0 Talking Heads' Fear of Music (2012)

(My Internet-ironical review of the album here.)

Jonathan Lethem is one of my favorite writers and Fear of Music is one of my favorite albums—of all, ever, not just of Talking Heads albums. So this was practically guaranteed to impress and it did not disappoint. For what it's worth it's also the first book I've read, beyond browsing in bookstores, in the still-growing 33⅓ series. The series matches one writer to one album (based on a curated volunteer system, it appears). Lethem is good, a really fine novelist (Motherless Brooklyn is a particular favorite), and this shows how casually excellent he can be as a rock critic too. Well, 2003's Fortress of Solitude had already made that quite evident. But I really love the way he goes at it, bearing down so hard. And this should be instructive too—for me and for all of us! Hours and hours of intense listening and gathering up of scraps of notes and thoughts went into this. It is as much a labor of love as anything I know. I think he might even like Fear of Music more than me, and I have always been that crank in my circles. Lethem attacks the whole by theme and each song individually, exploring a taxonomy of "types": Talking Heads versus David Byrne albums, text, concept LP, science fiction, Asperger's artifact, in terms of the paranoiac, etc. It's an album you can go quite deep with and he is here to prove it. I don't agree with him on many particulars—he calls "Electric Guitar" rather than "I Zimbra" the weakest track (one of my theories for why it's such an underrated album relates to kicking off with the one song that doesn't belong). And he often seems to be missing the humor I perceive as pervasive. But he brings a tremendous, even daunting level of insight to the album, the music, and the band, picking up on all kinds of things I had missed before or never exactly put together. Lethem makes a beautiful argument for why "Life During Wartime" and "Memories Can't Wait" are titled appropriately for the album's naming schema, as opposed to "War" and "Memories," which might seem more apt at first. Admittedly, we might be going into the deep weeds here. I love it when he talks about the "disco ambulance" of "Cities"—that is nigh perfect. He locates a critical center of gravity on the album in "Cities" and "Life During Wartime," side by side, nearly direct inversions of one another, each furiously name-checking city names and worried about the future, albeit in very different ways. "Memories Can't Wait," Lethem says, implodes them both, proceeding out of themes first established in "Mind." It's altogether quite a trip, much like the album. Recommended.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Talking Heads' Fear of Music (2012)

0 Brian Eno & David Byrne, "America Is Waiting" (1981)

(listen)

I liked the idea of this early solo collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne: taking random snippets of audio from AM radio broadcasts and matching them with ambient in-studio musical accompaniment heavy on the African influence. The two disparate elements somehow (not always) meld into songs, sometimes even with recognizable verse-chorus-verse movement, and work on each other in interesting ways, obscuring, highlighting, changing—and/or, ultimately, failing to change—the churning forces at play. I think it works best of all on this opener for the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and then gradually declined across the space of the album; the '06 rerelease, which added seven more tracks, only repeated that experience. But what an undeniable idea, as crystallized in "America Is Waiting," with such ingenuity of repurposing, belittling yet still bearing the chilling raw power of the original broadcasts. The album can claim a historic position for its use of sampling, a notion still in its infancy at that point though already in the arsenal of hip-hop artists in New York, which likely explains how these skilled musical voyeurs picked up on it. "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another," says San Francisco talk jock Ray Taliaferro in a broadcast of April 1980, according to Wikipedia, which statement in hindsight appears prescient—I'm not even sure Taliaferro, let alone Eno and Byrne, knew what they had there, so close to the historical political fault lines themselves. But sure, I'll call it prescience. And maybe it's projection on my part, but I hear great roiling mounds of anxiety in the musical trappings too, with contributions from Bill Laswell, David Van Tieghem, and Tim Wright, which appear to be attempting to encircle this potent gibbering with magic rituals of some sort or another. The result is like few things before or since.

Detail: Brian Eno & David Byrne, "America Is Waiting" (1981)

0 Talking Heads, "Listening Wind" (1980)

(listen)

More trials and tribulations of the contrarian: As often the case with me when favorite artists find success, I had a number of misgivings about the fourth album by Talking Heads, Remain in Light, arguably their breakthrough project artistically and maybe even commercially too. Certainly it delivered them to a wider audience, building on the hunger for wide-ranging source material that always drove the band and producer/collaborator Brian Eno, and certainly "Once in a Lifetime," "Houses in Motion," and "Born Under Punches" have become significant signature songs in the many years since, and yes, I've more or less embraced all that entirely. But the quiet and evocative "Listening Wind," which seems closer to Eno's Another Green World, remains the song on the album that never fails to win me over when it plays, a quiet insinuating thing of canny textures and effortless execution, moving along like a well-oiled buggy. The vocal line is chanting and rhythmic, opening up to a gorgeous moan on the chorus that is a pleasure to sing or roll one's head about with, and the instrumental is rich with grain and feel and the sweet touch of an undercurrent of urgency. It's way less complicated than the other songs on the album, almost a lullaby in effect, with numerous small pleasures that tell, never making a particularly big deal about it. I guess I thought the rest of the album was a kind of exercise in braggadocio—"Look at what we can do now," it demands by implication—whereas "Listening Wind" feels much closer to having absorbed something essential, now reflecting it back with preternatural poise.

Detail: Talking Heads, "Listening Wind" (1980)

0 Brian Eno, "King's Lead Hat" (1977)

(listen)

Honestly I never figured out until I saw it the other day in Wikipedia that the anagram of the title is "Talking Heads." Gratification. Relief. At long last. Why didn't anybody ever tell me?! Robert Christgau's review of Before and After Science alluded to it, and I don't know why I didn't get it. I'm usually pretty good at anagrams. I guess I got stuck on "death"—I thought it had to include "death." But no, just some greeting from afar to a musical relationship that was about to take off like rockets. "King's Lead Hat" was always my favorite song on the album. Much like "Third Uncle" on Taking Tiger Mountain, my other favorite album by Eno, it's about as hard as Eno was ever going to rock, in the context of albums that were themselves as rocking as he was ever going to get ... more or less. But he really pours everything into this, with a wall of sound affect that swarms like all 17 musicians listed on the credits could have chipped in. It fades up quickly to full-scorch groove and continues from there, with Eno yelping along with a nursery rhyme kinda melody on top of the stone groove, and it breaks wide open at the chorus, goes a little robo-loopy at the bridge, pirouettes and drops to a knee. It's fun, it's ecstatic, and there's a feeling of discovery about it. I see that it was released as the only single from the album and never did anything, even in the UK. So I will have to acknowledge that in many ways Eno's entire '70s catalog (heck, the whole career) is on the order of a cult level of operations. I want to sign up to be a priest in this cult.

Detail: Brian Eno, "King's Lead Hat" (1977)