Fear of music

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Fear of music Page 12

by Jonathan Lethem


  * * *

  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

  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

 

 

 


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