Fear of music Read online

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  “Memories Can’t Wait” wads two of Fear of Music’s leitmotifs — “sleep” and “party” — into a tight sandwich of tinfoil, and insists you take a bite.

  Like certain Bob Dylan songs, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” or, “I And I,” which beneath poetic and metaphysical trappings rest on a simple cinematic depiction of human action — lovers parting in a wintry park, her face concealed in a scarf; a restless man leaving a woman sleeping while he slips outs to gaze at the rail yards — we can, after the atmosphere settles around us, pretty easily project a “Memories Can’t Wait” movie in our heads. In the loft wherein the party in the narrator’s mind is enacted or reenacted, in the waning hours of said party, the narrator confronts a few dopey guests who’ve been granted the release of sleepy forgetfulness he’ll never taste himself. “Do you remember anyone here? / No you don’t remember anything at all.” Another, flat on his or her back, speaks to us as if in a psychic transmission out of stupor, coma, or death: “Never woke up, had no regrets.” The logic, damn him, is unassailable: anyone awake has necessarily therefore got regrets by the busload.

  These sleepers, the song’s “other people,” can’t help but seem a late-arriving indictment of the heedless folks in “Cities,” those who sleep in the daytime, if they want to. Even the ostensibly hard-boiled narrator of “Life During Wartime,” he who sleeps in the daytime out of necessity, as he incessantly reminds you — not because he’s a party animal, no — now looks like just another dozer. The real hard-boiled among us never blink, dream, or forget. They’re fighting the higher war of insomnia, on the battlefield of memories.

  Your mind is a van loaded with weapons pointed at you.

  These final, dead-on-their-feet guests at last shoveled out the door, our narrator sags into a chair — picture it unmoored from other furniture, adrift in the center of the loft’s expanse — there to endure upright nonsleep, to conduct his witnessing vigil. I’ll be here all the time, I can never quit. Now the fun begins: a walk through the land of shadows. Death-of-Party, the no-disco-for-you-young-man reproach, has transmuted into Party-of-Death. Peaceful Meadows is the name printed under a mortuary director’s name, for sure. (Your disappointment at what’s found there prefigures the ennui of “Heaven.”)

  “I’m wide awake on memories / These memories can’t wait.” Close-up on eyes wide open. Zoom into pencil-dot pupil. Cut, roll credits.

  * * *

  Like most if not all of the Fear of Music songs, “Memories Can’t Wait” finds a way to contradict not only its neighbors but itself. Two and a half minutes in, on the words “everything is very quiet,” this song that takes as its subject the blockage of transition into sleep, the denial of that sweet generic release bestowed eventually upon even the most desperate among us (prisoners in their cells, soldiers in their foxholes, animals and party animals alike), undergoes a musical transition that is also a release. A song dominated by a deranged clatter, and which has reached a harsh wheeling pitch, now smooths itself into mournfulness. What follows is a weary cascade of guitars that sounds like the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.” These guide the listener to the loft’s elevator, forgivingly. In such a garbagey discordant swirl, it almost sounds as if someone’s removed the stopper, or flushed the toilet. One screeching effect pulls against the drain’s sucking, and then it too succumbs, and all the gobbledygook Enoturds are gone. What follows isn’t quiet, but it is calm, as if the tank is refilling, the well rising back to the top. The lyrics may not know it, but the track does: somebody’s memories have given way to dreaming.

  * * *

  The noun/verb dream never appears in the Fear of Music text. If you sought a missing signifier to propose for a late-discovered outtake or Siberian-release-only B-Side, you’d have to figure “Dreams” (along with maybe “Skin” or “Sex” or “Music”) would make a fair candidate.

  * * *

  Speaking of the Beatles, “Memories Can’t Wait,” with its placement at the end of Side One, brings to mind “She Said, She Said,” the last song on Side One of Revolver. In both instances the songs chart out a harsh frontier of psychedelic divination to which the band in question will seldom return (though “The Overload” from Remain in Light is like “Memories Can’t Wait”’s subdued hangover). In both cases the songs find a partial reply in spaced-out form in the last song on their respective albums’ Side Two (“Drugs” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”).

  Speaking of the Beatles, the fading piano tone of “Memories Can’t Wait” sounds just like the sustained note at the end of “A Day in the Life,” only it doesn’t stick around as long. Hurry up please it’s time.

  So Fear of Music is a Concept Album. What Happens on Side Two?

  “I Zimbra” tried an end run. The song outlined a preemptive workaround to the album’s claustrophobic consciousness and the various discontents trapped within. Its readymade claim is that the whole problem, the only problem, is that words fail. Simultaneously, “I Zimbra” presented the freeze-dried, just-add-rhythm solution: freedom from self. The rest of Side One remorselessly, meticulously and exuberantly exposes this too-neat attempt. First, by dragging words into worlds. Yep, they fail all right, but we live inside those crumbling premises. And: we fail too. And more: we’re never less free from ourselves than precisely in the act of failing — at the party, in flight from native habitat, or in vigilant, restless sleep — to free ourselves.

  Free no mind and no ass may follow.

  After the contradictory twin-thesis meltdown of “Wartime” and “Memories,” the album’s flipside will be thrown into the position of a pendant, a New Testament or Godfather Part II, in relation to the first. The camera dollies out, to gather more territory, natural and supernatural. The woods and sky and what’s above the sky. As if to place the urban disaster zone in some mitigating frame. The lens zooms in to investigate some possibly overlooked avenues of intimate mitigation as well. Contraptions and illegal substances, the toolkit of rebellion, venues of jacked-up DIY transcendence. Side Two benefits from the drama and tension of a sequence of escape bids. And who doesn’t like a prison flick? Will our heroes taste freedom, or end up burrowing into one another’s cells?

  These arrows pointing outward: are they for real, or are they from Zeno’s quiver, therefore never to reach their goal? Or perhaps they’re like the Worm Oroborous, destined to bend with the curvature of the universe until they find they’re nibbling their own feathery tails.

  Air

  It doesn’t look good, but then, hey, it’s invisible! So why worry? It’s a pop song!

  In the wacky race to the front of your hindbrain, seeking to get stuck in that place from whence is generated your carefree toe-tapping, whistling and humming, out of the midst of all Side One’s ambulances and war machines now comes, hurtling into the lead spot, the grinning jalopy of “Air” — I mean to say, the grin is on the face of the car. For it is a cartoon vehicle, as drawn by some anonymous genius in the Hanna Barbera empire.

  The female element, ordinarily sublimated in this band — this bassist adamantly one of the boys — here breaks teasingly to the surface. In fact, the bassist appears to have tripled herself. In what may perhaps be a tiny first throb of the impulse that will become Tom Tom Club, these are the bassist’s sisters, billed as the Sweetbreaths (or, thanks to a wonderfully weird typo in the reissue CD insert, The Sweetbreathes, as though sweetness itself is doing some heavy breathing.) These creepy-sexy ladies mimic outer space sirens beckoning your landing module into the disasteroid belt. Impossible not to be drawn into that upper atmospheric layer by the harmonies floating down, since they seem a precise reference to the eerie feminine harmonizing of the original Star Trek television theme song, those haunted lasses that give forth just when Captain Kirk intones, “Space, the final frontier …” Their disembodied, wavering quality is the vocal equivalent of a Theremin, the official sonic effect of science fiction. To make the alliance more unmistakable, the keyboardist is hot on their heels with
some spooky interstellar tones. These have been Enofied into something cornily retro — his keyboard sounds like vibes. The result is cartoon-macabre: Space Ghosty, or perhaps even Scooby-Dooish.

  “Air” may in fact be an early sixties television theme song or novelty hit like the “Monster Mash,” one of those campy items which takes the Nuggets-era sixties garage-punk sound and shifts it toward kid stuff. Here, the nagging guitars thumb their nose like a pubescent teen at his square parents. The harder the song tries to be ominous the more jaunty the result, which doesn’t discredit the menace — it couldn’t, in this album’s atmosphere — so much as render it feral and taunting, an earworm or earwig squirming under your defenses. And when it shifts gears, it goes from mockingly ominous to mock-anthemic. The sweet sweep and Byrds-jangle of guitars, the tender plaint of the vocal through these choruses, is wholly untrustworthy, precisely because it’s destined to be lopped off before the singer can finish his thought. The singer’s omission of the last word works like one of those jokes where the rhyming line lands on an naughty word, left unspoken, supplied instead by the first syllable of the next: “She fell down the stairs and busted her — / As I was saying …” At the end of the lyric the Sweetbreaths and the Question Mark and the Mysterians keyboards swoop down from the dark side of Neptune and recapture the song for an E.C. horror comic. He Unbolted His Space Helmet And Was Invaded By The Invisible Fiend Who Is Everywhere!

  * * *

  “Air” is the most cheerfully bemused song on the album, with nothing but an irresistible pop confidence to cloak the ludicrousness of its naked prominence atop Side Two. And that’s more than enough. Much of Fear of Music traffics in subtle contradiction, tiny fissures and slippages, most of which serve to illuminate the anxious strictures denying avenues of escape; “Air” unmakes itself utterly by moving in two directions at once. It doesn’t completely know its ass from its elbow, which may turn out to be a kind of liberation. This injection of weightless absurdity makes “Air” a conceptual (if not sonic) mirror-cousin to “I Zimbra.” (Soundwise, the nearest relative to its unhinged glee is “Mind” — that other ethereal enemy.)

  Air makes a weird nemesis, both totally terrifying in its infiltrative ubiquity, and silly — invisible, intangible, and maybe kind of pointless to get worked up about, since we’re all breathing it anyway, and if we’re standing here conversing about it the stuff must be meeting a certain threshold of acceptable quality. Your enemies are breathing the same air as you: no advantage possible there. And the first accusation this narrator levies against the stuff — “hit me in the face” — is plainly idiotic. Close the window (or open it, if you need some freshening). Or turn off the hairdryer — you’ve changed your hairstyle twice already today. The song flirts with metrosexual vanity — what’s happening to your skin, buddy? Buy a higher grade of sunblock. Give me a break.

  Yet air might also be the defining fear-venue for uniquely contemporary terrors. Just think of all the stuff that leaks over the twentieth-century transom: mustard gas, nerve gas, tear gas, radiation, vacuum compression in airless space, global pollution, “Airborne Toxic Event,” anthrax, and the discovery that the sun which gives us life also seeds our cancerous tumors, as do routine X-rays. Carbon unit per square inch, beneath a failing ozone layer. Also, for you paranoids, those transmissions, whether Commie or Martian, which can only be rebuffed by means of tinfoil-lined windows or hats. Pandemic: the sneeze on the crowded airplane. We have nothing to fear but nothing itself, or that which masks itself as nothing, the ubiquitous invisible swirling everywhere. Air-fear radiates Cold War dread, too. That resonance cinches this song to “Life During Wartime” but also those rays passing through “Paper.”

  Hopelessly dire, and undignifiably silly: no wonder this song flies mockingly against itself. Someone ought to compile a list of the merriest tunes wedded to the grimmest lyrics. Start with The Supremes’ “The Happening,” in which Motown horn flourishes and tambourine jangles make Diana Ross’s lovelorn woe (“you find your world is tumbling down … I saw my dreams fall apart … now I see life for what it is”) sound like an anthem for Mod London. Or John Lennon’s “Crippled Inside,” jaunty rinky-tink piano, slide guitar and dobro shuffle to float the scorning title phrase — “One thing you can’t hide / Is when you’re crippled inside.” Phil Ochs’ “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” The result of this kind of schizoid lyric-to-music mismatch tends to be an air of mild satire, though at whose expense the satire is pointed — singer? listener? radio programmer? — isn’t always comfortably plain. “Air” knocks on the door of this peculiar clubhouse.

  * * *

  After the second line — “I run faster, faster, faster …” the singer recovers remarkably well from his initial total subjugation to the intangible element gone out-of-hand. The voice eases. And there’s a sleight-of-hand effect in “I say to myself / Where is that protection that I needed?”

  This distancing maneuver — “I say to myself” — sets up a permanent pronoun switcheroo. Having declared that “Air can hurt you too,” the self in question is never really confessional or vulnerable again. The tone’s gone cautionary and foreboding (“So remember, remember …”), rather than awestruck, or airstruck. This transition becomes complete with the phrase that reverses and revises the earlier one: “You’ll say to yourself.”

  The admonitory tone of this phrase forecasts the preachers and politicians to come on this singer’s subsequent albums. Though here he’s not so much in fire-and-brimstone mode — or even making a public service announcement — as he is functioning like a glib snake-oil salesman in reverse-pitch mode. The song turns into a nega-infomercial, touting a product that can’t be evaded, that you’ve already committed yourself to irrevocably. (Poisoned) air, brought to you by the same folks that brought you (poisoned) water! “Some people never had experience with air,” but you, my friend, may consider yourself the lucky recipient of our one-time offer. So try it! It’s even easier than picking up your phone and dialing a toll-free number — you merely need widen your nostrils and expand your chest and voila! You’ve joined the ranks of our satisfied customers.

  * * *

  Becoming excessively conscious of the air around you contains the seed of a claustrophobe’s panic attack: what starts as noticing that there’s lots of space between you and the objects around you — breathing room — might switch to the sudden apprehension that air’s giving you no margin at all. The stuff is pressed in close on all sides, following you, boxing you in. Don’t try anything, you’re surrounded! This could become a white-polar-bear thought, one of those you can’t quit thinking. It’s easy to know how to stop looking at the visible world — turn your back on it, or turn out the light, or squeeze your eyes shut and just look at those little dots there — but how do you quit noticing the invisible? In this formulation, air turns ghosty, something you alone see. Like memories, after everyone else is asleep.

  * * *

  For a rock band, air might also be the gaseous silent mixture between the players as they arrange themselves on stage, or in a loft rehearsal space turned recording studio — “room tone,” another invisible essence or ambiance, and one that a band often wishes to capture in a recording so as to keep it from sounding “canned.” Such air swells and deforms as a band evolves in its internal relation, as it adds equipment or players, or moves from postage-stamp-sized stages to vast risers in outdoor arenas. Such air grows sour or stale or shrieks with feedback according to the exact angles and postures of the equipment and its players.

  You want to get a song “onto the air.”

  Everyone’s looking for exposure but you can also die from it.

  * * *

  Another I’d-prefer-not-to-solo guitar part, broad swatches of chord marking space where others might doodle or decorate: a happy metonym, this time, for air itself. The guitars soar, and we’re borne up on the Sweetbreaths vocal Thereminizing. The band sounds sloppily airborne. Goofy, like helium-inhalers. If the second side is
a series of escape bids, maybe the task’s already in hand. “Air” could be a niftily weightless jailbreak: simply soar over the wall Side One represents. But can this balloon rise as high as that wall? And is there any air up there?

  Is Fear of Music a Science Fiction Record?

  The boy in his room is back, to insist that the answer to the above question is an unqualified yes. If only because he requires it to be. Believing that Fear of Music qualified as science fiction was essential to a thesis the boy had already under construction, as to how any contemporary artist with eyes wide open was certain to blunder into the mode of science fiction sooner or later. This, for the simple reason that the world we lived in — technological, media-saturated, urban, disastrous, and tending to ratify paranoia and alienation as apt and lucid responses — was a science fiction world.

  Fear of Music, parsed on headphones by the boy in a room lined with rows of paperback editions of Thomas Disch, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick novels, was eagerly folded into the ongoing project of roping those books together with certain films by Stanley Kubrick, Nicholas Roeg, and with modernist or postmodernist writing by Kafka, Pynchon, and Delillo, to create an idealized image of what science fiction was or could be, one in which high and low brow-distinctions utterly dissolved. Other key artifacts included George Orwell’s 1984 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and the French comic book Metal Hurlant.

  In this image, the definition of “science fiction” was purged of its awkward pulp origins, and had shed its embarrassing tendencies to compensatory power fantasies and wish fulfillment. It tended instead to be grim and foreboding, but also self-reflexive, and interested, sympathetically but unsentimentally, in these bug-like selves who found themselves crushed against the oncoming future’s windshield. Despite being skeptical and urban — both anti-pastoral and unmystical — it wasn’t technocratically clear-eyed and optimistic. Instead, it preferred to get lost in deeper mysteries of ontology, the strangeness of the encounter with The Other, the weirdness of art and drugs. It was also stirred by the question of our tolerances for dread and dislocation: what became of a person shaped totally by the new reality? We’d better know, since it had arrived.