Fear of music

by Jonathan Lethem

  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 t
o 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 …