving steadily from the realm of amateur-underground-art-project and into that of a professional success on music-industry terms, was motivated as much by the anxiety over the limitations (and routine) of the role as by the prospect of fame and wealth, or by continued growth opportunities for the band configured-as-such. In other words, David Byrne didn’t want to become the nerd Mick Jagger. For it was Jagger’s fate to be seen as somehow both apart from, and utterly incomplete without, his musical collaborators, even as the potential meaning of the Rolling Stones’ music became more and more a product and symptom of Jagger’s projected persona, circumscribed by its established interests and attitudes.

Evidence for my irresponsible theory is easy to amass in the long run: Byrne’s shift to film, theater, writing, and impresario work; his abjuration of his personal voice (in various senses) through the Remain in Light, Catherine Wheel, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts projects; his expansion of the Talking Heads onstage population so as to render problematic or irrelevant the band’s strict definition; his attraction to uncommercial “outsider” models of ongoing musical activity, like Brian Eno and Terry Allen; and of course, his tiptoeing off into solo work.

Evidence that this impulse was afoot as early as Fear of Music is more a matter of wild supposition. It also interests me totally, because it converges with the album’s inbuilt themes. Endtimes. Self-dissolution and disassociation. Collective apprehension and distrust. Stress.

If, just as a band is meeting the world’s embrace, and doing so much to the delight of its other members, you find yourself already less than completely comfortable being its Head, and doing its Talking, what’s the solution? Disappear into the band, or from it?

Could Talking Heads be the mind the singer’s afraid he can’t change? How do you change a mind you’re in, one that dreamed you up in the first place?

Paper

Confronting the first of the tangible nouns, the band renews their commitment to guitars, which, abruptly in command, seem delighted to have rehabilitated themselves from the daffy slackness of “Mind.” No dubious keyboard doodles here. In fact, after a brief, tightly wound but deceptively lyrical overture, the guitars attack their subject with a needling acuity, answering the challenge of the Gatling-gun drumming and a mercenary bass line that labors to double down on the song’s blood pressure. These are art-punk guitars when they want to be, the equal to any No Wave compatriot’s, though the poppy neatness of the songcraft tends to disguise it.

With the album’s third song this band appears to have recovered its grip on sonic urgencies: the sensuously layered textures of well-articulated panic, the urban-neurotic imperative. What a relief. You could say that “Paper” splits the difference between “I Zimbra”’s edginess and “Mind”’s unspooled languor, or that it claims the first song’s scratchy ferocity as a curative to the second’s atmosphere of illness, its failure to delineate clear boundaries on its uneasy subject. “Paper” is a fence that makes a good neighbor to “Mind”’s unkempt lawn. And meeting the second on our list of Things To Consider renews our sense of the project’s forward momentum.

But oh, the disordered tenant staring from between the blinds of the windows behind that good fence! “Paper” is the first of the album’s admonitory songs (“Life During Wartime,” “Air,” and others will bear this mode forward: Fear of Music as a series of flashing Warning Signs) and possibly its least coherent. What’s at stake here, and which is the corrupted element? Who’s the victim? Candidates range among the obvious and obscure, the named and unnamed: Paper, light, rays, priorities (“it’s been taken care of”), time (“expose yourself for a minute” / ”take a few weeks off”), or the limits of expression (“don’t think I can fit it on the paper” / ”Make it tighter, tighter”). “Rays” are, inevitably, radiation. This forecasts “Life During Wartime,” and alludes to this band’s generation’s backdrop of Cold War fear, of Mutual Assured Dystopia — klaxons to send you scurrying to basement clutching a few useless personal documents, the sky-flash which brands photographic impressions of evaporated bodies onto plaster and pavement, transforming the city’s surfaces into light-sensitive paper, and the fallout which erodes all substance from within, exposing the innate permeability of skin or paper, rendering it translucent, fated to petrify into dust.

Another candidate for the song’s true subject, one proximate to twentieth-century war-fear, may be paranoia itself. For, along with advancing the list of nouns, “Paper”’s been entrusted with one baseline thematic task — just as “Mind” conjured solipsism, “Paper” is here to inject paranoia into the album’s bloodstream. Judging by the singer’s tone of panic, those rays passing through paper and self and love affair all too absolutely unmake this song’s effort to “hold on”; the guitars, hypervigilant in their foxholes, seem to agree. “Nothing to fear but fear itself,” the summit of Greatest Generation bravado, finds itself rewritten in Cold War jitters: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody out to get you. The character peering through his blinds in a tinfoil-lined beanie may know something you don’t.

In a less global sphere, “Paper” enacts an artistic crisis, possibly even discloses a blatantly embarrassing case of writer’s block. The harder you try to parse the lyrics the more they resemble a vortex of notes — pages flying off a calendar, or perhaps a refrigerator daubed with Post-Its, proposals for possible songs about paper that never quite got around to being written. These notions may have been jotted down on waking from a dream, or while stoned: they seemed good at the time. Transitions are missing, maybe because they were impossible in the first place, negotiating as they would have had to between unresolved and contradictory premises residing warily in the same zone. Not so much thesis and antithesis as a constellation of inklings suspended at awkward angles from one another. The sole element linking all this paper, ironically, is those rays passing through. These perhaps stand for the intangible substance of the singer’s exigencies, his yearning for solace or confirmation — mind again!

Let’s tabulate a few of these fluttering scraps:

“It’s been taken care of” / ”Take a few weeks off.” Office politics, agendas. Voice of the boss. The paper discloses a whiff of Kafka bureaucracy.

“Long distance telephone call.” The paper’s outmoded. Yet communication breakdown’s always the same.

“Hold on to that paper.” Someone may want to inspect your credentials or ID. “Your papers, please.”

“Don’t think I can fit it” / ”Go ahead and tear it up.” Bad day in the artist’s studio.

“Even though it was never written down, still might be a chance that it might work out.” “We sounded pretty good in that jam a while ago. If only the tape had been running.”

“Was a lot of fun, could have been a lot better.” This extends a groggy tendril toward the dissolute, morning-after party-animal of “Memories Can’t Wait” and “Drugs.”

And so on.

Well, at least we can now check two items off our topic list, even if the second is a song that’s like a list itself, a compilation of half-muttered remarks on the degraded viability of doing things like writing down lists and checking off items. On earlier albums Talking Heads treated art-making pretty reverently; “Paper”’s where that reverence goes to die. It’s the nemesis-song for an earlier Talking Heads’ track: the heartfelt “The Book I Read,” in which stable value is accorded to a bound stack of pages and also to a fan letter jotted in the encounter’s aftermath, thus doubly affirming the efficient and humane connection between writer and reader. (“Mind” is nemesis-song to “You Pulled Me Up,” rebuking its glib reach-out-and-touch-someone/Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me” vibe. “I Zimbra,” abjuring meaning, picks no battles, unless it picks them all.)

“Paper” is one of the smallish ambulances racketing through this war zone, bearing just a casualty or two. The song is taut, and svelte. At 2:39 the shortest track on the album by a good measure, it perfectly hinges Side One, while risking being the album’s most forgettable. Not “worst” — it’s too taut, svelte, and guitarishly fierce to be that, and if this album needs a worst song there’s a better candidate, surely — but the most generically obedient to the overarching concept. It’s also lodged at the portal through which now comes a procession of indelible monsters. All it needs do, then, is pry that door open.

Is Fear of Music a Text?

“Fear of Music may be punk’s most modernist text. It tries to understand itself, but can’t quite.”

John Hilgart

If “Talking Heads” are the collective “implicit author” of Fear of Music, and David Byrne is, in turn, the band’s “auteur,” and if David Byrne is the type of rock musician who will eventually end up writing “real” (as opposed to “as-told-to”) books, and if books, including this one, are written about the band and its singer-lyricist-leader and its songs and albums, and if songs have lyrics which are quotable and analyzable, and if Fear of Music is, in at least certain quarters, received as a kind of “concept album,” does any of this mean, necessarily, that there is a text in this class?

Well, I hear you say, you’ve certainly been treating it as one to this point!

If writing about music is, in Frank Zappa’s memorable phrase, “dancing about architecture” (an oddly Talking Headsian phrase, or thing to do), then the act of analyzing lyrics is self-incrimination for that crime, the writer being drawn to the writerly aspect of his subject matter: dancing about the blueprints, instead of the building. This simple attraction of like-to-like is the reason a hundred books have been written about Bob Dylan for every one written about James Brown. (Well, one reason.) Yet an interest in language, in names, categories, and concepts, is more than a writer’s tropism — it’s a human one. We dwell in a world of labeled objects and notions: paper, animals, and dreams. These signposts, arbitrary and weightless at their point of origin, now weigh a thousand pounds each, at least, burdened as they are with explaining nothing less than our inner and outer experiences to ourselves — explaining world to self, and self to world.

Lyrics are more than just the pin stuck through the butterfly of the song — securing it to some page for inspection, but murdering its flight — if only for the simple fact that the pin of language is actually embedded at both ends, with the song strung in the middle. At one end, the pin goes through a collective human impulse as old as human history, that of meaning-attempting-to-happen in a meaningless universe (this is why Hugo Ball addressing a posh crowd with a presentation like “Gadji Beri Bimba” really was a radically hostile gesture, a hostility which I believe still exists as a trace essence in the Talking Heads’ repurposing of those syllables). At the other end, the pin is stuck into you.

Songs are saddled with words, then, as bodies on earth are saddled with minds. (Free your mind, and your ass will nevertheless drag it around wherever it goes.) Speaking as a non-musician, when I get a tune stuck in my head, even one where the tune and instrumentation is sophisticated but the lyrics vacuous — “The Girl From Ipanema,” say — I notice myself hearing the words, the voice of the singer, no matter how much I may credit the stuckness-in-head to the music instead. They’re stuck together. And so I end up with some portion of my brain returned to a beach in Brazil, one I’ve never visited personally, where I am forced to choose sides between identifying with or censuring the oglers who sigh as that bikini-clad Ipanemanian Girl strolls past. Conversely, when I find myself surprised by the arrival of Talking Heads’ “No Compassion” in my head, if I work backwards I often find it is because some friend of mine has just then been offloading emotional freight that I would really prefer they’d withheld until their next session with their analyst. Isn’t that what they’re paid for?

Talking of “Paper,” I mentioned writer’s block. According to the anecdotage surrounding Fear of Music (which even as we cite we’ll want to remind ourselves may be unreliable or misleading) this album arose in a creative vacuum, the band’s songwriter not having a tremendous wealth of material in pocket going in. The band had been touring just before, a state not conducive to writing songs. Of course, heading into a recording session with Brian Eno, avatar of counterintuitive methodologies and oblique strategies, it may be the case that sometimes nothing is a real cool hand. It was reportedly Eno who suggested the Hugo Ball poem to fill a musical framework that had seemed to resist lyrics, and Eno who became interested when he overheard Byrne humming a melody to himself while washing dishes, one discounted by the singer as anything useful for the band, but which evolved into “Heaven.” And it is Eno, a musician who nowadays bothers with lyrics and singing on a small minority of his projects, who has famously expressed a belief that lyrics are unimportant. What’s apparent is that Byrne, bookish songwriter, in this case wrote, if not with difficulty, at least differently; the topic-songs functioned as a distancing maneuver. Old habits, old techniques were called into question.

This group of songs is writerly without being wordy. It’s closer to John Wesley Harding than Blood on the Tracks. Compared to a novella of an album by Bright Eyes or Okkervil River, it’s a haiku. Still anything that troubles so extensively over the viability of text — absconded languages, changed names, irradiated paper, incinerated notebooks — probably is one.

As with nearly all of Talking Heads records before and after, “Fear of Music”’s sessions resulted in very few outtakes. Twenty-seven years later, the expanded official release only offered one sketchy riff, “Dancing for Money,” and three alternate tracks — an early version of “Mind” (the vocal too deranged too quickly) and glimpses of “Cities” and “Life During Wartime” which aren’t actually different performances but rather variant studio-constructions revealing paths-not-taken in the final mix. (On the black market, a few variations on “Drugs” have made themselves known. It would be “Drugs,” wouldn’t it?) The black monolith stands alone — someone swept up the marble chips. Neatness counts.

The boy from long ago approves. For him, Fear of Music is an edifice. It would have been impossible for him to view it as provisional or tenuous in any degree. Fear of Music was given. It appeared. To know that was enough. He wouldn’t have cared to uncover some large compendium of sonic leavings or rough drafts, which have a tendency to unbraid the songs as finished objects. He’d rather I sit and listen harder to the sacred accidents that have been stuck in his head for more than thirty years, even as he scoffs that no one could ever have listened harder to them then he did right at the inception of the relationship. For him, the songs resemble an array of stones facing one another in an ancient circle, each amplifying a cumulative mystery with their own. Embrace the fact that this text is forever closed, and describe its insular workings. Don’t make it less itself; make it more.

Cities

The next ambulance is audible from miles away, klaxons screaming, tires swerving and juttering on blacktop, chassis screaming across the horizon, the whole thing lit up like a, well, like a house on fire. This ambulance must be fucking huge! No minor emergency now. The distant alarms of “Cities”’s fade-in signals panic to our hindbrain, the headachy prodrome of in-progress calamity, though one with the fervor of a discothèque. The injured in this ambulance are surely up on their shattering limbs, dancing like the mummies in that Michael Jackson video. It’s a disco ambulance. Hearing it approach, you understand this party has no beginning or end, never stops, only moves to the next town. Now it’s coming to yours. You won’t notice your headache for the duration of the ambulance’s visit, for the sound approaching is the sound of that-pain-which-drives-out-pain. Or drives over it.

When the whole mighty armature at last heaves into view, it’s really not an ambulance at all. It’s a metropolis on wheels, one of those futuristic anomalies, like the cities-on-tracks in an SF novel by Brian Aldiss or Christopher Priest. Houses in motion! We’re greeted with the sound of four musicians using their instruments like an erector set to construct a skyline that won’t fall down before they’re finished. The instruments each hammer rhythm, and the singer hammers, too. All the forward motion feels pretty good in the lower quarters. If to a man holding a hammer everything looks like a nail, to a guitarist this itchy, a drummer this drawn to his high-hat, and a bass player with her pulse racing, everything looks like a dance floor. Under the ominous veneer, the punk panic of the car-alarm effects, the grinding of some Eno-processed Berlin noise, “Cities” runs the Velvets’ “Rock and Roll” straight into K.C. and The Sunshine Band’s boundless groove: One fine morning she put on the radio station and she said, that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh uh-huh! Find a city, make a little love, get down tonight!

* * *

“Cities” and “Life During Wartime” are so closely related it seems bold they were chosen to live side by side. It’s testament to their mutual strength that nothing is lost in the comparison; each, taking their turn, may seem the album’s showstopper, at least while onstage. Basically, “Cities” is “Life During Wartime”’s younger brother, as disco is a younger sibling to funk, more frisky and free, not bearing so many of the burdens of its progenitors. Like a lot of younger brothers, “Cities” parrots some of its older brother’s cherished notions and cheekily contradicts others, or declares them irrelevant, not such a big deal. (“Wartime,”
ominously: “I sleep in the daytime / Work in the nighttime.” “Cities,”
jauntily: “The people sleep, sleep in the daytime / If they want to, if they want to!”) Like a lot of younger brothers, “Cities” is funnier than its elder.

Both songs have a “bigness” that’s new for this band. They suggest a vastness glimpsed in portion, a tip-of-the-iceberg sensation, partly by the device of non-repeating lyrics that appear to be part of a geographical survey or handbook of survival tips. “Cities” actually only mentions London, Birmingham, and Memphis — there’s a good chance you’ll recall it as having been many more — but the implication is of a list so large it gathers in even those smaller Southern destinations as well as a European capital, and therefore probably goes on forever, both before the fade-in and after the fade-out. (“Did I forget to mention Memphis?” is devilish sleight-of-hand in this regard.) Both songs feature a certain insatiable-monster quality to their riffs. They’re unkillable, but not impersonal like “I Zimbra”; they might kill you. As it happens, neither song is long — “Wartime” is barely longer than “Mind,” and “Cities” loses out by a whole minute to “Drugs,” the album’s longest. But they feel bigger. Whatever “major” means, these attain. They’re thick, not thin. Houses with rooms to inhabit and get lost in. On the previous record, More Songs About Buildings and Food, only the funk cover, “Take Me to the River” attains the thickness of “Cities” and “Life During Wartime,” sound-paint applied to blot out everywhere the pencil-sketch beneath. Even when that earlier album’s songs are dominated by thickened sequences — “Stay Hungry,” say — they retreat at other points to the tinny, demo-ish tone that was this band’s first trademark.

Of course, thickness was the next stop for this band, who were on the verge of being literally thickened by five new members (making Jerry Harrison’s arrival merely that of the lead clown out of the circus car). The sound-palette of Remain in Light would be gobs of impasto painted over broken ceramic, glued to a canvas now utterly concealed.

* * *

“Cities” is a watershed, in a lineage that describes the long-term accommodation of Talking Heads’ cosmopolitanism to the fact of the heartland, the house-training of their nervous New Yorker’s grievance against wide open spaces.

At one end of this continuum stands “Big Country,” from More Songs About Buildings and Food, with its notorious declaration: I wouldn’t live there if you paid me. According to Lester Bangs: “Finally somebody said it: there is nothing beyond Jersey; Jack Kerouac made all that shit up, he was a science fiction writer.” Yet as much as its obnoxiously dry lyric begs to be taken literally, even “Big Country” contains a trace of back-door negotiation with what it denounces: the slide guitar, a self-conscious gesture for a punk or even new wave band in 1978, a violation of the anti-pastoral ethos to which Talking Heads had staked their claim. (For a comparable gesture, consider the ostentatious wail of bent guitar strings in the Ramones’ “Questioningly,” also from 1978.)
The slide-guitar can be taken two ways: a satirical gesture, furthering the song’s atmosphere of scorn by framing a sound that’s emblematically “corny,” or a preemptive musical apology for the slight.

Lurking behind Bangs’ remark is the iconic Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover: the west side of Manhattan, showing Ninth through Twelfth
Avenues giving way to the Hudson River, and then to a vast plain dotted with place-names, beyond which is glimpsed the Pacific Ocean, and Japan. The Steinberg foregrounds a self-satisfied confession of the Gothamite’s solipsist vanity, as well as his or her naïveté about other places. Perhaps less obvious to those not native to the five-borough asylum, the drawing can be viewed even more simply as an admission of agoraphobia, that non-apocryphal New Yorkian fear of the open sky. The kid in his room, for instance, knew another kid who’d wept in terror when as a third-grader he’d for the first time been taken to Far Rockaway for a glimpse of the horizon.

This is the Cary Grant North By Northwest crop-duster sensation — the nightmare, in flyover country, of becoming the one flown over. This Fear of Nowhere theme hides everywhere in Talking Heads’ work; in “Big Country,” as in the Steinberg drawing, it hides inside urban arrogance.

At the other end of the continuum, on which “Cities” marks the midpoint, lies “People Like Us,” from the 1986 film and album True Stories, which claims total mind-meld with the provinces: I heart the heartland! If the songwriter of “Big Country” was looking to apologize, here he finally got it off his chest.

“People Like Us” (to begin with the good) is catchy and polished song-craft, in a lineage from the Randy Newman of Good Old Boys. The former nervous wreck of a singer has grown capable of flooding a track with congeniality and compassion. Yet that boy in the room, his life rearranged by love of certain songs and albums, charges me with the necessity of saying how much he loathed “People Like Us.” At the time, it was a deal-breaker. I’m still with him. The core of my dislike is the song’s blurring of the singer’s confession of feeling “not the same as everyone else” with the collective plaint, “Times are hard for people like us.” The slippage between those lines I can’t live with. More, the apparently magnanimous “we don’t want freedom / we don’t want justice” surfs over an undertow of judgmentality. This is “Big Country” again, only turned inside out.

I do, however, sort of like the least defensible line: “People like us, growing big as a house.” The skinny songwriter once expressed regret at True Stories being presented as a Talking Heads album (“Those songs weren’t for me to sing”); we might imagine he’s thinking “big as a house” were words we’d prefer hearing from John Goodman. Yet it recalls the houses scattered like green Monopoly tokens through Talking Heads’ work; “Love Goes to a Building on Fire,” “Don’t Worry About the Government” (“They all need buildings to help them along”), More Songs About Buildings and Food, “Houses in Motion,” “This is not my beautiful house,” etc., etc. There’s something needful in the persistence of this oblique conflation of houses and selves, buildings and bodies. From David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries:

Cities are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts … you don’t need CAT scans and cultural anthropologists to show you what’s going on inside the human mind; its inner works are manifested in three dimensions, all around us.

If lurking in the City-Versus-Country scheme is agoraphobic fear of the diminution of the human form, perhaps “growing big as a house” proposes a solution to the anxieties aroused by Texas: erect a self substantial as a building. Like the “big suit” the singer used to fill out the ludicrous outlines of a rock star, as his concert stages grew more and more to resemble the prairie or desert, exposing him like a bug — or a New Yorker — dragged into the light.

* * *

So “Cities” locates a midpoint: call it a snapshot of an in-progress negotiation with the ineradicable fact of other places. These cities arouse enormous distress in a narrator who nonetheless works in good faith to grant their actuality, their good and bad points. For the formerly prejudiced, it might be an accomplishment worth bragging of, just to be able to say and sincerely mean it, that you’re “checking it out.” I’ll make up my mind when I’m ready.

Yet why so much pulse-racing exhilaration? Whence the giddy jokes about home cooking and Elvis? Maybe this is a song that can’t quite take its own premise seriously. (Birmingham? Really? The game’s rigged. At least try Chicago, or Los Angeles.) Or possibly this is a song of departure, maybe even secretly a break-up song: to entertain options is a threat and a promise of leaving, a harbinger of freedom. I’ll find me a city to (really) live in — that’ll show her!

Speaking things-catching-fire, the river that smells like home cooking could be about to burst into flames, incorporating Cleveland and Randy Newman’s “Burn On, Big River” into this scenario.

The out-of-character goofiness in calling Memphis “Home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks” sounds like Steve Martin’s contemporaneous novelty hit “King Tut”: he who was “born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia,” but also the B-52s’ “Mesopotamia” (a song produced, in 1981, by David Byrne). “Mesopotamia”’s another song that uses a fade-in to introduce panicky dance riffs, and concerns itself with the wish to travel, and flippantly advertises the amnesiac paltriness of American knowledge of other places: “I am no student of ancient culture / Before I talk, I should read a book / But there’s one thing that I do know / There’s a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia.” These jokes incorporate a grain of what might be called “historical agoraphobia”: the realization that all we’ve dragged over the sea from cloistered, repressive, reassuring Europe is a handful of out-of-context place names. Place names and fear. Nothing else to cover the big-sky fact of our manifest-destiny frontier, our heedless dream of autonomy. New York is the Old World by comparison. To contemplate leaving it, as “Cities” does, is to belatedly join the American expansionist lemming-dash, the derangingly utopian experiment already in progress.

* * *

It’s rarely a mistake to ask: what were these artists doing at the time they made their very interesting art? Had anything changed in their lives? The obvious answer is that Talking Heads became a professional touring band, graduating from clubs to concert halls, in the year or so before creating Fear of Music. London, Memphis, Birmingham, other municipalities: these were places where they’d boarded airplanes and checked into hotels and played concerts. “Cities” is a sublimated rock-tour song, the way Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled is a sublimated book-tour novel. In those cities, the band and the songwriter gazed into the faces of the people deigned “not worth talking about” in “Big Country.” And yet, at the same time that a tour produces a series of humblingly real encounters, it cumulatively unveils a dissociative effect. Cities and regions blend together, become distinguishable only by a few outstanding characteristics — this is the place with that good oyster restaurant; here’s where we shot pool in the hotel. The result is a disturbing poignancy, as the “real” encounters also become repetitive and arbitrary. If you fly too often in too brief a time it begins to seem that the plane is standing still while the landscape is being wheeled past. This paradox sustains “Cities”’s giddy tension: the song is at once the album’s most clear-eyed, most plainly situated in the “real” world, and its most screwball and derisive: the “real” slides off “Cities” as if the song was coated in Teflon. Good points and bad points will cancel like matter and antimatter, leaving only the explosion, the freak-out, represented here by a treated, Daffy Duck guitar solo that skids and squeals through the exact center of the song, trying to find its brakes or pretending it doesn’t have any. Live where you like, my friend, it won’t help.

* * *

In a simpler time James Brown & His Famous Flames or Huey Lewis & The News wove a series of place names into a song like “Night Train” or “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” embedding a shout-out to fans listening on radios “all over the world,” a tradition which obviously originated in more personalized on-stage salutes, as well as stage props like the place-name-stickered guitar case. (Chuck Berry made a career of such songs.) The obverse of this love-of-localities is the generic joke of the lead singer so befuddled about destinations in the course of a long tour that he hails the wrong city: “We love you Minneap — uh, Detroit!”

Several 1978 Talking Heads shows in the U.S. heartland opened with “Big Country”: Wouldn’t live here, thank you very much, now here’s our act. Call this having the courage of your convictions. “Cities,” a year later, can’t yet be troubled to make too sincere a retraction.

* * *

Last, there’s that “dry ice factory.” A cynic might call this a predatory hipster’s epiphany, to notice that the abandoned brick industrial zones in mid-sized rust-belt towns — Cincinnati, say, or Harrisburg, PA — are positively brimming with drool-worthy underpriced loft spaces. You can almost see the exposed brick in the kitchen, and the rehabbed, brushed-steel table originally used for cutting dry ice into blocks.

Really, though, this anomalous lyric represents a reversion to claustrophilic form: a shucked hermit crab will eventually locate something that looks to him like a shell, wherever he goes. It’s that, and a foreshadowing of the next song’s prevailing concerns: that dry ice factory looks like it would make a good castle keep, a fortress for hunkering down, changing your hairstyle and your name yet again, and heating some salvaged canned beans over a Sterno fire. What’s likely true of these “Cities,” then, good and bad points aside, is that they’d each offer at least temporary anonymity and refuge, an ice factory or book depository or fallout shelter for transient use. For, here’s your big brother now. He’s come to tell you to quit fooling around, and to strap on your gun and your rucksack: the trucks are ready to roll. The disco ambulance howls from view. These cities are not for keeping.

Two Cities Hiding

In the alternate studio-construction now joined to the official Fear of Music (the 2005 CD reissue, that is) “Cities” gains a verse. “Down El Paso way, things get pretty spread out / People got no idea where in the world they are …” Though the lyric was snipped from the final mix, within a year or so of the album’s release the singer had resumed singing the lines in performance, and they’re printed, as though canonical, in the reissue’s jewel-case booklet. The lyric, which decants the Fear of Nowhere crop-duster theme in “Cities” (“they go up north, they go down south” — singer’s panic rising now — “still got no idea where in the world they are!”), also touches the song down in Texas, the eventual setting for True Stories.

In Texas, David Byrne met Terry Allen, an underground country musician and visual artist, who casually bridged the two realms Byrne sought to yoke together. For, if all art aspires to the condition of music, all Talking Heads’ music aspired to the condition of gallery art. Perhaps the key to this would be distance from the power centers where money issued its controlling edicts over an artist’s priorities (i.e. Gotham City, or Metropolis). Brian Eno spurned Roxy Music for a conceptual-art career trading on abdicated rock stardom; Allen, his own record-industry career refused, modeled another exit from the Mick Jagger fate.

Texas, then, might be a zone for hiding in plain sight, gaining cachet in Metropolitan galleries through remote control. In Allen, Byrne’s anxieties about “nowhere” could be assuaged in an unexpected way: you might come from nowhere and still be somebody, reversing the script where the aspirant artist (David Byrne grew up in a Baltimore suburb) seeks entrance to the capital of influence and payola to make his mark.

New York, London, Paris, Munich. Maybe the problem was pop music.

(Interesting how rock stars like to vanish from intolerable renown into something to do with the visual arts, that is if you grant that Captain Beefheart was a rock star or that marrying Yoko Ono has something to do with the visual arts.)

The other unnamed city hidden in “Cities” is one you’ve taken for granted: New York. The alternate-mix “Cities,” which brings El Paso into the light, does the same for New York, by exhuming the siren or car-alarm noises which were buried in the song’s subliminal layers. You always knew those fires were breaking out somewhere, or that another mugging victim needed scraping off the pavement on an hourly basis, didn’t you? To this, the kid in his room can testify: New York City in the seventies was a routine sirenscape, a terrain lit by sonic flares. Those effects, to which a human body can only acclimate up to a certain limit — even if muffled in the mix, as the original release mercifully muffles them — constitute the Music of Fear. This alternate “Cities,” then, screamingly testifies as to the time and place it was recorded, as though the walls of the studio were as porous as those of the typical tenement.

Life During Wartime

The riff is really saying something. The first word is spoken in an inhuman voice comprising a band racing itself to get to work after the lull of the last song’s Doppler retreat. It’s an utterance made of every instrument at the players’ disposal: rump, grunt, or junk. Got it? The remainder of the phrase, a schoolyard taunt gone admonitory and foreboding, neeny-neeny-agghah! The engine turns over with a funky-chunky lurch, throwing a piston but gone zero-to-sixty just the same. This groove throws up a higher panic, issued by the grown-ups at headquarters this time, a nervewracked-at-the-nerve-center vibe. The riff manages to needle you about letting the song depart without you, two bongo players thumbing their nose from the rear window as you savor the exhaust. Next time, jump when we tell you to jump. Rumpy-chunky-bump. Yikes. Comprende?

That takes you through the 15-second mark, at which point the vocal begins its remorseless chiding incantation. The scary thing about “Life During Wartime” is how deeply the singer’s tone has accommodated itself to the prophetic, doomy groove. The singer narrates from a future — the song’s, the album’s, the band’s, your city’s — you weren’t wholly certain you wanted to glimpse, at least not in 70 millimeter Panavision, recording equipment you hadn’t realized this band packed. Too bad, you’re enlisted, by virtue of identifying, already, with his hard-won preparedness, his flayed-nerve expertise. Maybe the song got away from you before you could jump, but it took you aboard, as well. You’re wedged in the back seat between those grinning bongo players, in fact — Dr. Heckel and Mr. Jekyll.

“I Zimbra” has taken its Dada mask off.

With “I Zimbra,” “Life During Wartime” is one of two songs based on jams the band recorded before going into the official sessions, and “Life During Wartime” is the song that most sounds like a band jamming in the band’s entire catalogue to this point. We feel the band’s commitment to the dogged, exhortative groove — a commitment to digging the groove’s trench deeper, to exemplifying and exploring it. Like “Cities,” the song is “endless,” its lyrical couplets a renewable resource; new ones are still being invented on the fade (lyrics which will be “restored” in the alternate mix released in 2005). Fear of Music’s sonic aura is, on the whole, atmospheric or edgily formal (the producer’s hallmarks, after all). But this song’s all about immediacy, or “presence” — no dodgy effects here. A bunch of cops or soldiers have burst through a set of loft doors (imprinted with the album jacket’s anti-skid pattern) to find the band break-necking at a new national anthem, one so pressured and mordant, so churlish and stern, it ought to be illegal if it isn’t already.

This isn’t a song that Brian Eno or anyone would choose to get in the way of. “Life During Wartime” is one of those moments in the life of an artist, or a band, where they simply and abruptly assume the fullness of their capacities. Never mind that the riff may stumble out of O.V. Wright’s “Nickel and a Nail” or some other blues-funk swamp, to be pointed by this band in the direction of Grace Jones’ disco; no matter if these dystopian spare-parts would have already been received materials for Philip K. Dick or the Dylan of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” The array of powers on display — powers of foresight, of suggestion, of menace — has never existed before. The song may in fact consist of the exact center of Talking Heads’ accomplishment. It defines the magnitude of statement that the band would claim as a new standard, for an album or two.

(That’s to say: “I Zimbra” may be celebrated (including by these musicians themselves) as forecast of what was to come — specifically, of Remain in Light, as brain-zapping an album as can be, and for many people the summit of this band’s art (not a verdict I’d negotiate with, but the boy in his room required I exalt this one instead). In its eerie melodic chants and Enofied layers, sure, “I Zimbra” may resemble passages in Remain in Light more than anything in “Life During Wartime.” But “I Zimbra,” dropped in among Remain in Light’s epochal first five tracks, would seem a scrap of tinsel. “Life During Wartime” could hold its own.)

“Life During Wartime” is voluminous. The size is in the fractured, expansive storytelling, but also in the disconcertingly vast zone the sound inhabits. You register the singer in a sonic space amidst the instruments, and the band in the sonic space of the building — the dry ice factory or wherever it is. (You can feel the bass player’s feet on the floor.) They may be in hiding at the moment, but they’ve hidden themselves in a citadel, a redoubt. They’ve picked high ground. And there’s more of them than at last count (the bongo players, by filling in space in this band’s sound, demonstrate that such space exists). Possibly they’re mobilizing for larger stages.

The song makes Fear of Music twice as big, at least.

#

As in the manner of “Tangled up in Blue” on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, the keynote-address quality of “Life During Wartime” seems to chime intelligibly through every other song on the album that houses it, even while telling a tale entirely its own. “Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?” Thus effortlessly is baby brother put in his place, his scatterbrained city-search revoked. They’re all the same city now. Yet the forward thrust of “Cities” is endorsed, as being roughly on-target: load up, stay ready to move at a moment’s notice. Just don’t bother with the airport. Meanwhile, “Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks” gathers in “Paper” at a glance (with “I can’t write nothing at all” thrown in for good measure, and to remind us to picture the un-blocked writer jotting these lyrics down).

Elsewhere, the sort of wartime that keeps you scrounging for peanut butter goes a long way to explaining the immanent paranoid takes on the atmosphere (“Air”) and on our four-footed friends (“Animals”): in “Wartime,” no matter the lack of specifics, we’re pretty certain the planetary environment’s badly degraded, the formerly pastoral world reduced to invisible toxins and craven interspecies rivalry. Meanwhile, the church in which the sacrament of the guitar hero might once have been revered is torn down, left in ruins deemed wholly impractical even to linger over. No speakers, no headphones, no nightclubs. Possibly the best way to recuperate “Electric Guitar” — for many listeners Fear of Music’s most awkward and anomalous song — is as a pendant on “Life During Wartime”’s chorus. The guitar fell out of the van while we were packing, see, and then we ran over it backing up, and then someone said, fuck it, just leave it there …

“Wartime” enlists the whole album in its project, a kind of post-disaster scenario wherein ordinary human beings who once had time for dancing and lovey-dovey have now stripped down the chassis of their existence to function as roving outlaw-survivalist-terrorist-hackers. Paradoxically, this could be taken as ultimately reducing the album’s quotient of free-floating dread, rather than amplifying it. By literalizing the crisis Fear of Music represents, it externalizes the clutter of ominous nouns: the reason everything’s all so fucked up — even your mind — is because this is wartime. The song containerizes fear, and while the world as we know it is a very large container, it’s nevertheless smaller than some other things. Like being itself, or world-and-self. It’s a “situation.” And situations can get better.

Every literal breakdown of the world as we know it embeds a consoling dream, or several: things were actually better before, and so might be repaired; threat has toughened us and knit us communally closer, freeing us to shed the bourgeois neuroses and ennui that had previously divided and defined us, and so forth. In this way, “Life During Wartime,” for all its breadth and force, is the most conservative song on the album in its assertion of a manageable “outside” to the tension at hand. The enemy is not us.

Yet, precisely for its breadth and force, “Wartime” is also the most radical song in the band’s history to this point. That radicalism resides in its stance toward this band’s previous commitment to bourgeois neurosis, to damaged viewpoints — or, most simply, to vulnerability, which this song neither denies nor succumbs to. Even the song’s title, with its surprising expansion of the album’s minimalist noun-scheme, alludes to (and helps create) the implied author’s toughened stance. This isn’t just “Wartime,” or “War” — yet one more ambient substance in which personal agency drowns — but (my) life, (en)during. Or, our life. “We make a pretty good team.” The song’s un-simple collectivity includes bragging (“We’re tapping phone lines”) and intra-group admonitions both practical (“You oughta know not to stand by the window”), and against presumptions of intimacy (“You don’t even know my real name”). The listener? Free to include him or herself in the cell, or stand aside as anemic witness. Most striking of all is the scrupulous account of delegation and triage within a squad under permanent strain: “Don’t get exhausted, I’ll do some driving / You ought to get you some sleep” (these words come at the fade’s start; depending on how loud you have your stereo turned up, they may be the last you make out, as if the van ride continues but you’ve permitted yourself to pass out in the passenger seat).

The lyrics wouldn’t add up to so much, though, if it weren’t for the new attitude or attitudes conveyed by groove and voice: adamant, versatile, keen. Willing to break bad news but also to be bad news, or at least dangerously grown-up, to cop to possessing a clue or a plan, a roadmap. Eager to have it both ways: to denounce fun and fooling around and be a song some people I know have been known to fuck to.

* * *

The names of the downtown nightclubs “CBGB” and “Mudd Club” are parochial chocolate chunks lodged in the widescreen allegorical peanut butter. For all “Wartime”’s broad applicability, these references make it Talking Heads’ equivalent of Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street”: an I’m-Breaking-Up-With-My-Old-Scene song. (Give No Regards To Broadway, Forget Me In Herald Square.) A chip on the shoulder has imperfectly veiled itself behind the broader motif, that of wartime’s invalidation of old lifestyle vices like music, sex, dancing and notebooks. Is this song a little embarrassed by earlier Talking Heads’ ingenuous Lower East Side art-punk poses?

The writer Luc Sante: “Back in the day, when Talking Heads had just vertically ascended from strictly local fame, my friends and I could crack each other up at the most stressful and solemn moments by just saying “Look at my hair; I like the design!” (The line’s from “Warning Sign,” on More Songs About Buildings and Food.) No one shames you better than those who remember-you-when. “Life During Wartime” might seem to reply, or offer a correction: “Changed my hairstyle so many times now / I don’t know what I look like.” The hairdressing, you see, wasn’t about being a mirror-star — it was a survival tactic. “We dress like students, we dress like housewives / Or in a suit and a tie.” Talking Heads’ early anti-fashion fashion, the polo shirts and square haircuts, is hereby redeemed. Not posers, they were in mufti the whole time: band as sleeper cell.

* * *

“Life During Wartime” isn’t reducible. But if nudged, it might throw a couple of interpretive shadows.

Like “Cities,” it’s not too much to see this as the confessions of a touring rock band, those who “sleep in the daytime and work in the nighttime.” Overloaded vans, dubious transmissions (bad sound check?), the struggle to organize passports and visas, etc. The exultant openness of the jet-setters of “Cities” has worn off, but, well, they’re “getting used to it now.” In this formulation, the CBGB and Mudd Club mentions are simply factual, a how-do-you-do to minor-league venues Talking Heads had outgrown.

There’s also the teen-grandiosity thesis: high school as a self-dramatizing martial interlude, complete with fake IDs and doubtful assignations in lawless zones: the graveyard, the hillside, that creepy apartment with nothing but peanut butter in the fridge. If the van’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’. It isn’t your fault you’ve gotten heavily into Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati Trilogy, since the grownups really were lying all along. Never trust anyone over thirty, especially if they’re recommending college or night school. The hacker vibe is prescient: I know a kid who can get a free long-distance call out of any payphone with a whistle he got out of a box of Cap’n Crunch. Philip Price, lead singer and songwriter of Winterpills, said: “When I first discovered this song in college, it gave my completely imagined psychological embattlement total legitimacy.” This interpretation is only another measure of the song’s sturdy versatility. For those in an actual war-zone, the song’s a documentary. For those in an allegorical war-zone, the song’s a documentary. Even better, the song righteously blurs the allegorical into the actual, on the listener’s behalf. My war-zone’s as real as yours until proven otherwise.

* * *

The history of “ain’t” or of double negatives in white rock ’n’ roll is by the time of this recording officially too extensive to mean nothing of no special particular importance whatsonever.

* * *

Each of the first five records by this band would have A Song. “Psycho Killer.” “Take Me to the River.” “Life During Wartime.” “Once in a Lifetime.” “Burning Down the House.” In a world of radio formats and movie soundtracks and headline writers seeking to sound cool, these artifacts float loose of their album surroundings, to drift even beyond the band’s name and fame into a constellation of context-reduced cultural “things” burnished by use as non- or semi-sequiturs. Life During Wartime is a Lucius Shepard novel and a Todd Solondz film and a hundred other things. While these could never plausibly exhibit a coherent relation to one another, all feed talismanic juice back to the phrase’s source.

In the auditorium of Fear of Music, however, “Life During Wartime” is tethered to a sequence of soundings-in-progress. It’s answerable. The next track will have to find a way to humble it.

Is Fear of Music a New York album?

The boy in his room, in his quasi-ghetto-brownstone, never questioned that “Life During Wartime” had conquered the world the way it had conquered his brain. Me, I discovered, a year or so ago, that the song only bobbed up to #80 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a career hiccup, since “Take Me to the River” had reached #28 the year before. The particle of the boy in his room that still resides inside the middle-aged writer is flummoxed, and distraught, to be recipient of this information. (He’s pretty sure WNEW lied to him at the time, by playing the song every 20 minutes or so in November of 1979.) Well, what did the rest of the country make of “No Mudd Club” / “No CBGB,” anyway? We’re back in Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover — who else could be bothered to distinguish Eleventh Avenue from Twelfth?

We are so often defined by what we resist and denounce. Kurt Vonnegut, not Jack Kerouac, had to say “I’m not a science fiction writer.” By naming those nightclubs in their song, Talking Heads inscribes what it claims to reject, the song bearing its origins forward like a snail’s shell on its back. They’d hardly needed to say “This ain’t no Fillmore West.” The tendency was dubbed, by Freud, the narcissism of minor difference. It explains, if you believe it, why Serbs attack Croats, why Republicans attack Democrats, why Freudians attack Lacanians; from a greater distance, you couldn’t tell them apart, hence the fetish for tiny distinctions. “Cities” and “Wartime” conduct a friendly argument (“Other places exist!” “Technically yes, but under the dire present conditions they resemble the Lower East Side!”) that’s really no argument at all. Or, anyway, no more of an argument than an umpire’s with a manager, in which the rules of baseball are never in danger of being discarded. The equivalent of the rules of baseball, for Talking Heads, is urban modernity. Urban modernity is exemplified — always will be, even when the place has its head up the ass of its own self-regard — by New York City.

Talking Heads were the definitive New York rock band. Manhattan band, if you wanted to give the outer boroughs to the Ramones. Their émigré maneuver (from Baltimore, Rhode Island, Kentucky, wherever) confirmed on them the same status that fell on Dawn Powell or Truman Capote. This burg was, is, forever defined not by natives (who’s native here, anyway, a Dutchman? Or –?) but by those who came from afar and claimed it, loved it better, and broadcast its myth, until that myth became the dominant one in U.S. culture for the century. Art and intellect and style? The Velvet Underground came close, and were first, but were gone. Talking Heads, the definitive New York band. This is so obvious it isn’t even interesting, except for what cuts against it: the scrap of resistance, of wishing to throw it all away and instead embark on tides pulling from Texas, New Orleans, from Africa and the Caribbean. The tension of the dissolution of an ideal, that enriching undertow on Fear of Music.

The boy in his room, when he left his room in the year or two after Fear of Music was released, sometimes went to CBGB. The club let sixteen-year-olds in, and even sold them beer — this was another city, another time. He went to the Mudd Club once, too, in the company of his high school math teacher; John Lydon — his name still Rotten — was there that night, leaning against a wall, seeming galactically bored and weary. It was too late to see on those tiny stages the bands that had made that scene, or those clubs, so famous: Patti Smith, Television, etc. The boy attended eight or ten shows at CBGB, but not one by a band that would ever go on to be signed to a major label; some of the performers were kids from the boy’s own high school. The tide of fame had swept out and left those clubs to those kids, a tiny beach strewn with bottle caps.

The first time the boy saw Talking Heads, in October 1979, it was in a large theater in New Jersey. The opening act was Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. He bought the tickets at a Ticketron in the basement of Abraham & Straus, a department store in downtown Brooklyn, and he took a Greyhound Bus to the show. His companion was his schoolmate, the painter — he was a painter already, in high school — Tom Burkhardt. Tom was the son of the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burkhardt, a documenter of and participant in the abstract-expressionist scene of the fifties, and a collaborator with Red Grooms (Tom, as a child, had appeared in his dad’s and Grooms’ films). Though we were just two high school kids on a Greyhound bus going to sit in the rear section of that New Jersey theater, Talking Heads would have liked to meet Tom’s dad, if they’d had the chance. Rudy was exactly the sort of person who was the reason the band had come to New York City in the first place, really.

“I’m dreaming of a city / It was my own invention.” That lyric’s from “What a Day That Was,” on a 1981 David Byrne solo record called The Catherine Wheel, score to a Twyla Tharp ballet. (A collaborative choice about as “New York” as a rock musician could make, as unimaginable for a London or Los Angeles punk as for a heartland rocker like John Mellencamp.) The song’s in the upper echelon of Byrne’s compositions in those miraculous years; it became an honorary Talking Heads song when it was enfolded into Stop Making Sense (the film, if not the album). The line hearkens to “Cities,” but with a deepened awareness of the force of projection in the exchange: Gaze into a city, and a city gazes into you. New York made the songwriter and then he returned the favor; now his is a New York we can dwell and dream inside by plopping the needle on a record.

At the same time, a city exists. Another lyric from “What a Day That Was” explodes the dream with fierce actuality: “There are fifty thousand beggars / Roaming in the streets.” If your gaze was really steady enough to see what’s before you, there might be reasons to wish to leave this place.

Memories Can’t Wait

From its first appearance, every grinding gear, every corroded nut and bolt, each once-tremulous syllable or plucked note of this dreadnaught of a song wears an exoskeleton of reverb and sonic crud as it grinds grimly uphill, armored like a Doctor Doom or Robocop who has been smeared with tar and then rolled like a cheese log in gravel. It is as if “Memories Can’t Wait” rides on spiked treads, a vehicle bogged in mud at the depths of the record’s second side, and determined to climb into view over the crushed bodies of the other tracks. The fools! They dared go to battle wearing only their disco outfits! “Memory Can’t Wait”’s aura so totally inhabits the destructive panorama of the preceding song that the lyric will never need mention it, can instead proceed on an inward path of self-corrosion, demolishing stances and attitudes we hadn’t considered might be cozily smug, on our own parts and those of the earlier narrators. “Wartime” comes here to be engulfed and rebuked.

The sound is both malicious and mournful, seething and glum. As a voice rises through the dire swampy trudge the song now appears to wish to halt time, in order to survey damage it itself inflicts, perhaps half-knowingly, like a curious monster, a wistful Godzilla astride a city numbed and dumbed by its depredations. How can the creature help being enraged by what it sees, by what it alone understands? Yet each daft screaming human it lifts to its wondering face, in order to make inquiry or at least meaningful contact, is pierced instantly by its claws, head lolling to silence.

Alone again, naturally.

* * *

“Memories Can’t Wait” is a fucking disaster area, a black bubbling cauldron full of barking dogs and backwards masking — the dumb-scary trick of “satanic” bands — and every other creepy sonic tape-effect Brian Eno couldn’t sell to Devo. This is the Talking Heads you didn’t even know to hope never to meet in a dark alley, the heavy metal-heads, who Don’t Fear the Music Reaper, but know you do, or are willing to show you why you ought to. The song’s impossible to dismiss. Unlike a lot of other things tricked-up to look scary, but which turn out to be Donovan singing “Season of the Witch” when you peek beneath, the Enoween costume on “Memories Can’t Wait” is laid on top of a face even scarier than the mask. The song’s churning, clanking, scrabbling guitarcitecture is rock solid, i.e. it’s solid rock — never has this band gone further afield from its disco-funk liaison, that long date they’ve been keeping en route to Speaking in Tongues. The only thing African about this track is that you’re probably not comfortable there.

As for the singer’s approach, behold the doomy bombast and say it’s not more or less exactly what you’d get if the band from whose forehead sprung the whole premise of downtown-New York art-rock, the band that Andy Warhol sponsored, the band that begat Modern Lovers which begat Talking Heads, had been fronted not by Lou Reed but by Jim Morrison. There’s a party in my mind, so try to set the night on fire! I’m stuck here in this seat, so break on through to the other side!

This song is a promise-keeper, a dread-deliverer, and a proving ground for the album’s claims. “Mind” teases at solipsism; “Memories” drowns in it. “Paper” and “no time for dancing, etc.” were memos informing you that much of what you hold precious — including about this band — isn’t secure in the long run; “Memories” mugs you, frisking your pockets for your last dime of hope. “I Zimbra” seduced you with the dizzy freedom of nonsense, “Memories” now delivers the bill for the vacation, and it’s a whopper. (“Air” and “Drugs” share a similar see-saw relation: both sides of the LP begin ethereally refreshed and plunge toward an earthbound squalor of insomnia, of sweaty sheets and fingernail grime.)

Above all, “Memories” chides that “Life During Wartime” wasn’t the end of Side One. Where the earlier song sketches a battlefield, this vaults from its trench to bayonet you. One track after “Wartime” proposed externalizing the album’s drama in a literal and present apocalyptic setting; “Memories” reverses the charges. Go ahead, depart the nightclub — the party, kid, is in your mind. The war was fought and lost a million years ago, and you’re picking through the rubble, trying to reinvent the language of those who lost it on your behalf. The album’s crisis has moved entirely into the self, and therefore infiltrates every present circumstance. The van has tread marks crushed into its roof.

“Memories Can’t Wait” declares itself as a reply to “Life During Wartime” by the extra words in its title. On iTunes the two stick out of the skinny body of the song list like a blunt erection. They’ve got the same number of characters, if you count the apostrophe. Dead heat, but “Memories” has the last word.

#

“Memories Can’t Wait” wads two of Fear of Music’s leitmotifs — “sleep” and “party” — into a tight sandwich of tinfoil, and insists you take a bite.

Like certain Bob Dylan songs, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” or, “I And I,” which beneath poetic and metaphysical trappings rest on a simple cinematic depiction of human action — lovers parting in a wintry park, her face concealed in a scarf; a restless man leaving a woman sleeping while he slips outs to gaze at the rail yards — we can, after the atmosphere settles around us, pretty easily project a “Memories Can’t Wait” movie in our heads. In the loft wherein the party in the narrator’s mind is enacted or reenacted, in the waning hours of said party, the narrator confronts a few dopey guests who’ve been granted the release of sleepy forgetfulness he’ll never taste himself. “Do you remember anyone here? / No you don’t remember anything at all.” Another, flat on his or her back, speaks to us as if in a psychic transmission out of stupor, coma, or death: “Never woke up, had no regrets.” The logic, damn him, is unassailable: anyone awake has necessarily therefore got regrets by the busload.

These sleepers, the song’s “other people,” can’t help but seem a late-arriving indictment of the heedless folks in “Cities,” those who sleep in the daytime, if they want to. Even the ostensibly hard-boiled narrator of “Life During Wartime,” he who sleeps in the daytime out of necessity, as he incessantly reminds you — not because he’s a party animal, no — now looks like just another dozer. The real hard-boiled among us never blink, dream, or forget. They’re fighting the higher war of insomnia, on the battlefield of memories.

Your mind is a van loaded with weapons pointed at you.

These final, dead-on-their-feet guests at last shoveled out the door, our narrator sags into a chair — picture it unmoored from other furniture, adrift in the center of the loft’s expanse — there to endure upright nonsleep, to conduct his witnessing vigil. I’ll be here all the time, I can never quit. Now the fun begins: a walk through the land of shadows. Death-of-Party, the no-disco-for-you-young-man reproach, has transmuted into Party-of-Death. Peaceful Meadows is the name printed under a mortuary director’s name, for sure. (Your disappointment at what’s found there prefigures the ennui of “Heaven.”)

“I’m wide awake on memories / These memories can’t wait.” Close-up on eyes wide open. Zoom into pencil-dot pupil. Cut, roll credits.

* * *

Like most if not all of the Fear of Music songs, “Memories Can’t Wait” finds a way to contradict not only its neighbors but itself. Two and a half minutes in, on the words “everything is very quiet,” this song that takes as its subject the blockage of transition into sleep, the denial of that sweet generic release bestowed eventually upon even the most desperate among us (prisoners in their cells, soldiers in their foxholes, animals and party animals alike), undergoes a musical transition that is also a release. A song dominated by a deranged clatter, and which has reached a harsh wheeling pitch, now smooths itself into mournfulness. What follows is a weary cascade of guitars that sounds like the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.” These guide the listener to the loft’s elevator, forgivingly. In such a garbagey discordant swirl, it almost sounds as if someone’s removed the stopper, or flushed the toilet. One screeching effect pulls against the drain’s sucking, and then it too succumbs, and all the gobbledygook Enoturds are gone. What follows isn’t quiet, but it is calm, as if the tank is refilling, the well rising back to the top. The lyrics may not know it, but the track does: somebody’s memories have given way to dreaming.

* * *

The noun/verb dream never appears in the Fear of Music text. If you sought a missing signifier to propose for a late-discovered outtake or Siberian-release-only B-Side, you’d have to figure “Dreams” (along with maybe “Skin” or “Sex” or “Music”) would make a fair candidate.

* * *

Speaking of the Beatles, “Memories Can’t Wait,” with its placement at the end of Side One, brings to mind “She Said, She Said,” the last song on Side One of Revolver. In both instances the songs chart out a harsh frontier of psychedelic divination to which the band in question will seldom return (though “The Overload” from Remain in Light is like “Memories Can’t Wait”’s subdued hangover). In both cases the songs find a partial reply in spaced-out form in the last song on their respective albums’ Side Two (“Drugs” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”).

Speaking of the Beatles, the fading piano tone of “Memories Can’t Wait” sounds just like the sustained note at the end of “A Day in the Life,” only it doesn’t stick around as long. Hurry up please it’s time.

So Fear of Music is a Concept Album. What Happens on Side Two?

“I Zimbra” tried an end run. The song outlined a preemptive workaround to the album’s claustrophobic consciousness and the various discontents trapped within. Its readymade claim is that the whole problem, the only problem, is that words fail. Simultaneously, “I Zimbra” presented the freeze-dried, just-add-rhythm solution: freedom from self. The rest of Side One remorselessly, meticulously and exuberantly exposes this too-neat attempt. First, by dragging words into worlds. Yep, they fail all right, but we live inside those crumbling premises. And: we fail too. And more: we’re never less free from ourselves than precisely in the act of failing — at the party, in flight from native habitat, or in vigilant, restless sleep — to free ourselves.

Free no mind and no ass may follow.

After the contradictory twin-thesis meltdown of “Wartime” and “Memories,” the album’s flipside will be thrown into the position of a pendant, a New Testament or Godfather Part II, in relation to the first. The camera dollies out, to gather more territory, natural and supernatural. The woods and sky and what’s above the sky. As if to place the urban disaster zone in some mitigating frame. The lens zooms in to investigate some possibly overlooked avenues of intimate mitigation as well. Contraptions and illegal substances, the toolkit of rebellion, venues of jacked-up DIY transcendence. Side Two benefits from the drama and tension of a sequence of escape bids. And who doesn’t like a prison flick? Will our heroes taste freedom, or end up burrowing into one another’s cells?

These arrows pointing outward: are they for real, or are they from Zeno’s quiver, therefore never to reach their goal? Or perhaps they’re like the Worm Oroborous, destined to bend with the curvature of the universe until they find they’re nibbling their own feathery tails.

Air

It doesn’t look good, but then, hey, it’s invisible! So why worry? It’s a pop song!

In the wacky race to the front of your hindbrain, seeking to get stuck in that place from whence is generated your carefree toe-tapping, whistling and humming, out of the midst of all Side One’s ambulances and war machines now comes, hurtling into the lead spot, the grinning jalopy of “Air” — I mean to say, the grin is on the face of the car. For it is a cartoon vehicle, as drawn by some anonymous genius in the Hanna Barbera empire.

The female element, ordinarily sublimated in this band — this bassist adamantly one of the boys — here breaks teasingly to the surface. In fact, the bassist appears to have tripled herself. In what may perhaps be a tiny first throb of the impulse that will become Tom Tom Club, these are the bassist’s sisters, billed as the Sweetbreaths (or, thanks to a wonderfully weird typo in the reissue CD insert, The Sweetbreathes, as though sweetness itself is doing some heavy breathing.) These creepy-sexy ladies mimic outer space sirens beckoning your landing module into the disasteroid belt. Impossible not to be drawn into that upper atmospheric layer by the harmonies floating down, since they seem a precise reference to the eerie feminine harmonizing of the original Star Trek television theme song, those haunted lasses that give forth just when Captain Kirk intones, “Space, the final frontier …” Their disembodied, wavering quality is the vocal equivalent of a Theremin, the official sonic effect of science fiction. To make the alliance more unmistakable, the keyboardist is hot on their heels with some spooky interstellar tones. These have been Enofied into something cornily retro — his keyboard sounds like vibes. The result is cartoon-macabre: Space Ghosty, or perhaps even Scooby-Dooish.

“Air” may in fact be an early sixties television theme song or novelty hit like the “Monster Mash,” one of those campy items which takes the Nuggets-era sixties garage-punk sound and shifts it toward kid stuff. Here, the nagging guitars thumb their nose like a pubescent teen at his square parents. The harder the song tries to be ominous the more jaunty the result, which doesn’t discredit the menace — it couldn’t, in this album’s atmosphere — so much as render it feral and taunting, an earworm or earwig squirming under your defenses. And when it shifts gears, it goes from mockingly ominous to mock-anthemic. The sweet sweep and Byrds-jangle of guitars, the tender plaint of the vocal through these choruses, is wholly untrustworthy, precisely because it’s destined to be lopped off before the singer can finish his thought. The singer’s omission of the last word works like one of those jokes where the rhyming line lands on an naughty word, left unspoken, supplied instead by the first syllable of the next: “She fell down the stairs and busted her — / As I was saying …” At the end of the lyric the Sweetbreaths and the Question Mark and the Mysterians keyboards swoop down from the dark side of Neptune and recapture the song for an E.C. horror comic. He Unbolted His Space Helmet And Was Invaded By The Invisible Fiend Who Is Everywhere!

* * *

“Air” is the most cheerfully bemused song on the album, with nothing but an irresistible pop confidence to cloak the ludicrousness of its naked prominence atop Side Two. And that’s more than enough. Much of Fear of Music traffics in subtle contradiction, tiny fissures and slippages, most of which serve to illuminate the anxious strictures denying avenues of escape; “Air” unmakes itself utterly by moving in two directions at once. It doesn’t completely know its ass from its elbow, which may turn out to be a kind of liberation. This injection of weightless absurdity makes “Air” a conceptual (if not sonic) mirror-cousin to “I Zimbra.” (Soundwise, the nearest relative to its unhinged glee is “Mind” — that other ethereal enemy.)

Air makes a weird nemesis, both totally terrifying in its infiltrative ubiquity, and silly — invisible, intangible, and maybe kind of pointless to get worked up about, since we’re all breathing it anyway, and if we’re standing here conversing about it the stuff must be meeting a certain threshold of acceptable quality. Your enemies are breathing the same air as you: no advantage possible there. And the first accusation this narrator levies against the stuff — “hit me in the face” — is plainly idiotic. Close the window (or open it, if you need some freshening). Or turn off the hairdryer — you’ve changed your hairstyle twice already today. The song flirts with metrosexual vanity — what’s happening to your skin, buddy? Buy a higher grade of sunblock. Give me a break.

Yet air might also be the defining fear-venue for uniquely contemporary terrors. Just think of all the stuff that leaks over the twentieth-century transom: mustard gas, nerve gas, tear gas, radiation, vacuum compression in airless space, global pollution, “Airborne Toxic Event,” anthrax, and the discovery that the sun which gives us life also seeds our cancerous tumors, as do routine X-rays. Carbon unit per square inch, beneath a failing ozone layer. Also, for you paranoids, those transmissions, whether Commie or Martian, which can only be rebuffed by means of tinfoil-lined windows or hats. Pandemic: the sneeze on the crowded airplane. We have nothing to fear but nothing itself, or that which masks itself as nothing, the ubiquitous invisible swirling everywhere. Air-fear radiates Cold War dread, too. That resonance cinches this song to “Life During Wartime” but also those rays passing through “Paper.”

Hopelessly dire, and undignifiably silly: no wonder this song flies mockingly against itself. Someone ought to compile a list of the merriest tunes wedded to the grimmest lyrics. Start with The Supremes’ “The Happening,” in which Motown horn flourishes and tambourine jangles make Diana Ross’s lovelorn woe (“you find your world is tumbling down … I saw my dreams fall apart … now I see life for what it is”) sound like an anthem for Mod London. Or John Lennon’s “Crippled Inside,” jaunty rinky-tink piano, slide guitar and dobro shuffle to float the scorning title phrase — “One thing you can’t hide / Is when you’re crippled inside.” Phil Ochs’ “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” The result of this kind of schizoid lyric-to-music mismatch tends to be an air of mild satire, though at whose expense the satire is pointed — singer? listener? radio programmer? — isn’t always comfortably plain. “Air” knocks on the door of this peculiar clubhouse.

* * *

After the second line — “I run faster, faster, faster …” the singer recovers remarkably well from his initial total subjugation to the intangible element gone out-of-hand. The voice eases. And there’s a sleight-of-hand effect in “I say to myself / Where is that protection that I needed?”

This distancing maneuver — “I say to myself” — sets up a permanent pronoun switcheroo. Having declared that “Air can hurt you too,” the self in question is never really confessional or vulnerable again. The tone’s gone cautionary and foreboding (“So remember, remember …”), rather than awestruck, or airstruck. This transition becomes complete with the phrase that reverses and revises the earlier one: “You’ll say to yourself.”

The admonitory tone of this phrase forecasts the preachers and politicians to come on this singer’s subsequent albums. Though here he’s not so much in fire-and-brimstone mode — or even making a public service announcement — as he is functioning like a glib snake-oil salesman in reverse-pitch mode. The song turns into a nega-infomercial, touting a product that can’t be evaded, that you’ve already committed yourself to irrevocably. (Poisoned) air, brought to you by the same folks that brought you (poisoned) water! “Some people never had experience with air,” but you, my friend, may consider yourself the lucky recipient of our one-time offer. So try it! It’s even easier than picking up your phone and dialing a toll-free number — you merely need widen your nostrils and expand your chest and voila! You’ve joined the ranks of our satisfied customers.

* * *

Becoming excessively conscious of the air around you contains the seed of a claustrophobe’s panic attack: what starts as noticing that there’s lots of space between you and the objects around you — breathing room — might switch to the sudden apprehension that air’s giving you no margin at all. The stuff is pressed in close on all sides, following you, boxing you in. Don’t try anything, you’re surrounded! This could become a white-polar-bear thought, one of those you can’t quit thinking. It’s easy to know how to stop looking at the visible world — turn your back on it, or turn out the light, or squeeze your eyes shut and just look at those little dots there — but how do you quit noticing the invisible? In this formulation, air turns ghosty, something you alone see. Like memories, after everyone else is asleep.

* * *

For a rock band, air might also be the gaseous silent mixture between the players as they arrange themselves on stage, or in a loft rehearsal space turned recording studio — “room tone,” another invisible essence or ambiance, and one that a band often wishes to capture in a recording so as to keep it from sounding “canned.” Such air swells and deforms as a band evolves in its internal relation, as it adds equipment or players, or moves from postage-stamp-sized stages to vast risers in outdoor arenas. Such air grows sour or stale or shrieks with feedback according to the exact angles and postures of the equipment and its players.

You want to get a song “onto the air.”

Everyone’s looking for exposure but you can also die from it.

* * *

Another I’d-prefer-not-to-solo guitar part, broad swatches of chord marking space where others might doodle or decorate: a happy metonym, this time, for air itself. The guitars soar, and we’re borne up on the Sweetbreaths vocal Thereminizing. The band sounds sloppily airborne. Goofy, like helium-inhalers. If the second side is a series of escape bids, maybe the task’s already in hand. “Air” could be a niftily weightless jailbreak: simply soar over the wall Side One represents. But can this balloon rise as high as that wall? And is there any air up there?

Is Fear of Music a Science Fiction Record?

The boy in his room is back, to insist that the answer to the above question is an unqualified yes. If only because he requires it to be. Believing that Fear of Music qualified as science fiction was essential to a thesis the boy had already under construction, as to how any contemporary artist with eyes wide open was certain to blunder into the mode of science fiction sooner or later. This, for the simple reason that the world we lived in — technological, media-saturated, urban, disastrous, and tending to ratify paranoia and alienation as apt and lucid responses — was a science fiction world.

Fear of Music, parsed on headphones by the boy in a room lined with rows of paperback editions of Thomas Disch, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick novels, was eagerly folded into the ongoing project of roping those books together with certain films by Stanley Kubrick, Nicholas Roeg, and with modernist or postmodernist writing by Kafka, Pynchon, and Delillo, to create an idealized image of what science fiction was or could be, one in which high and low brow-distinctions utterly dissolved. Other key artifacts included George Orwell’s 1984 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and the French comic book Metal Hurlant.

In this image, the definition of “science fiction” was purged of its awkward pulp origins, and had shed its embarrassing tendencies to compensatory power fantasies and wish fulfillment. It tended instead to be grim and foreboding, but also self-reflexive, and interested, sympathetically but unsentimentally, in these bug-like selves who found themselves crushed against the oncoming future’s windshield. Despite being skeptical and urban — both anti-pastoral and unmystical — it wasn’t technocratically clear-eyed and optimistic. Instead, it preferred to get lost in deeper mysteries of ontology, the strangeness of the encounter with The Other, the weirdness of art and drugs. It was also stirred by the question of our tolerances for dread and dislocation: what became of a person shaped totally by the new reality? We’d better know, since it had arrived.

So far, rock ‘n’ roll had barely attended this party. David Bowie made gestures — and loaned himself to Nicholas Roeg, which seemed in turn to deepen his earnest engagement with the material (in albums created with Brian Eno, or Neo Brain) — but his foppish chameleonism also risked making his science fiction seem a pose, with a glam Buck Rogers costume hung embarrassingly in the closet. New Wave bands seemed allied, if only by the accident of their synthesizers and urban props — Gary Numan’s “Cars” was great science fiction pop — but dance floor power fantasies, like Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, pointed back to wish fulfillment — a Jules Verne or Hugo Gernsback tour of glossy wonders — rather than critique. If you cared for science fiction as a mode of inquiry, an angle of attack on everything, there were only two choices: Devo, and Talking Heads. The boy in his room looked at that menu and said I’ll have both, please. These two bands alone seemed to have grasped the essence that bridged Kafka and Rod Serling: the future was a thing happening to you, whether you wanted it to or not, and it would be encountered not in outer space but in food and buildings, in your workplace and government and sex life.

And Talking Heads, the boy’s most special companions on this journey, knew the fact that he’d found no way to enunciate, and wouldn’t ever, not completely, even after growing up to write several books in the attempt: that this city you lived in might be a kind of dystopia, or future ruin. A future ruin already, and no regrets. Indeed, the boy in the room liked it better that way. This city, perhaps unlike all others upon the earth, seemed to the boy designed to broadcast rather than conceal the truth about what the world now consisted of. (Hence the special awkwardness still to come, both for the band and for the boy in the room: that freeing oneself from this city’s deprivations and stresses, instead of reciprocating their embrace, might feel like a kind of flinching.)

Unlike that boy, though, I’m not sure the science fiction definition offers very much that’s worth clinging to. First of all, if the definition widens to include too much — everything cool and urban and remotely alienated or portentous — it can only seem to need to be dissolved. Neither Don Delillo nor Talking Heads required the genre definition to find their way to the statements they wanted to make, right? It’s just art. (In that spirit you’d also say that someone like J.G. Ballard made his statement despite the genre definition.) You could as easily use the science fiction label to define all the pulp baggage, the iconography and stylistics that we’re glad this better art excluded on grounds of taste. Not just the wish-fulfillment tropes, but the specific flavor of fetish illustration, airbrushy stuff like a Jefferson Starship or E.L.O. album cover, and its equivalent in prose or music (the mellotron, say).

What’s more, at nearly fifty, I can know — know in my bones, not just in my brain — how much the present’s made up not only of the future-already-here, but the past-still-around. The same part of me that can much more easily see now how much, despite its anti-nostalgic tenor, “Life During Wartime” has to do with a 1950s-style air-raid drills, the Cold War fear I’m old enough, just barely, to have tasted myself before it was replaced with something else. (Replaced, but also left laying around, for handy reference and use.) It’s that part of me which is equally better able than the boy in his room to recognize how Talking Heads sound not only “like music from the future” but also like the Beatles and the Zombies and Buddy Holly. Not only because I’ve subsequently listened to more of those earlier things than the boy had at the time, but because he never would have permitted himself to see how much “his” music was entrenched in the world of his parents’.

Similarly, however much the future may be described by the city, the countryside exists. People live their whole lives there (or, rather, here, since I’m writing these words in a farmhouse). As I’ve already taken pains to point out, this was something coming increasingly to the attention of the band’s songwriter. Even further, another suspicion appears already to have been sneaking over that same songwriter: believing New York City was the city of the future — or, at least, that it was the only city of the future — might have been as nearsighted and self-congratulatory as the Steinberg New Yorker cover. The city of the future might be Sau Paulo, or Lagos.

The city of the future might also be Chocolate City, that Blackopolis secreted not-so-secretly inside the official U.S. urban reality. For, if the boy really had been casting the widest net for “science fiction” music, he ought to have landed on Parliament and Funkadelic, right? George Clinton’s starchildren optimized as full a spectrum of the genre’s marvels as the New Wave bands. At least. But the boy in his room was elaborately defended against those bands, for reasons humiliating to recount (making matters worse, the records were even in my house, hence ignoring them was an active, not a passive, crime. My brother listened to them. Younger brother.)

Those defenses would soon break down, in order that I become a proper hipster of my generation; if they hadn’t by the time Bernie Worrell was made a member of Talking Heads, they’d have needed to at that point. (A digression: somewhere in the ocean of time between being the boy in his room and being the aging fan writing these words, while riding in a car with a friend older than myself, I slipped a tape into the car’s player, a mix of favorite late-seventies tracks from the various permutations of George Clinton’s bands. This was after Speaking in Tongues. My friend — a sophisticated listener, but with zero exposure to black music after Otis Redding — said, “Wow, these guys sure stole everything from Talking Heads, didn’t they?” Up to that instant I still nurtured a will-to-believe that Talking Heads’ career consisted of a sequence of advances into the radical absolute, each album a singularity devising itself in vacuum; Speaking in Tongues needed to conform to this view. So, even as I’d become a Funkadelic fan, I couldn’t hear the extent to which the new Talking Heads record was basically Funkadelic with David Byrne singing. There in that car my brain’s firewall melted.)

Is Fear of Music science fiction? Sure, but only because Kafka is too, and the entire twentieth century. And no, not at all, since (unlike Devo or Funkadelic) it barely glances at the iconography, the kit of endearing devices and ingrown references. (Apart from those Star Trek harmonies.)

Heaven

There is a piano in “Heaven.” The guitars defer to it. This is “the slow song,” not because the tempo’s so different from “Memories Can’t Wait” or “Mind” (and “Drugs” will be far slower), but because the song demands it be understood that way. The guitars, to this point always doubled up as if in laughter or gasping for breath, now unkink themselves, quit scratching and jeering. The wide-open chords of the so-called “solos” in earlier songs here play tonal paintbrush, opening vistas of eternity and fulfillment. (In fact, their soaring layers faintly forecast the producer’s future liaison with Daniel Lanois and The Edge.) The guitars chime sincerity, and fall in obediently with a balladeer’s palace-staircase piano. Someone better croon soon.

Someone better send a memo to the rhythm section.

“Heaven” may seem so integrated and inevitable by this point (and to hear it once is to have heard it a thousand times) that a listener fails to register the blithe disobedience of two of the players from the very first note (an irreverence that sets the original aside from nearly every subsequent and gorgeously soporific cover version you’ll ever encounter, including a few by the original artists). The drummer stiff-arms the subject matter, like a Heisman Trophy persisting downfield against all obstacles. He just martially toughs it out, fingers in his ears while he chants “rock song, rock song, rock song” all the way through. If, a couple of tracks earlier, you semi-consciously registered a play on the title “Heaven Can Wait,” well, the drummer’s here to say this “Heaven” can’t. Not if it’s up to him. Even more rudely, the bass player’s just doing way too much, blobbing all over the track with webby all-thumbs-footprints, gurgling and belching and totally earthbound. Hey! A frog jumped out of “Animals”! Catch the little guy!

The bass is easily the best thing and the worst thing on the track.

Best because worst: the bass punctures any sanctimony or bogus mystery here. Otherwise, “Heaven” risks a deadly perfection. The song enacts the ennui it rails against, by never railing against anything at all. It drowns in its gorgeous reservations. Or maybe it’s only you who drowns, in “Heaven”’s unsarcastic sarcasm, its thrilling boredom, its overwrought dispassion, as you plunge through the gummy stasis of its surface, on which floating petals conceal a murky whirlpool of reverb and echo and guitars. (What guitars! “Under” heaven, it seems, every kind of strife occurs.) The bottom’s simply not visible from shore, but when you reach it you’re not certain you ever swam a stroke, or did more than just gaze into the pool from the bank and wonder what the black water would feel like: if heaven’s impossible to know, “Heaven”’s hard to recollect, in the eerie fullness of its shallows, once the track’s not playing.

“Heaven” is deadpan. What, you object to such simplicity and spaciousness? Well, you’re simply not ready yet. Just be grateful the song hates its own beauty a little, a kind of inoculation against feelings of unworthiness, and a hatred that’s likely its most beautiful feature.

What was the truth the guru told you, the third time you climbed his mountain to ask? “Don’t bother, it’s conundrums all the way down.”

* * *

In certain philosophical systems there is a difference between what something is called and its “true name.” “Heaven” occupies a zone where basic terms are frozen in paradoxical transition, neither wave nor particle, beginning with a neat piece of slippage in its second line: “The name of the bar, (hesitation), the bar is called Heaven.”

The name of the bar is called Heaven.

(The name of this band is Talking Heads.)

(Talking Heads have a new album. It’s called Fear of Music.)

So, now we know what the name of the bar is called. But what is the name of the bar?

The band in the bar is playing your favorite song. But is the name of that band called Talking Heads and is the name of their new album called Fear of Music and is the name of the song called “Heaven”? Okay, but what is its true name?

The reference to “your favorite song” is certainly a passing scrap of tautological arrogance, and a provocation. It basically dares you to say well, this isn’t it. The fact that they “play it once again, play it all night long” reminds you, too, to notice how much repetitiveness can be achieved merely in a single 4-minute stretch — forget about playing it once again. I think they already did this number, didn’t they? No, this is still the first time. You just nodded off.

The secular heaven of “Heaven” is a nice place, a good and desirable place, yet it’s deadly boring; the whole song is designed to give evidence of this fact. And yet the given evidence — ah, the evidence! — is sublime, or at least it’s nice and good and desirable.

“It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all / Could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” Hard to imagine, yet aren’t we, listening, imagining exactly that? The word “nothing” is itself a hinge, or dumb pun: is nothing exciting, a description of a situation that’s rather convincingly boring (even if you choose to call it “Heaven”), since when nothing’s exciting there’s nothing interesting at all — or is nothing exciting, a very rare and fascinating condition in which the less there is the more scintillating we’re finding “it” to be? And what’s “it,” anyway, if “it” is nothing?

I’m still waiting to learn the name of the bar.

I tried to warn you, seeker: Conundrums all the way down.

* * *

One thing’s clear, anyway: Fear of Nowhere’s back with a vengeance. Here’s the risk that “Air” only flirted with, a precursor intuition: seek release, rise into the stratosphere, and you’ll find it was waiting for you all the time, heaven, the heavens, the blankness of secular outer space. “Heaven” is at root a meditation on the seduction and horror of that blankness, the place where nothing ever happens. It’s probably the band’s clearest deer-in-headlights glance at the theme (Forget “Big Country” — the Great Plains are no longer to blame).

From this point, the Fear of Nowhere theme will be free to evolve toward reconciliation, first on Speaking in Tongues’ “This Must Be the Place,” a song about abiding with nowhere — understanding that you can dwell there, even gratefully, so long as you don’t require it to be heaven, only a home. Next it moves on to active celebration: “We’re on the Road to Nowhere,” from Little Creatures. By this time all dread, all critical irony, has been drained from the portrayal of that lonely band of wanderers trying to get to that bar. They’re us! And when we get there we’ll really be somewhere!

* * *

Then again, the mention of a “bar” requires we read “Heaven” in light of the ain’t-no-Mudd-Club motif. Could this be merely a trickily sublimated adieu to some specific after-hours place, a Warholianly bland dive where everyone’s trying to get — and “everyone (who’s everyone) is there” — but isn’t remotely interesting when you get inside. Is Heaven a hip nickname for the VIP room at Max’s Kansas City, say?

A party where “everyone will leave at exactly the same time” is, if you needed this to be the Christian heaven, a pretty fair quick sketch of Life During Rapture. Taken literally as a party scene, it’s weirdly comic, a kind of Monty Python routine, like the one in Meaning of Life where the Grim Reaper informs everyone at the dinner party that they’ve eaten the same curdled salmon mousse and must put down their wineglasses and come with him immediately. (Really, anytime you trouble to actually picture heaven it’s a joke about vagueness, blandness and boredom, fluffy clouds and zithers, as in a single-caption cartoon, so “Heaven”’s big reveal is no surprise at all.)

The party in question may also be the one “in your mind.” If so, its abrupt finish makes perfect sense as a solipsist’s death scene: you hope it never stops, but if it does, who can believe the fun will continue after you’re gone?

Or is it, sigh, just another break-up song that’s embarrassed to be one? “When this kiss is over it will start again / It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same.” (Dylan: “You say my kisses are not like his / This time I’m not going to tell you why that is”). Maybe boring heaven is you, dear. I mean to say, don’t feel bad. The problem isn’t you, it’s me. You, you’re perfect, you’re my favorite song. Snore.

* * *

This “Heaven” is a little humiliated not to be the last song on its record. (“Big Country,” “This Must Be the Place,” and “Road to Nowhere,” compatriots in the Fear of Nowhere sequence, each get to be.) Its hint of grandiosity, its aura of afterglow, cry “Coda!” and are rebuffed. Maybe this is to be blamed on that damned frog. Or maybe the fact is that Fear of Music, with its air of restless inventory, with its tendency to autonomically self-cancel, can’t permit the song such a romantic role. It is only in the reverent view that heaven comes last. Here, it’s hastily sandwiched between air and animals, where heaven couldn’t possibly belong, if it even exists in the first place.

* * *

As “Heaven” wends through exasperation with its own graciously cloistered layers, the singer actually begins moaning “Arrrgh, ayyy, yoiiii, yoiiii” — everything short of “Oy, vey.” The song begs for a fade but isn’t granted one. Instead the guitars, which had attempted to smother the rhythm section in sacred gauze, give way completely, and the drums and bass thump and chuckle like they’ve just played “Louie Louie.” Frog wins.

Is Fear of Music an Asperger’s Record?

In a 4-minute video released in 1983 to promote Stop Making Sense, David Byrne, doubled by camera trickery, interviews himself, on the cheesy set of a fake television talk show. On the left he plays a caricatured “David Byrne,” dressed in the Big Suit, his hair slicked and body rigid with discomfort, eyes darting like those of a caged robot. On the right, in a series of campy costumes, wigs, and false moustaches, Byrne plays a sequence of different interviewers, each unpleasant in a different way (or several): snide, louche, uninterested, assuming, insulting, half-asleep. “Byrne” copes with his interlocutors with mechanical civility; at the outset he says, as if held hostage, “I will do absolutely anything you say.” To questions that affront or bewilder him, he recites, flatly, “I’ll tell you later.”

The sleaziest and most insinuating of these talk-show hosts wears shades, a pimp’s moustache, and a wide-lapelled banana-yellow suit. He offers to sing Byrne a song he’s written himself — Byrne suggests he might listen to it, later — and then, having browbeaten Byrne into reciting the cliché, “I would like to show people … the … movies … in my head,” threatens him with reciprocation: “I got a movie in my head! You wanna see it?”

“No,” says Byrne. “But do you have anything to eat?”

For anyone keen to make such an interpretation, the clip could seem to show this artist throwing an Asperger’s Syndrome coming-out party for himself, only scantly veiled as the typical famous-person’s gripe about demeaningly brain-dead publicity occasions. In presenting himself as an affectively challenged intellect beset by a world of opaque social codes, unspoken demands, and bullying assumptions, it predates by a decade Byrne’s casual acknowledgement on his website, in 2006: “I was a peculiar young man. Borderline Asperger’s, I guess.” He expanded to an interviewer for the Guardian UK:

I’d only heard of Asperger’s a few years ago, when a group out of Stanford proposed a spectrum that goes from autism to Asperger’s to sort-of-good-at-math. I thought “Wow, I see a lot of myself in that.”

Yet artists are rightly ticklish, in our diagnostic era, at the intrusions of such frameworks on the reception of their creative results. Byrne, from Bicycle Diaries:

The great works of antiquity, the classics, could have been made by nameless (to us) skilled obsessive nutters — many of their personal stories are lost to history. So maybe they could have been complete misfits too — but who cares?

He goes on:

It makes one wonder if Braque and other cubists suffered from migraines and were painting what they actually saw. Would that make a difference?

It might be worth keeping in mind, too, that Asperger’s, and the whole autism “spectrum,” is only a local prevailing condition in the history of human self-understanding. A recent weather pattern, possibly a shape glimpsed in clouds because we need to see one there. We locate so much Asperger’s Syndrome right now everywhere, in our selves and children and our art, at least partly because it gives the relief of a name to one of the unnamable zones in the contemporary relation of our curious, helpless minds to the stuff outside of our minds — to the problem of buildings and food, and of other people. The word “supertaster” describes someone whose tongue can barely stand even the slightest salt, sugar or bitter, whose sensitivity to ordinary things makes him or her averse to that which we all are expected to take for granted. But there are days, passages in human history — Late Capitalism, say — that make supertasters of us all. Or at least it may be that in a world consisting of so much routine super-stimulation, of overwhelming demands and bewildering possibilities, we may recognize ourselves in the description, abruptly and with relief.

Everyone needs to be a victim of something, after all, except for me and my monkey.

The banana-yellow-suited interviewer asks Byrne, menacingly, jabbing his finger, “What do the words of your songs mean to you? I mean, you don’t write love songs, do you?”

Byrne replies, painstakingly, “Uh, I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kind of — big.”

The question, then, is not how Aspergerian David Byrne might be — or whether or not that is even a question worth asking, or appropriate to ask (never mind that he raised it himself), outside of current fads in the history of the Categorical Imperative. The question is what that description might offer as a means for raising the artifact at hand and turning it, prism-like, to cast an altered light. Fear of Music, if you wore it like a mask over your usual head, could be a kind of machine for coping. With its air of list-making rigor, its doomed authority, this collection of songs might have special capacities for sorting the stuff of the world into manageable boxes, like a child’s dinner plate with barriers to keep the peas from the potatoes.

Yet in practice, the album’s coping devices keep falling apart individually, while discrediting one another collectively. Some things that look small from a distance, smaller than “love” — animals, say — may, when approached more closely, turn out difficult to tame. The last three songs continue Side Two’s meditation on the chances for, and risks of, liberation, while staking out increasingly cynical and perverse stances on the topic. The three also form a mini-suite on the theme of the album’s own dissolving authority and control.

Animals

The flayed, jerky guitar and metronomically tense drum and bass all land “on the one” right at the get-go, leaning forward with an air of outright panic. (“Animals” resembles a James Brown track, one of those where the Godfather of Soul and the J.B.’s sound like they’ve been set on fire, like “Hot Pants” or “Super Bad” — well, basically, “Animals” is “Super Bad,” played super badly.) The urgency recalls “I Zimbra,” yet with none of the grace — as if to refute the earlier song’s disembodied utopianism — and no conga polyrhythms to seduce your nervous system up to the song’s speed. (Instead, something seems to be relentlessly scratching, just beneath the threshold of your attention, sounding like a dog at the door of a locked cabinet full of kibble.) “Animals” has been pounding its fist in its palm from the start, even if you don’t at first discern the sound of an aggrieved pant or grunt from a singer desperate to be called to the microphone to lay out his irrational case. When he does, 8 seconds in — “I’m mad, and that’s a fact!” — it is in the manner of an outraged citizen taking over a previously orderly city council session, finding voice for screwball gripes he’s nursed his whole life, and ruining, for the counsel members, a planned evening of agreeably dull rubber-stamping.

You’d think all concerned would sag their foreheads into their hands and ignore this guy, or go into the corridor for a cigarette break, but the band falls in around him instead, one hundred percent persuaded for a change, and utterly adamant in prosecuting the same argument themselves. Which seems to concern, ah, pets. It’s a whole chorus of town kooks. Well, maybe there really is something that needs attending to, though it seems unlikely to be urgent as they claim: how can something so cute and, well, so natural, be an emergency? You just found out — really? The whole presentation’s a bit shrill, hard to take at face value. The haranguing guitar and ticking-time-bomb bass use the musical equivalent of button-pushing words, saying things that sound like “zero-sum game,” “no alternatives,” and “nuclear option.” If these guys sounded half as outraged, let their voices drop into a lower, more persuasive register — or employed a more dialectical argument, giving some credit to the opposing viewpoint — they’d easily be twice as convincing.

The song with which you’re likeliest to flat-out take exception is the song that most agrees with itself.

“Animals”’ unapologetic righteousness is displayed in the narrator’s first utterance: He’s mad (rather than simply either enraged or psychotic) and therefore begging the question of whether he’s got an ear for the double-entendre, or for jokes generally. Doesn’t sound like it. So the song transforms its listener into a reasonable Alice, she who can’t help noticing that the Mad Hatter by definition sits at a table full of animals.

* * *

It’s hard even to begin counting the ways this lyric self-discredits. “Animals think they’re pretty smart” — uh, no. Smart or not, intellectual vanity is beyond their range. Like envisioning the future, regretting the past, or being an intentional asshole, thinking you’re smart is one of the things that defines being human. “Animals want to change my life.” Really? (Maybe the title of this song should be “Projection,” buddy.)

“Made a mistake in the parking lot.” This phrase is a revealing clue as to what’s going on here: “made a mistake” is a would-be domesticator’s term, the utterance of a frustrated potty-trainer. No animal who actually lived on nuts and berries could possibly excrete in any “wrong” place. Really, every inch of paradise (which we paved, in order to put up the parking lot) is a wild animal’s proper toilet. (This point has already been conceded, anyway, by “shit on the ground / see in the dark” — i.e. it’s a basic property of animalhood.) The “mistake,” sir, is yours, to expect the wild kingdom of fauna to honor your foolish rules, the parking lot legislated with painted lines and directional arrows that we’ve made of the world. The retraction of “shit” in favor of the mincing euphemism “made a mistake” is a clue, too. This narrator — clearly an inhabitant of “Cities” — is in an anal-retentive twist, having observed in the animals a freedom easily attained, a freedom taken for granted, that very thing he ought, by the logic of this album’s illogic, to revere and desire. Yet it only seems squalid and threatening, completely divorced from his own experience or possible uses. He wants to believe it mocks him, and offers maliciously bad counsel, for the alternative is a terrifying indifference.

* * *

Taking “Animals” in the least seriously, you risk joining the narrator as the butt of the joke. For once, Fear of Music may have bitten off more, subject-matter-wise, than it can possibly chew — a mystery deeper than mind, cities, memory, or even heaven. Each of those earlier topics is, in its different way, Us, while animals are the True Other. They’re not-mind, and they dwell in not-heaven — i.e. a totally non-conceptual realm. To contemplate them is to stare at the cold blank fact of a universe that needn’t include us and our conflictual self-awareness.

So met, the album’s only option is total self-satire. We’re plunged into Lester Bangs’ “comedy record” now for sure. The primary joke is that of the breakdown of the album’s persuasive methodology (even if this was getting us nowhere in a hurry). Having a tantrum about animals being hairy (true) is as pathetic as insisting they live untroubled lives (debatable, with us around) or care whether they influence yours (patently false). This song fears its narrator is idiotic — or is positive that he is — which is precisely why it hastens to castigate the animals for not getting the joke (more projection). It does this even at risk of contradicting its persistent sulky claims that they like to laugh at people and are making fools of us. Similarly, the song sneers at the wanderings of a crazy dog as a form of indirection, to cover its own crazy-dog wandering, its bald lack of useful direction (even to be hairy might be preferable). In the end, it tries to preempt dismissal with utter candor, pleading: “Go ahead, laugh at me.” We’ll be happy to oblige, both because it’s funny, and to put some distance between ourselves and these erroneous sentiments.

* * *

At the age of nine or ten, before Talking Heads or George Orwell had entered his life, the boy in his room read Albert Payson Terhune’s once-famous novels about noble collies: Lad, A Dog, and His Dog. Then he told his parents he wanted a dog. He specifically asked for a Golden Retriever, but specifically received a Brooklyn street mutt, rescued from an abusive family down the block. “Blue” was half German Shepherd, half something else that the boy’s family always claimed was Weimaraner, though really, who knew? Cued by Terhune, the boy intensely sentimentalized Blue’s intelligence, loyalty, and valor. Blue was “his dog,” though in the end Blue attached himself more completely to that boy’s father, who was the one left to walk the dog, and to pick up his shit.

Thirty-five years later, I’m the father who twice-daily walks the family dog with a plastic bag inverted on my hand. I do it muttering sarcasm at the poor terrier, who may in her Pavlovian way by now require my muttering in order to move her bowels. My wife dislikes how I talk to the dog, my ongoing critique of the terrier’s neuroses and repetition compulsions (things I possess myself, needless to say). I don’t blame my wife — my speeches to the dog are contemptible — but still defend myself by pointing out that the dog doesn’t understand. My wife believes this is an underestimation of the dog. That’s usually the last word until the slavish creature — the dog, that is — commences licking my toes, a nightly ritual.

What I’ve never admitted to my wife, though, is that at some level of my being I’m probably still testing animals to see whether or not they might understand. If I’ve (reluctantly) quit waiting to meet Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows or the walrus from Through The Looking Glass, I haven’t given up entirely being disappointed not to own a Terhune dog. That’s to say, one who judges my moral squalor in a single pitying canine glance, and thus forces me to become a better person. This is the kind of permanent error possible only in a bookish urban childhood. “Animals,” much as I want to dismiss it, freezes this portion of my soul in a snapshot.

* * *

In 1986 artist Ilona Granet began mounting fake street signs in Manhattan, intended to shame wolf-whistling male-chauvinists, reading “Curb Your Animal Instincts.” Would it make better sense taking animals personally if the animals in question were our own bodies, beheld in dismay by our reeling, outraged brains?

“Always bumping into things” — who hasn’t held this grudge against their own limbs at some point? This interpretation puts another spin on the cries of bad advice and setting bad examples, which now may be understood as the outcries of a mind that can’t get a handle on its unruly vehicle. Who’s driving this bus? For the answer, look down, down, down. “Never there when you need them / Never come when you call them” — who was it who said that the clearest proof of God’s mockery of man was a disobedient hard-on? This aligns the song, perhaps, with Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine Blues,” or Randy Newman’s “Gone Dead Train,” or some other thinly veiled allegory of impotence, though the comparison reveals a crucial difference: a train or engine was at least firmly under human command at some point. An animal, less so.

* * *

The (up)tight bounds of the self-enclosed groove in “Animals” operates like a heartbreakingly cruel zoo-exhibit cage. Two-thirds through and it’s refused to allow the song to inch either forwards or backwards. Then, without warning, or any “build,” comes a phase transition, to another, equally constricted, airless, and sensorily deprived musical space, as if the creature has now wedged itself into a drain pipe leading from its wretched habitat, no improvement at all. The aggrieved vocal chanting that comes next puts forth a litany of new accusations. From here, a slow fade. This won’t do, but it has to. We settle for the wholly unsatisfying outro.

This structure links “Animals” to “Memories Can’t Wait,” another song that changes gears two-thirds through, never to return to the earlier mode, even while its lyrics deny the possibility of change. The sonic shift in “Memories,” though, conveys secret possibilities for release. Not here. Animals don’t help, and “Animals” won’t. Halfway through a Side Two that began with the ambitious reach of “Air” and “Heaven,” Fear of Music is vacating its facade of progress.

* * *

Played live (you can hear it on The Name of This Band is Talking Heads), the bitterness of “Animals” is barely sweetenable, but some distance is achieved by expanding “go ahead, laugh at me” from a subliminal last-second mutter to a full-throated chorus. In 1988’s “Nothing but Flowers” — a song, basically, about tearing down the parking lot and putting up a paradise (and then regretting that, too) — the songwriter inserts more daylight between himself and the benighted fulminator of “Animals,” singing, “We used to microwave / Now we just eat nuts and berries / You got it, you got it.”

Is Fear of Music a Paranoid Record?

Like science fiction or Asperger’s, “paranoid” is a label that’s a Rorschach blot. We’ll want to know what it says about you that you even put it forward for consideration, certainly, before we consent to try it on. Do you mean paranoid in a good way? Do you like paranoid art?

Let me go first: while I prefer to believe I’m not certifiably paranoid, I like paranoid art very much. Paranoid art of certain kinds. At least as I understand the term. Which I’ll try to define below. Am I hedged enough to go forward? (Or too hedged to go forward at all?)

Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It’s brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It’s not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what’s out there. It might even be bravery’s opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name “religion.”

For an individual social operator, moving through realms of gossip, through pecking orders and cliques and workplace water-cooler herds, or the even more intimate sphere of requited or unrequited love or friendship, paranoia’s not much more attractive or serviceable: what are they saying about me? How can I infiltrate them and find out? Did I hear what I thought I heard? Was that slight a calculated one?
Am I wearing horns? That figure’s a universally comic or pitiable one — the jealous husbands of Shakespeare’s Othello or Preston Sturges Unfaithfully Yours, or the Zoonoidal narrator of “Animals.”

Paranoia’s companions, the false-opposites of pronoia (the belief that everything is a benign conspiracy, manipulated in your personal favor) and solipsism (the suspicion that you are everything) are marvelously useful to mention here, in as much as they indicate paranoia’s fundamental Achilles’ heel: you, you, you, you great big beautiful doll you — you’re always at the center of the situation. What Copernicus might seem to have long-ago abolished, paranoia and its fellows restore: the observer’s centrality to the scheme he observes.

So what’s the use of paranoid art?

A remark — actually a lyric — comes to bear: “There is a war / Between the ones who say there is a war / And the ones who say that there isn’t.” (It’s from a Leonard Cohen song.) Paranoid art says, basically, there is a war. Between the one who is looking to find something to change your mind, and the mind that doesn’t want to be changed; between the sleepers and those awake, between you and the air and the animals; possibly between heaven and earth. Paranoid art insists on tracking lines (drawn on paper, perhaps): lines of force and influence, force fields of motivation, codes of power. It reinscribes the image of something at stake that others may prefer to obscure. This art traffics in interpretation, and so beckons interpretation on the part of its audience.

Perhaps above all, paranoid art is usefully confused about what is on the inside and what is on the outside of the container. Which is the place the war is to be fought? That’s the essential argument between “Life During Wartime” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Paranoid art is where Copernicus goes to be persistently overthrown, for it has noticed that consciousness is itself a permanent conspiracy theory, and one that is ipso facto correct. I think, therefore I am at the center of this story. Even if I don’t want to be. Even if I’d rather sleep. While paranoia in everyday life asks questions it believes have terrifying answers, paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. For paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.

Which is why it feel like more than an ordinary act of betrayal if our best paranoid artists subsequently strike us as having produced complacent art: it is as though they are trying to suffocate the nourishing questions that their own earlier efforts fed in us. It might seem that they were only sampling paranoia as a temporary mood or style, a way of justifying “changing your hairstyle so many times now.” Tell me: do I look paranoid in this haircut?

Electric Guitar

For the first and only time, the singer’s voice reaches you before some instrumental overture (or backing chorus, in “Air”) — that is if you want to call this “singing,” as opposed to the sound of some guy doing a stand-up agony routine, or taunting his imaginary friend. The drummer strikes a couple of ill-considered beats and then settles into a ragged rhythm, while the guitar begins sandily tramping, like a zombie lost in seaside fog, and with no particular regret, since he was never very hungry to begin with. Then a moaning village-idiot bass line wanders in, except somebody’s phase-shifted this bass through a French horn or trombone, apparently. Maybe a producer’s joking act of revenge against the bass player. (You wanna get all froggy in my “Heaven”? Okay, poof, you’re a frog.) Meanwhile something else toots at random, just to say how-do-you-do, before vanishing: was it a kazoo, or a clown’s bicycle horn?

The track’s whole air is drunken, misguided, deranged, but rather harmlessly so. The band seems to be only half-willingly following the singer into this scenario, as if they’ve never heard the song before. Yet the singer only half-willingly leads them forward, seeming more like someone who’s snuck off to the bathroom during the party and forgot to come back, is instead making odd faces at himself in the mirror. Hey, you’ve got the rare early pressing of Fear of Music in your hands, the one where they accidentally substituted the demo of “Electric Guitar” (recorded in a plumber’s storeroom) for the finished track! Only three hundred copies leaked out before the mistake was caught — valuable! Oh, there’s no such thing? This is the finished track of “Electric Guitar,” keeping its appointment on the masterpiece artwork known as Fear of Music?

Well, you may be inclined to think, not so bad for the official worst song on the album. This track appears designated to attract such judgment, as if to throw us off the scent of some other weak member of the herd.

What is it about “Electric Guitar” that triggers defensiveness and embarrassment? Surely it’s something more than finding it tucked away in nearly any album’s official “hiding spot,” one-song-from-last, neither fish nor finale. What’s the word? Oh yeah, penultimate. But there’s nothing remotely “ultimate” about this song, which seems to wither from even the mildest responsibilities of being included in the proceedings. “Electric Guitar” needn’t further any “argument,” nor have one of its own, nor even tell a coherent story — all these expectations we’ve abandoned by now (though we keep remarking on their absence, as though feeling we’d been promised these things). But, please, at least, speak up, and quit talking with your mouth full. Pay attention to what you’re saying!

The song’s chagrin at its own gestures is fitting, since the subject, where we can make it out, seems to have to do with embarrassment at the imposture and pretense of finding themselves in the position of a rock band presenting rock music with electric rock guitars in the first place. Get a life! This is wartime! Don’t quit your day job, or do, but not for this. The disjointed, tinny, hobbled tone of the guitars on the track (the bass is an electric guitar too, remember) recapitulates the theme — the whole track is riddled with mortification at having anything to put forward at all. (The phrase “tune this electric guitar” sounds awfully like “tuneless electric guitar,” and we agree.)

This self-mocking theme of imposture is at odds with (and almost totally annihilates, or invalidates) the ostensible “tale” here, a paranoid scenario that sticks halfway between Kafka’s The Trial and some liberal-allegorical Rod Serling episode involving “music police.” These scraps of narrative, when not totally incoherent, display the self-aggrandizing overreach of a lot of counterculture persecution complexes: first they came for the electric guitars, and I said nothing, then they rounded up the bongs and Day-Glo posters …

* * *

The lyricist — if we posit such a being in this instance, as opposed to a mumbling morning-after dream-recounter — seems wholly dispirited, dumping out notebook scraps, latching onto received phrases (“the meaning of life,” “a crime against the state”), garbling syntax. What can we rescue from the scene? The figure of the electric guitar moves through this song like a horror-movie creature, assembled from unlikely parts and ill-advisedly given a version of life; at once a pitiable victim and a figure of threat; unkillable because undead to begin with. What’s the crime here? The highway accident? The untuned guitar? The ruse of elevating rock and roll to the status of art? Or the substitution of a copy for an original? (An Andy Warhol moment crops up, a bit of postmodern art-speak — “the copy sounds better” — but it’s another fragment.) The shadowy judge and jury feel as likely to be record company executives — or a “jukebox jury” on a radio game show — as an existential Star Chamber. Really, the artist sits in self-judgment, at finding himself playing the old card of rebellion. In this formulation rock ’n’ roll is a rote gesture, one likely exhausted before it began, before Elvis Presley borrowed a black leather cap and what spark it still carried from Marlon Brando in The Wild One. This is not an art for adults.

“Electric Guitar” might be a not-so-secret telegram to fellow musicians: your relationship with your instrument is tenuous at best. Do not trust it. You cannot tune it. It is fragile. It is controlled by something outside of yourself. If the first sensation of a rock musician is that you’re a font of authenticity, the second is that you’re a fucking fake.

Comedy’s the way out again, and the comedy’s good. The only problem might be that the best joke is right up front. “Electric guitarrrrr / Gets run o-verrrr / By a caaarrr / On the HIGH-way”
— the singer paints this picture with the eye-rolling, one-thousand-percent non-sympathy and morbid glee of a five-year-old reporting on the death of a pet frog to his horrified parents. Have we given birth to a sociopath? But the kid knows what Pete Townsend did in 1965: the frog, like the guitar, is utterly replaceable. And its guts looked pretty cool on the outside.

This is the best joke not just for the priceless delivery, but because it lends its character to the whole experience of “Electric Guitar,” which sounds like it got run over by a car, too. Then, like a nightmare thing, like Jeff Goldblum’s “Brundlefly” in Cronenberg’s The Fly, it doesn’t have the taste to die.

* * *

Even “Electric Guitar”’s title conveys its impurity here. No other noun required a modifier to keep it upright. In Fear of Music’s Periodic Table of Elements, “Electric Guitar” isn’t gold, it’s fool’s gold.

* * *

So what’s “Electric Guitar” for? With its tone of luxuriant degeneracy it seems mainly to be demarcating just how bad things can get. Even if the tools of inquiry were disqualified in earlier chapters — “what good are notebooks?”; “science won’t change you”; “don’t think I can fit it on the paper”; and so forth — they were disqualified in what appears in retrospect to have been a spirit of inquiry, leaving the implication that they might give way to sturdier, more viable methods. All those spotty arguments now look rigorous by comparison to “Electric Guitar.” And each and every one of those arguments was conveyed to us in a — rock song! In this way, the unspooled languor and depressive haze of “Electric Guitar” may cast some effective shadow on nearly everything that preceded it. You thought you’d given up everything — you told yourself you were giving up the nightlife — but you were still clinging to your collection of rock LPs, especially that worn-out old copy of Fear of Music. (They’ll have to pry it from your cold, dead hands.)

Paper, for all its weakness, at least gets a minimally competent defense: “Hold on to that paper.” On the other hand: “Never listen to electric guitar.” If I were electric guitar, I’d fire my lawyer.

* * *

Yet whether it’s “Electric Guitar” that’s guilty or not, let’s sing a tiny ballad to “the worst song on the album,” a fragile and beautiful notion owing its life to the unlikely demands of a listener for perfection and completion, in a region of the insistently irregular, impure and unlikely. Forget “concept albums” — album is itself a concept. Hardly a natural form, not sun or moon, not some inevitable God in our fannish sky. There used to only be “songs” — hits, singles, filler — jumbled into saleable compendiums, in a format called a “long player.” Then someone — Beatles? Dylan? — raised the stakes. And lately, the stretchiness and permeability of new formats and modes of transmission renders the concept antique. “Worst song on the album” means as little, probably, to an LCD Soundsystem fan as it did once to a Bo Diddley fan. (Or should.) Yet that window between the two is where my sensibility ran into Fear of Music, and likely yours too. And truthfully, that window between is where Fear of Music conceived and presented itself to us. And more, how we adore our disappointment! Our love wouldn’t be complete without it.

* * *

The whiny little guitar squiggle that appears following every utterance of the words “electric guitar” in the chorus (or what passes for a chorus, etc.) represents the ultimate dead end for its impulse — that of the guitar as “primary speaker” in rock music. It sounds like “needle-needle-nee”!, and it never progresses, nor occupies any larger role than it does at it first appearance. It’s laughable, yet, in its modularity as a figure floating in aural vacuum, the squiggle points forward to the spatial palace of “Drugs.” There, such lost sounds will act less as distress calls than as a kind of mental sonar, taking measure of an uncannily vast interior.

What Was the Fate of the Fear of Music Songs in Live Performance?

The Fear of Music tour, the one I glimpsed with Tom in New Jersey, was the band’s swansong as a performing quartet — that’s unless you count the moment in the Stop Making Sense enactment when the original foursome are alone on the stage. (It’s “Found a Job” — precisely what these four human beings did together when they signed their first record deal.) But that moment is more like an eloquent tombstone for what had been, isn’t it?

Almost the whole album was tried on stage at one point or another, in 1979 and 1980. Only “Drugs” would wait for the expanded band (and that song, as we’ll see, had a secret early life in live performance, under another name). Even “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” were given air. Some of the songs are tough to work up — not because they necessarily demand extra players (though “Life During Wartime” misses its bongos), but because Eno-aura, those treatments to which he’d subjected voice and instrument, needed an equivalent on other terms.

“Life During Wartime,” knowing it has the obligation of becoming a classic, nevertheless sounds, in Boston in August 1979, tentative and roller-rinky, much as Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” did at the Hollywood Bowl in 1965, mere months before it became the song that destroyed European civilization. Yet at that same Boston show “Memories Can’t Wait” appears with a new guitar part, scudding and nervous, to simulate the Enoreverb — the result has the skeletal ferocity of Gang of Four. (An even better 1979 version, at the State Theater in Sydney, Australia, is introduced by Byrne as “Memories,” reducing the title to its noun-essence.) Once in a while, the singer’s psycho-killer one-man-theater makes too much a cartoon of “Mind” or “Cities.” Yet the band’s total commitment, to what you’d think must still have struck them as an astonishing new burst of songs, rides over any limitations. These recordings, which fortunately circulate pretty widely, are essential. They halt the album in time and gaze at it in wonder.

On that 1979 tour, in Peoria, Illinois, Jerry Harrison invited Adrian Belew onstage, to add a guitar solo to the band’s encore of “Psycho Killer.” A year or so later, faced with the thrilling prospect of putting across live versions of the layered, polyrhythmic, diffuse Remain in Light tracks — themselves constructed out of things like Belew’s solos, and Nona Hendryx’s vocals — Harrison took the job of recruiting a larger band: Belew, a bass player named Busta Jones, a drummer named Steve Scales, and Bernie Worrell, a Julliard-trained architect of the Parliament-Funkadelic sound.

You must change your band.

By the time the nine- or ten-person ensemble working under the name Talking Heads had finished touring to support Remain in Light they were one of the greatest, most compulsively danceable, and certainly most unprecedented, live bands in the history of pop music. Many thousands of people knew this at the time.

Three years later, the successive evidence offered by The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, and the film and album Stop Making Sense, which documented the subsequent “Big Suit” tour, and the spotlight focused by “Burning Down the House,” the band’s first top-ten hit, ensured everyone knew it.

The boy in his room — well, by this time increasingly out of his room — was aboard this bus. At the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Flushing, NY, in August, 1982, the “evolved” Talking Heads dragged the boy bodily through transformations he couldn’t have known to invite but didn’t remotely care to resist. At that concert, undergoing a state of rapture that easily rekindles in memory, the boy turned to his best friend Joel and gave the simplest and most unguarded expression possible to a feeling nearly anyone has had at least once (I hope), perhaps most often at the perihelion of some sexual experience, or drug experience. I don’t remember the exact words the boy used, but the gist was, “We must never, ever, miss a chance to do this again.” To be fair, this was a drug experience as well. And the boy was a week or two from leaving for his first days at college, which is to say at the door of his first departure from his city, from the city of prideful fear. Yet to doubt that recollection would be to doubt pleasure itself. If we all have two or three moments to which we’ll forever ache to return, this is one of mine.

At that concert the band debuted a song from the album that would become Speaking in Tongues. I couldn’t make out the title the singer announced (he may only have said “a new song”), nor much of the lyrics, which anyway prominently consisted of a nonsense phrase: “High, high, high, high, high, hiiiigh — woo-hoooo!” The song would turn out to be “Swamp.” It scared me at the time, and I liked that. David Byrne sounded devilish. Maybe Talking Heads were headed to an (even more) fearful place, on my behalf, as a lover of my own fear. Fear of Music remained my sentimental favorite, but you’d have been an idiot to argue with Remain in Light. In fact, it was easy to congratulate yourself in 1982 that you’d chosen your favorite band perfectly, for its capacity to grow at a rate that outpaced your wild expectations.

Some of the Fear of Music songs were swept up in this apotheosis: “Life During Wartime,” of course, and “Cities,” but also “Mind.” “I Zimbra” appeared, sometimes mated to “Big Business,” a Remain in Light-style Byrne solo track. “Heaven” went on to play a special role as semi-ironic interlude, its simplicity more and more in contrast to the dance-oriented swirl of the set-list. “Drugs” makes some surreally jubilant appearances. If you’d asked me then, I’d have sworn the songs had grown with the band, responding to their globalized treatments by evolving too, unfurling new avenues and implications only glimpsed on the original album.

Listening to these concerts now, and even watching the undeniably joyous Stop Making Sense, I’m not so sure. By now I will have plainly disqualified myself as anything but a Fear of Music purist and partisan, so I may as well go ahead and say that from the first time Adrian Belew stepped onstage — or maybe the first time Busta Jones stepped onstage — something was lost as well as gained, for these songs especially. Fear of Music’s special aura and tension seem to me now absolutely defined within the four-person band that held the name Talking Heads when they made the album. The negotiation of solitude with companionship, located in the space between those four players, activates the deeper forces in the Fear of Music songs. David Byrne had been struggling with the format of “rock band,” and with the (implicitly confessional) role of “lead singer.” In Remain in Light and beyond, and in the expanded band’s performances, he solved it. But the sound preceding, the sound of that struggle just before it was solved, generated a field of meanings with an unstable but permanent power.

Not to be overly dramatic, but Fear of Music sounds to me now to have been almost instantly renounced. Its door closed. The anxiety, claustrophobia, and dread, but also the fascination, the solipsistic delight, all bound within a suite of internal self-references, has exploded. The pieces will never be put back together. In fact, David Byrne sings the Fear of Music songs beautifully with the larger band — sings them urgently, as if the songs are wildly alive to him. How could he do otherwise, in musical surroundings as fervent as any singer’s had the luck to inhabit? But the air isn’t close around him, generating the pressure of dread these songs once dramatized. He’s gained elbow room, room enough for him to learn to be a hilarious dancer, room enough to declaim and preach as the Remain in Light songs need him to do, room enough for a big suit and some groovy back-up singers. And fear is drained, like a snake’s venom.

Up to Fear of Music, the name of this band is Talking Heads. After, Talking Heads is what they’re called. It’s as though the original band was both too lonely and not lonely enough for the singer and songwriter of Fear of Music.

Cities have a lot of people in them, more than families do, but we go to them, often, to be unknown.

And then our cities become our families, and we might find we have to venture forth from those as well.

In the film Stop Making Sense it is during “Life During Wartime” that David Byrne begins running in circles around the stage, around the band, even behind Chris Frantz’s riser. The gesture is paradoxical — mute and eloquent, a singer running away from his microphone and at the same time seeming to say look at all I can encircle. Look at all that the alchemy of my fear and desire has brought into being. My wartime has become a party in my mind and yours. It is the running of a proud curator racing through the rooms of his museum gesturing at the wonders in his collection, implements from a war, once dangerous and ugly, but now transformed into Dada “readymades,” decanted into myth and symbol. It is the running of an animal measuring the limits of its cage.

Drugs

“Drugs” opens into room tone, only the room might be out-of-doors — a rain forest, or some vast arboretum dripping with birds. You can actually hear the air, and the animals. (These birds — of paradise? — offer a handy contradiction of “Animals,” as if another was needed: you know these animals aren’t hairy.) That’s to say, “Drugs” is aware that something else is out there, and isn’t particularly threatened. An interior landscape by definition, the song will persist in enclosing more stuff than some of the album’s ostensible panoramas. This includes a number of weightless sonic sculptures drifting through its doorways, but also conceptual glances in this or that direction — for “Drugs,” despite wandering attention, nods at many of Fear of Music’s themes. If the song is recessive, trapped within a starkly reduced subjectivity, it at least paints a generous view of this head’s quarters. There’s time to spread out and look around, and plenty of picture windows, even if these offer vistas only of other rooms. (As Dr. Aldous Leary said, The doors of perception have many mansions. Or something.)

These birds, though they’ll be pushed into the ambient-subliminal layer once other noises appear, stay with “Drugs” well past the first minute (they last for 1:16, out of 5:20, on the album’s longest track). You simply take them for granted, as anyone living in hearing range of real birds tends to do. You only might notice if they were gone. Or not. It depends on your attention to that sort of thing.

* * *

A synthesizer mimics the science-fictiony sound of an airlock opening, or an elevator door unsealing, then gives way to a twitchily distinctive rhythm figure. This will be one of the song’s constants — though from time to time it lays out, or is drowned in effects, the figure will persist in this first form all the way to the song’s fade, 5 minutes later. Untreated drum and bass, recognizable as themselves, pace some vast floor — are we back in Side One’s loft? — muttering to one another. The figure is punctuated by a heavily echoed “ping” sound, like that of a submarine’s sonar, or the singing note a metal hammer makes when striking a forge, or bare stone. In fact, this weird tone makes an explicit reference to another song featuring hammered beats — Lee Dorsey’s “Working in a Coal Mine.” The resemblance is clearest in the Dorsey song’s bridge, when other instruments fall away, leaving just the hammered beat and the bass line’s pulse, while the singer moans, “Lord, I am so tired … how long can this go on?” — lyrics that themselves wouldn’t be entirely out of place on “Drugs” (or “Memories Can’t Wait”). Still, the reference, if it is one, seems out of joint: one’s a song of labor and the other, presumably, of leisure. On the other hand, “Working in a Coal Mine” is one of those rare sixties pop songs not about love, a thing that obviously interested both Fear of Music’s songwriter and its producer. (It also interested Devo, whose cover of “Working in a Coal Mine,” released in 1981, was recorded in demo form much earlier, and was a demo Brian Eno would have heard while planning that band’s first album. Just a thought.)

What’s achieved, anyway, is the suggestion that this drug trip might actually be hard, sweaty work — and that journeying through “Drugs” could feel as fathomless and reverberant as entering a coal mine.

* * *

It will be two full verses and one chorus before the singer appears. We’re still in birdland. The next entrant into the space of “Drugs” is a guitar figure, another needle-needle-neep like that we’ve just met in “Electric Guitar” — but this one’s less insecure and whiny, far more self-possessed. It seems perfectly happy to migrate through, offering its peculiar intermittent contribution to the atmosphere. The guitar’s not looking to hook up, it’s playing with itself.

Keyboard offers a wash of color here and there. The synthesizer reproduces the airlock sound.

(This is the verse.)

Just before the minute mark the rhythm track dampens, the hammer-pings cease, and the synthesizer projects a short film depicting some long-lost satellites whose orbit has taken them across our high ceiling.

(This is the chorus.)

We are experiencing a distinct sense of unhurry. “Drugs” is hard to get your brain around. But you’ll have time.

* * *

Preparing us to meet the trauma of the sound of human speech entering into this eerily becalmed chapel, an otherworldly harmony vocal may or may not be buried under the synthesizer sweeping through the chorus section. If it is there, rather than being produced by some unspecified Enofication of the synth tones themselves — you could listen a hundred times and be uncertain — it has the quality of wraithlike femininity we encountered once before, in the Sweetbreaths’ contribution to “Air.” This makes sense. We’re on a science fiction trip.

More absolutely, though, the birds are the track’s vocalists, until the singer arrives. Job finished, they’ll never return once he opens his yap.

* * *

Even at 1:21 he hasn’t sung, but we’re made aware of his presence. He breathes and gulps into our attention. Detecting a singer’s intake of breath isn’t uncommon on a closely miked vocal track (a few singers, like Diana Ross, scoop a little oxygen at the end of nearly every sung line, a thing I’ve done you no favor by pointing out since it can be ruinously distracting once you’ve begun noticing). A breath out, however, is an absolute unicorn in recorded music. Exhalations are meant to carry notes of song (or shouts of joy, or, once in a while, a James Brown grunt, or Bob Dylan syllable of laughter). This guy comes in panting. And goes on struggling to control his intake through the song. This effect is produced in the true manner of a method-actor, like Dustin Hoffman staying up all night before the torture scenes in Marathon Man: the singer, reportedly, did calisthenics before stepping to the mike, then jogged in place to keep from regaining his breath while he sang.

It’s a great performance, not a hammish one. You hang on every word, yet the vocal never chews the room’s extraordinary scenery — each word also hangs in the track’s uncannily spacious zone, equal player to the banners of keyboard color unfurling, the guitar’s relentless onanism, the what’s-he-building-in-there? puzzle of the rhythm track’s steady labors.

Of course, as in the other actorly tradition — Lawrence Olivier or Orson Welles stagecraft, that is — this performance is abetted by a generous portion of a singer’s equivalent of wigs and false noses. The producer runs amok, shading or distorting or compressing these syllables in any number of directions throughout, leaving barely any unmolested. It’s all good. Every disguise fits.

The singer will only sing for 2:17 of the song’s 5:21. Structurally, “Drugs” takes the form of a triptych: (1) birds (2) singer; and (3) some “found vocals” still to come. Occupying merely the middle-third of the whole imposes on this performance a kind of modesty. Big as he may feel to himself, this guy is just one thing moving through an even larger zone of our attention.

* * *

“And all I see is little dots.” There’s no way I can think to easily prove this, but “and” is surely one of the rarest common words to open the first line of song lyric. We’ve caught this narrator in media res, a traditionally exciting narrative strategy, and one that here suggests this person may have been wandering in other rooms of the mansion before we bumped into him here. “Dots” is grasped in retrospect, working back from the rhyme with “spots” (or taken off the lyric sheet). What we hear instead has been reverbed until it sounds like “doubts.” The dots are what he sees; the doubts are what we feel.

“Some are smeared …” No, please, do go on, it’s fascinating. In “Mind” we’re informed that we’re not listening; here we’re told the singer doesn’t notice us, or whomever it is he might be supposed to be addressing — he’s too taken up with the hallucinations or phosphenes in his visual field. We’re in the position of a guide, then, a steady hand to hold while he discourses from the far side of his reality. We’re a designated driver.

* * *

He feels “like murder” but “that’s alright.” The album’s flow of equivocal statements becomes, in “Drugs,” a geyser, one which blankets its weirdest song in okayness. Never has this strategy been more necessary, or effective. “Okay,” “alright,” and “over in a minute or two” — these will mitigate murder, meanness, and too much light, just as the limp modifier “pretty” damps down whatever’s “intense.” Similarly, not knowing what they’re talking about takes the sting out of the laughter of the girls. (Maybe they’re really not laughing at the mess the boys made, but at some girlish joke among themselves.) You could slide through all kinds of disaster in a state like this, telling yourself it was “okay” the whole time. You only might wake up with blood on your hands. But then again you might also discover it was because you’d been sitting in a corner rhythmically scratching your own scalp or shin or earlobe until it bled.

* * *

He tells us two things, adamantly, and as if they’re one and the same. But strictly speaking, they’re not. When he says, “I don’t know what they’re talking about,” we believe him absolutely — to this guy, other human voices probably sound like the lyrics to “I Zimbra” right about now — but when he expands, to say, “Nobody knows what they’re talking about” we may doubt his reportorial capacities. In that gap lies the song’s crux: who else is present? And are they on the same trip? This is a breakdown along “Life During Wartime” versus “Memories Can’t Wait” lines. Either we’re getting a missive from the front lines of a new state of collective reality, or the song’s a minority report, from the one fellow who sees phantoms.

Yet mean and scary as things want to be, the whole drama is enacted within a sympathetic amplitude which keeps this song, and its narrator, well clear of “Animals” territory. Bottom line: he gets the joke — the joke of subjectivity, the joke of paranoia, the inside-outside problem of trying to make an effective observation of anything in particular when the specimens keeps shifting and sliding under the microscope, and the lens keeps reflecting your own face back to you. Contemplate the sequence of dorky confessions beginning at 2:59 (right after a gawky hiccup of what sounds like a violin sawed by a chimpanzee): I’m charged up I’m kinda wooden I’m barely moving I study motion I study myself I fooled myself! Like Groucho meeting Harpo in a doorway framed to look like a mirror in Duck Soup, the speaker’s caught sight of a version of himself that’s not quite right — or not right at all. His reaction is not only to be fascinated at his own impaired function, but to invite the fascination of others.

With that, and one more chorus (“don’t feel like talking,” declares the Talking Head), he’s out. Or not quite. He’s got another of those odd gaspy exhalations to deliver, at 3:41, but this one’s really a laugh, and a fairly relaxed, even self-approving one. The producer clears out all distortions to frame the little guffaw in sonic clarity, as if the singer had managed to stick his head out a window and gargle with a mouthful of fresh air.

* * *

He cedes the stage to something new that’s also prescient. It’s a male voice, sounding like some kind of public service announcement, indecipherably gobbled in echoey loops (if you listen hard to one channel, then the next, you might finally conclude you’d heard “great” on the left and “good deal of collective” or “good deal of molecular” on the right — and you might be completely imagining it). What “Drugs” sounds like once this “found vocal” appears is highly predictive of the Eno-Byrne collaboration coming just next, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (more on this subject, momentarily). But the garbled announcer isn’t given the last third of “Drugs” to himself, as the birds had rule of the first. He comes and goes, is haunted by some other buried ghost-voices, and then — gadzooks! — a bullfrog croaks, plain as day, plain as the singer’s laughter. It’s as though the producer raised the stakes on the bassist once more — still feeling froggy? Here’s that sound you were chasing. Side Two’s been colonized: One Nation Under Frog.

* * *

Authentic fact: “Drugs” has a secret identity, a true name. It was once called “Electricity,” and was demoed and played live and introduced to audiences under this title. It then suffered a name change. There could be a pragmatic reason for this: the song was due to nestle beside another, called “Electric Guitar,” creating risk of verbal static.

Playing it in concert in late 1978, the singer’s last sung words are, “Electricity — call it by name!” Six months later, in the recording sessions, he replaces these words with, “Electricity — that’s what I call it!” (Again, the distinction between a thing’s name, and what it is called.) As if he’s making a rueful, stubborn joke about a song title that isn’t quite willing to be banished — and it isn’t as if the word electricity has been demoted in importance within the song. (Amusingly, when I search my own stash for versions, studio or live, legalized or extralegal, I find the piece under four names: “Drugs,” “Electricity,” “Drugs (Electricity)” and “Electricity (Drugs).”)

Pop history marks the fact that the word “God” didn’t appear in the title or chorus of a pop song until The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” Despite the association of sixties rock with drugs, the actual word “drug” endured a similar quarantine into the seventies, when glam and punk made it a commonplace (Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug,” Ian Dury’s “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,” The Clash’s “Julie’s Been Working in the Drug Squad,” Mike Hall’s “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around,” East River Pipe’s “Druglife,” Wilco’s “Handshake Drugs,” the Karl Hendricks Trio’s “Naked and High On Drugs,” etc.).

The sixties drought may have been self-censorship for fear of radio boycott. It also might be that using the word would have named something sacred too bluntly. Except when being warned against, drugs were understood as exalted and esoteric, an agent for self-transformation that was a kind of twin to the music itself, and so were named allusively or not at all. To say the word is to treat the stuff irreverently, as a material, daylight fact. Drugs could even be embarrassing hippie stuff, like sex, to be denounced by punks overthrowing oppressive countercultural norms.

Yet the title “Drugs” sounds unironic, and unembarrassed to be. It’s also a better noun for the album’s collection, more grounded. It makes the song less arty-farty, more human, since who gets high on electricity? Only Dr. Frankenstein’s exquisite corpse, that Dada collage of body parts. Whereas we living can all get wired on drugs. Even the brainiest nerds must get stoned. This matter-of-factness also points to one of the paradoxes of the song: that despite drugs being a “head trip,” you must first convey them through your body (lungs, veins, or stomach). On an album partly about the plight of disembodied minds, the mind in “Drugs,” wedged between bird sounds and frog noises, dwells contentedly in the vehicle of its animal nature.

* * *

On the other hand, a Frankenstein reference would have been appropriate, since “Drugs,” more than any other song on the album, is its mad-scientist producer’s monster, or rather the monster produced by two mad scientist falling into happy collaboration — the producer and the songwriter. The extent of this is proved by the track’s earlier life as “Electricity,” for, along with a live version, if you seek you’ll find you can hear an instrumental demo track testifying to the song’s nature Before and After Eno. The song was spooky from the first, but it was also a conventional “rock” song: guitar-laden, propulsive and full-sounding — strummable, hummable. (It is also marvelous.) David Byrne: “Brian and I listened to it over and over again and then I suggested starting to remove things from the mix. First, my vocal came out, and then all the other parts, and then all we were left with was the snare drum and some of my guitar. The problem was that, since all the old parts were ingrained in our heads, we couldn’t come up with anything new to replace them. So what we did was work on the parts simultaneously but without each other’s knowledge. Brian would play half a bass part and I would play half a bass part and then we’d put them together as if it was one part …” The method described is, precisely, that of the Dada art-generating game called Exquisite Corpse. The two men killed “Electricity” to bring “Drugs” to life, and so the most retrograde item on the album became the most futuristic, the first-existing placed last. Though “I Zimbra” is routinely billed as the bridge to a place beyond Fear of Music, “Drugs” is arguably even more prophetic, in the manner of its construction as well as the sound.

What’s missing from the anecdote are the names of the other three members of Talking Heads, erased as fully as the sound of their instruments (apart from that snare). To fall in love with “Drugs” is to fall in love, a little, with the future death of this band. The boy in his room did, but was oblivious to his complicity.

* * *

But wait, wait, what does “Drugs” mean? We’re so near the end, let me try shuffling this tarot deck once more: “I Zimbra” (no-mind, non-sense), “Mind” (not a working number), “Paper” (old methods doubtful), “Cities” (flee, dance), “Life During Wartime” (quit dancing, find barricades), “Memories Can’t Wait” (party and war are in your mind), “Air” (no release on earth), “Heaven” (release from mind only in death), “Animals” (no dignity in bodily release), “Electric Guitar” (doubt rock) — so, does “Drugs” counsel a mixed state of happy impurity, an ecstatic surrender on temporary organic terms? Conclusion: Fuck up the mind. Or maybe the key phrase is “I study motion,” as the songwriter was about to do, and you should too. This is a disco! (Or at least it ain’t not no disco.) Quit staring at your phosphenes, wallflower. You may be overthinking things. In fact, free your mind and — hey, at last I get it! — your ass will follow. Anybody have Bernie Worrell’s phone number?

* * *

Then, at last, at the 4:21 mark (a duration by which every other song on Fear of Music has already said its piece, quit the stage), and supplanting birds, singer, found voices, bullfrog, plus any number of elegantly synthesized aural objects floating past our view, comes an unhinged, frenetic, heedless, all-elbows guitar solo. Or maybe this is just another placeholder, another paper slip fluttering to the ground reading “insert guitar solo here” — only this time instead of long tones subserviently anchored to chord structures, we meet a guitar filling all available space with freewheeling “rawk” aggression. “Drugs” goes out on this scraping, sketchy note, as if making final rebuke to all bogus conclusions, including my own in this book. That guitar denies closure to the song, and the album. It says: you think you know where we’re going, but you don’t. How could you possibly know, when the place we set out for was, exactly, nowhere — and then we lost our way?

How do you get to nowhere from here, anyway?

Here’s how: flip the record over and drop the needle again. The answer you seek, pilgrim, is lurking in “I Zimbra.” This time maybe you’ll get it.

So that’s what the boy in his room did.

Breaking Up With Fear of Music

And then, for a while, I didn’t. I might not have played Fear of Music once in ten years. Roughly, the nineties — I might not have played Fear of Music once in the nineties. We were exes, the album and I. Or if I’m lying, and I might be, it’s the kind of lying you do, lying to others and yourself, when you sleep with an ex. That didn’t really happen. Also, it didn’t mean anything. I was just checking to be certain it was over.

And there was the matter of what came after. Remain in Light was undeniable, if a little esoteric around the edges. But, though “Swamp” had sent a nice shiver through me in live performance at Forest Hills, when the record came out, even while I liked it and played it a lot, there was absolutely no way to claim Speaking in Tongues as Reasons to be Fearful, Part Three. The band “belonged” to others now, the way Fear of Music belonged to me. This could be okay — maybe — if I kept liking the work. Well, I did like it, and then didn’t, but I also never quit examining the new work for clues that the band knew it was neglecting its most crucial task, which would be to reconquer those dark towers that loomed over the landscape of my mind. The problem was, soon Fear of Music was two, three, then four albums in the rear view mirror. Nobody even glanced back at those towers. Those towers grew dusty.

When the band “stripped down” on Little Creatures, I imagined I detected a hint of regret on their part, regret at abandoning the mode I liked best. In fact, after the elaborate George Clintonesque funk-metaphors, the simple “topics” on that album, and on True Stories, could suggest, if you hastily retitled the songs to identify their root-nouns, a kind of fearless version of Fear of Music’s index of elements: “Names,” “Babies,” “Television,” “Nowhere,” “Radio,” “Evidence,” and so forth. The only problem was that this proved to me how much I didn’t want a fearless Fear. And I didn’t like most of those songs so much as I tried to.

Too often, I felt, the band’s later albums courted harmlessness, and disclaimed complicity. (Even Randy Newman was more troubling.) This is not what you want from artists who had shown you — in a world where “scary” things like Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and The Exorcist had only seemed silly, overwrought, and superstitious — what your own brand of fear truly consisted of. How it mingled in your environment and neural habitat simultaneously, how much it seemed to resemble thought itself.

My disappointment, though I’ve brandished it like a badge of maturity and self-knowledge, is, in the end, pretty generic. Given the (also generic) story of how the band’s climb to their heights of accomplishment tumbled into a tale of diminishingly vivid follow-ups, public exposure of private grudges, and unstellar solo careers, some version of my sulky feelings could probably be located in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of persons whose coming of age was congruent, like mine, with this band’s career. If you were five years younger, you might feel approximately the same way about, say, The Smiths. I should emphasize that I say this not to dismiss anyone else’s cathexis, but to at least temporarily dismantle my own, the better to have a gander at it. The violence of my identification with Fear of Music remains durably interesting to me even after I debunk it by shifting it into this bland generational perspective, even after I admit that it really isn’t violence, except in a there’s a war in my mind kind of way.

The reason it remains interesting is that these matters — the matter of self-willed exile from things that nourish us, the matter of not-totally-secret complicity with the forces of alienation and dislocation we claim only to be withstanding, the matter of wanting the cities we love to be destroyed to prove that nobody except ourselves could love them as they ought to be loved, the matter of cherishing one’s own dread, and the distance it enforces between you and other human beings, the matter of not letting the world fire you, because you quit — all these matters seem nested, when I look, inside the artwork itself. Fear of Music predicted my departure from it: when I took it inside of myself it proved an Unidentifiable-With Flying Object. This is why I trace in it, so often now, a premonition of its departure from itself, those clues as to its unsustainability, its uselessness as a dwelling-place, even for the people who made it.

My biggest surprise, coming full circle to Fear of Music and to Talking Heads generally, was how often in their work I felt the throb of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Look Back” or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” or the bluesman’s refrain of “always leaving home.” That note of permanent goodbye, where a potentially tender feeling makes itself callous in order to spare sentimentality, to circumvent wallowing. Needless to say, this motif is a fish in a barrel for anyone wishing to critique enabling fantasies of macho autonomy — the trumping-up of the male animal’s hard-boiled sulk. Yet the impulse can never be reduced completely out of poignancy by such a critique, because it carries within it, if nothing else, the pain of its own perceived necessity. Who are we people who sometimes need to destroy and depart, who find that losing things — people and cities, time and mind — is often the only way to taste having had them at all?

Sometimes memories just can’t wait to be memories and have to hurry the deal along.

Side One of Talking Heads’ first album opens with a goofy love song, called “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” (and that “Uh-Oh” gives you an idea just how large a spoonful of irony a fan like myself needed then, to be made to swallow such a happy pill). The second track, “New Feeling,” will be, for most listeners, when the “real” Talking Heads appear, because the guitars roil in a panic, the band seeming to pin the singer to the microphone like a specimen bug. And in the first line of their second song comes the band’s first Dylanesque farewell: “It’s not yesterday any more!”

In a sense Fear of Music and I are like Groucho and Harpo, meeting one night in that doorway that pretends to be a mirror. The false reflection displayed to me a self that was just enough off-register to be completely revealing. Yet this was only possible because we met at a time when we were both wearing the same disguise. Of course, this analogy puts the listener on a par with the object — as though I had anything to teach Fear of Music! As if it saw me at all! I’m sane enough not to think that it ever did. (“Talk to your analyst,” Fear of Music wishes to tell me, if it wishes to tell me anything. “Isn’t that what he’s paid for?”)

The punishing intensity we bring to the imperfect reflections we find in the mirror of artworks we choose to love, and our readiness to be betrayed by their failure to continue to match our next moves in the mime-show, our next steps in the dance, is likely a form of mercy. That, because it is a coping mechanism, a deflection of a punishing intensity we mostly wouldn’t want — except maybe once a week, on a shrink’s couch — to apply to ourselves. And any fan who has ever risked disappointment with their love, or any artist who has ever put themselves in the position to disappoint a fan, or a critic, if they are honest with themselves knows that the disappointment that ensues is above all a human situation.

For thirty years — god, thirty years! — I’ve wanted to say to the songwriter of Fear of Music, whether I was at the time allowing the record to touch me, or not, something along the lines of “yes, yes, this is all very good, these films, these books, these albums, even that subsequent masterpiece or two — but baby, baby, baby, where did our fear go?”

And then I began writing this book and realized that it was right where I left it.

Notes/Thanks

Text references

David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

Brian Eno, A Year, With Swollen Appendices

David Bowman, This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century

Sytze Steenstra, Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne From Talking Heads To The Present

Talking Heads, Fear of Music CD reissue insert, 2005

Andrew Purcell, “Imelda, The Nightclub Years,” The Guardian UK, January 29, 2007

Michael Phillips, “The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Red State Blues, Life in the Bush Leagues blog, December 27, 2010

For essential help, the book’s patient editor, David Barker, and Rich Cohen, Kevin Dettmar, Eliot Duhan, Sean Howe, Maureen Linker, Devin McKinney, Philip (the name of this bending talking) Price, Luc Sante, Rob Sheffield, Matthew Specktor, Andy Zax. In the zone beyond essential or help, I kowtow to this little book’s life coach, John (all I see are little dots) Hilgart.

Also available in the series:

1.Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

2.Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

3.Harvest by Sam Inglis

4.The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

5.Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

6.The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

7.Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

8.Electric Ladyland by John Perry

9.Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

10.Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11.The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

12.Let It Be by Steve Matteo

13.Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

14.Aqualung by Allan Moore

15.OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

16.Let It Be by Colin Meloy

17.Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

18.Exile on Main Sreet by Bill Janovitz

19.Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

20.Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

21.Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

22.Murmur by J. Niimi

23.Grace by Daphne Brooks

24.Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder

25.Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

26.Low by Hugo Wilcken

27.Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes

28.Music from Big Pink by John Niven

29.In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

30.Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy

31.Doolittle by Ben Sisario

32.There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

33.The Stone Roses by Alex Green

34.In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

35.Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

36.Loveless by Mike McGonigal

37.The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

38.Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

39.Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

40.Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

41.Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard

42.Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

43.The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

44.Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

45.Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

46.Aja by Don Breithaupt

47.People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

48.Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

49.Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

50.If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef

51.Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich

52.Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

53.Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

54.20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

55.Horses by Philip Shaw

56.Master of Reality by John Darnielle

57.Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris

58.Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs

59.Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

60.Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen

61.The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

62.Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

63.XO by Matthew LeMay

64.Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

65.Radio City by Bruce Eaton

66.One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards

67.Another Green World by Geeta Dayal

68.Zaireeka by Mark Richardson

69.69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol

70.Facing Future by Dan Kois

71.It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

72.Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73.Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

74.Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

75.Kid A by Marvin Lin

76.Spiderland by Scott Tennent

77.Tusk by Rob Trucks

78.Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

79.Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

80.American Recordings by Tony Tost

81.Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

82.You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield

83.Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

84.Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen

85.Dummy by R. J. Wheaton

Table of Contents

Series

Title

Continuum International Publishing Group

Dedication

“The war has been based

Warning: Contents under pressure of

Prelude I: Talking Heads Have a New Album. It's Called Fear of Music

Prelude II: Another Intermediary Artifact

I Zimbra

Is Fear of Music a Talking Heads Record?

Mind

Is Fear of Music a David Byrne Album?

Paper

Is Fear of Music a Text?

Cities

Two Cities Hiding

Life During Wartime

Is Fear of Music a New York album?

Memories Can't Wait

So Fear of Music is a Concept Album. What Happens on Side Two?

Air

Is Fear of Music a Science Fiction Record?

Heaven

Is Fear of Music an Asperger's Record?

Animals

Is Fear of Music a Paranoid Record?

Electric Guitar

What Was the Fate of the Fear of Music Songs in Live Performance?

Drugs

Breaking Up With Fear of Music

Notes/Thanks

Also available in the series