Fear of music

by Jonathan Lethem

  “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 Ne
w 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.