Fear of music Read online

  Another candidate for the song’s true subject, one proximate to twentieth-century war-fear, may be paranoia itself. For, along with advancing the list of nouns, “Paper”’s been entrusted with one baseline thematic task — just as “Mind” conjured solipsism, “Paper” is here to inject paranoia into the album’s bloodstream. Judging by the singer’s tone of panic, those rays passing through paper and self and love affair all too absolutely unmake this song’s effort to “hold on”; the guitars, hypervigilant in their foxholes, seem to agree. “Nothing to fear but fear itself,” the summit of Greatest Generation bravado, finds itself rewritten in Cold War jitters: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody out to get you. The character peering through his blinds in a tinfoil-lined beanie may know something you don’t.

  In a less global sphere, “Paper” enacts an artistic crisis, possibly even discloses a blatantly embarrassing case of writer’s block. The harder you try to parse the lyrics the more they resemble a vortex of notes — pages flying off a calendar, or perhaps a refrigerator daubed with Post-Its, proposals for possible songs about paper that never quite got around to being written. These notions may have been jotted down on waking from a dream, or while stoned: they seemed good at the time. Transitions are missing, maybe because they were impossible in the first place, negotiating as they would have had to between unresolved and contradictory premises residing warily in the same zone. Not so much thesis and antithesis as a constellation of inklings suspended at awkward angles from one another. The sole element linking all this paper, ironically, is those rays passing through. These perhaps stand for the intangible substance of the singer’s exigencies, his yearning for solace or confirmation — mind again!

  Let’s tabulate a few of these fluttering scraps:

  “It’s been taken care of” / ”Take a few weeks off.” Office politics, agendas. Voice of the boss. The paper discloses a whiff of Kafka bureaucracy.

  “Long distance telephone call.” The paper’s outmoded. Yet communication breakdown’s always the same.

  “Hold on to that paper.” Someone may want to inspect your credentials or ID. “Your papers, please.”

  “Don’t think I can fit it” / ”Go ahead and tear it up.” Bad day in the artist’s studio.

  “Even though it was never written down, still might be a chance that it might work out.” “We sounded pretty good in that jam a while ago. If only the tape had been running.”

  “Was a lot of fun, could have been a lot better.” This extends a groggy tendril toward the dissolute, morning-after party-animal of “Memories Can’t Wait” and “Drugs.”

  And so on.

  Well, at least we can now check two items off our topic list, even if the second is a song that’s like a list itself, a compilation of half-muttered remarks on the degraded viability of doing things like writing down lists and checking off items. On earlier albums Talking Heads treated art-making pretty reverently; “Paper”’s where that reverence goes to die. It’s the nemesis-song for an earlier Talking Heads’ track: the heartfelt “The Book I Read,” in which stable value is accorded to a bound stack of pages and also to a fan letter jotted in the encounter’s aftermath, thus doubly affirming the efficient and humane connection between writer and reader. (“Mind” is nemesis-song to “You Pulled Me Up,” rebuking its glib reach-out-and-touch-someone/Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me” vibe. “I Zimbra,” abjuring meaning, picks no battles, unless it picks them all.)

  “Paper” is one of the smallish ambulances racketing through this war zone, bearing just a casualty or two. The song is taut, and svelte. At 2:39 the shortest track on the album by a good measure, it perfectly hinges Side One, while risking being the album’s most forgettable. Not “worst” — it’s too taut, svelte, and guitarishly fierce to be that, and if this album needs a worst song there’s a better candidate, surely — but the most generically obedient to the overarching concept. It’s also lodged at the portal through which now comes a procession of indelible monsters. All it needs do, then, is pry that door open.

  Is Fear of Music a Text?

  “Fear of Music may be punk’s most modernist text. It tries to understand itself, but can’t quite.”

  John Hilgart

  If “Talking Heads” are the collective “implicit author” of Fear of Music, and David Byrne is, in turn, the band’s “auteur,” and if David Byrne is the type of rock musician who will eventually end up writing “real” (as opposed to “as-told-to”) books, and if books, including this one, are written about the band and its singer-lyricist-leader and its songs and albums, and if songs have lyrics which are quotable and analyzable, and if Fear of Music is, in at least certain quarters, received as a kind of “concept album,” does any of this mean, necessarily, that there is a text in this class?

  Well, I hear you say, you’ve certainly been treating it as one to this point!

  If writing about music is, in Frank Zappa’s memorable phrase, “dancing about architecture” (an oddly Talking Headsian phrase, or thing to do), then the act of analyzing lyrics is self-incrimination for that crime, the writer being drawn to the writerly aspect of his subject matter: dancing about the blueprints, instead of the building. This simple attraction of like-to-like is the reason a hundred books have been written about Bob Dylan for every one written about James Brown. (Well, one reason.) Yet an interest in language, in names, categories, and concepts, is more than a writer’s tropism — it’s a human one. We dwell in a world of labeled objects and notions: paper, animals, and dreams. These signposts, arbitrary and weightless at their point of origin, now weigh a thousand pounds each, at least, burdened as they are with explaining nothing less than our inner and outer experiences to ourselves — explaining world to self, and self to world.

  Lyrics are more than just the pin stuck through the butterfly of the song — securing it to some page for inspection, but murdering its flight — if only for the simple fact that the pin of language is actually embedded at both ends, with the song strung in the middle. At one end, the pin goes through a collective human impulse as old as human history, that of meaning-attempting-to-happen in a meaningless universe (this is why Hugo Ball addressing a posh crowd with a presentation like “Gadji Beri Bimba” really was a radically hostile gesture, a hostility which I believe still exists as a trace essence in the Talking Heads’ repurposing of those syllables). At the other end, the pin is stuck into you.

  Songs are saddled with words, then, as bodies on earth are saddled with minds. (Free your mind, and your ass will nevertheless drag it around wherever it goes.) Speaking as a non-musician, when I get a tune stuck in my head, even one where the tune and instrumentation is sophisticated but the lyrics vacuous — “The Girl From Ipanema,” say — I notice myself hearing the words, the voice of the singer, no matter how much I may credit the stuckness-in-head to the music instead. They’re stuck together. And so I end up with some portion of my brain returned to a beach in Brazil, one I’ve never visited personally, where I am forced to choose sides between identifying with or censuring the oglers who sigh as that bikini-clad Ipanemanian Girl strolls past. Conversely, when I find myself surprised by the arrival of Talking Heads’ “No Compassion” in my head, if I work backwards I often find it is because some friend of mine has just then been offloading emotional freight that I would really prefer they’d withheld until their next session with their analyst. Isn’t that what they’re paid for?

  Talking of “Paper,” I mentioned writer’s block. According to the anecdotage surrounding Fear of Music (which even as we cite we’ll want to remind ourselves may be unreliable or misleading) this album arose in a creative vacuum, the band’s songwriter not having a tremendous wealth of material in pocket going in. The band had been touring just before, a state not conducive to writing songs. Of course, heading into a recording session with Brian Eno, avatar of counterintuitive methodologies and oblique strategies, it may be the case that sometimes nothing is a real cool hand. It was reportedly
Eno who suggested the Hugo Ball poem to fill a musical framework that had seemed to resist lyrics, and Eno who became interested when he overheard Byrne humming a melody to himself while washing dishes, one discounted by the singer as anything useful for the band, but which evolved into “Heaven.” And it is Eno, a musician who nowadays bothers with lyrics and singing on a small minority of his projects, who has famously expressed a belief that lyrics are unimportant. What’s apparent is that Byrne, bookish songwriter, in this case wrote, if not with difficulty, at least differently; the topic-songs functioned as a distancing maneuver. Old habits, old techniques were called into question.

  This group of songs is writerly without being wordy. It’s closer to John Wesley Harding than Blood on the Tracks. Compared to a novella of an album by Bright Eyes or Okkervil River, it’s a haiku. Still anything that troubles so extensively over the viability of text — absconded languages, changed names, irradiated paper, incinerated notebooks — probably is one.

  As with nearly all of Talking Heads records before and after, “Fear of Music”’s sessions resulted in very few outtakes. Twenty-seven years later, the expanded official release only offered one sketchy riff, “Dancing for Money,” and three alternate tracks — an early version of “Mind” (the vocal too deranged too quickly) and glimpses of “Cities” and “Life During Wartime” which aren’t actually different performances but rather variant studio-constructions revealing paths-not-taken in the final mix. (On the black market, a few variations on “Drugs” have made themselves known. It would be “Drugs,” wouldn’t it?) The black monolith stands alone — someone swept up the marble chips. Neatness counts.

  The boy from long ago approves. For him, Fear of Music is an edifice. It would have been impossible for him to view it as provisional or tenuous in any degree. Fear of Music was given. It appeared. To know that was enough. He wouldn’t have cared to uncover some large compendium of sonic leavings or rough drafts, which have a tendency to unbraid the songs as finished objects. He’d rather I sit and listen harder to the sacred accidents that have been stuck in his head for more than thirty years, even as he scoffs that no one could ever have listened harder to them then he did right at the inception of the relationship. For him, the songs resemble an array of stones facing one another in an ancient circle, each amplifying a cumulative mystery with their own. Embrace the fact that this text is forever closed, and describe its insular workings. Don’t make it less itself; make it more.

  Cities

  The next ambulance is audible from miles away, klaxons screaming, tires swerving and juttering on blacktop, chassis screaming across the horizon, the whole thing lit up like a, well, like a house on fire. This ambulance must be fucking huge! No minor emergency now. The distant alarms of “Cities”’s fade-in signals panic to our hindbrain, the headachy prodrome of in-progress calamity, though one with the fervor of a discothèque. The injured in this ambulance are surely up on their shattering limbs, dancing like the mummies in that Michael Jackson video. It’s a disco ambulance. Hearing it approach, you understand this party has no beginning or end, never stops, only moves to the next town. Now it’s coming to yours. You won’t notice your headache for the duration of the ambulance’s visit, for the sound approaching is the sound of that-pain-which-drives-out-pain. Or drives over it.

  When the whole mighty armature at last heaves into view, it’s really not an ambulance at all. It’s a metropolis on wheels, one of those futuristic anomalies, like the cities-on-tracks in an SF novel by Brian Aldiss or Christopher Priest. Houses in motion! We’re greeted with the sound of four musicians using their instruments like an erector set to construct a skyline that won’t fall down before they’re finished. The instruments each hammer rhythm, and the singer hammers, too. All the forward motion feels pretty good in the lower quarters. If to a man holding a hammer everything looks like a nail, to a guitarist this itchy, a drummer this drawn to his high-hat, and a bass player with her pulse racing, everything looks like a dance floor. Under the ominous veneer, the punk panic of the car-alarm effects, the grinding of some Eno-processed Berlin noise, “Cities” runs the Velvets’ “Rock and Roll” straight into K.C. and The Sunshine Band’s boundless groove: One fine morning she put on the radio station and she said, that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh uh-huh! Find a city, make a little love, get down tonight!

  * * *

  “Cities” and “Life During Wartime” are so closely related it seems bold they were chosen to live side by side. It’s testament to their mutual strength that nothing is lost in the comparison; each, taking their turn, may seem the album’s showstopper, at least while onstage. Basically, “Cities” is “Life During Wartime”’s younger brother, as disco is a younger sibling to funk, more frisky and free, not bearing so many of the burdens of its progenitors. Like a lot of younger brothers, “Cities” parrots some of its older brother’s cherished notions and cheekily contradicts others, or declares them irrelevant, not such a big deal. (“Wartime,” ominously: “I sleep in the daytime / Work in the nighttime.” “Cities,” jauntily: “The people sleep, sleep in the daytime / If they want to, if they want to!”) Like a lot of younger brothers, “Cities” is funnier than its elder.

  Both songs have a “bigness” that’s new for this band. They suggest a vastness glimpsed in portion, a tip-of-the-iceberg sensation, partly by the device of non-repeating lyrics that appear to be part of a geographical survey or handbook of survival tips. “Cities” actually only mentions London, Birmingham, and Memphis — there’s a good chance you’ll recall it as having been many more — but the implication is of a list so large it gathers in even those smaller Southern destinations as well as a European capital, and therefore probably goes on forever, both before the fade-in and after the fade-out. (“Did I forget to mention Memphis?” is devilish sleight-of-hand in this regard.) Both songs feature a certain insatiable-monster quality to their riffs. They’re unkillable, but not impersonal like “I Zimbra”; they might kill you. As it happens, neither song is long — “Wartime” is barely longer than “Mind,” and “Cities” loses out by a whole minute to “Drugs,” the album’s longest. But they feel bigger. Whatever “major” means, these attain. They’re thick, not thin. Houses with rooms to inhabit and get lost in. On the previous record, More Songs About Buildings and Food, only the funk cover, “Take Me to the River” attains the thickness of “Cities” and “Life During Wartime,” sound-paint applied to blot out everywhere the pencil-sketch beneath. Even when that earlier album’s songs are dominated by thickened sequences — “Stay Hungry,” say — they retreat at other points to the tinny, demo-ish tone that was this band’s first trademark.

  Of course, thickness was the next stop for this band, who were on the verge of being literally thickened by five new members (making Jerry Harrison’s arrival merely that of the lead clown out of the circus car). The sound-palette of Remain in Light would be gobs of impasto painted over broken ceramic, glued to a canvas now utterly concealed.

  * * *

  “Cities” is a watershed, in a lineage that describes the long-term accommodation of Talking Heads’ cosmopolitanism to the fact of the heartland, the house-training of their nervous New Yorker’s grievance against wide open spaces.

  At one end of this continuum stands “Big Country,” from More Songs About Buildings and Food, with its notorious declaration: I wouldn’t live there if you paid me. According to Lester Bangs: “Finally somebody said it: there is nothing beyond Jersey; Jack Kerouac made all that shit up, he was a science fiction writer.” Yet as much as its obnoxiously dry lyric begs to be taken literally, even “Big Country” contains a trace of back-door negotiation with what it denounces: the slide guitar, a self-conscious gesture for a punk or even new wave band in 1978, a violation of the anti-pastoral ethos to which Talking Heads had staked their claim. (For a comparable gesture, consider the ostentatious wail of bent guitar strings in the Ramones’ “Questioningly,” also from 1978.) The slide-guitar can be taken two ways: a
satirical gesture, furthering the song’s atmosphere of scorn by framing a sound that’s emblematically “corny,” or a preemptive musical apology for the slight.

  Lurking behind Bangs’ remark is the iconic Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover: the west side of Manhattan, showing Ninth through Twelfth Avenues giving way to the Hudson River, and then to a vast plain dotted with place-names, beyond which is glimpsed the Pacific Ocean, and Japan. The Steinberg foregrounds a self-satisfied confession of the Gothamite’s solipsist vanity, as well as his or her naïveté about other places. Perhaps less obvious to those not native to the five-borough asylum, the drawing can be viewed even more simply as an admission of agoraphobia, that non-apocryphal New Yorkian fear of the open sky. The kid in his room, for instance, knew another kid who’d wept in terror when as a third-grader he’d for the first time been taken to Far Rockaway for a glimpse of the horizon.

  This is the Cary Grant North By Northwest crop-duster sensation — the nightmare, in flyover country, of becoming the one flown over. This Fear of Nowhere theme hides everywhere in Talking Heads’ work; in “Big Country,” as in the Steinberg drawing, it hides inside urban arrogance.