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 w
ound 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.
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