* * *
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 arti
st 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
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
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