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)

0 Stop Making Sense (1984)

USA, 88 minutes, documentary
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writers: Jonathan Demme, Talking Heads
Photography: Jordan Cronenweth
Music: Talking Heads: David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, Steven Scales, Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell
Editor: Lisa Day

It's interesting to think about what one does with favorite bands. As a point of conversation I used to argue for the importance of always having one, or several: favorite locals, favorite performers, favorite within genres, favorite favorites. At some points, overwhelmed by so many choices, it becomes a pretty good problem to have. Many happy years can go by where the thought is basically on when a next album is coming out and/or a next show happening. Then one day something changes—the band breaks up, puts out a bad album, somebody says something stupid, a death—something—and it doesn't have the same allure anymore.

Talking Heads were like that for me, my favorite band from 1978 when I first heard the debut and then the follow-up. I stuck with them all the way to 1986 and True Stories, which was too rancid, and left a bad taste that's still there. Stop Making Sense was a high point of the good years, coming even as the band was visibly beginning to fracture and it was easy to wonder each time if there was going to be anything more. I saw the movie on its release and it was more than I could have hoped for, as was the album that followed the next year, Little Creatures, the last good thing they ever did. I actually saw Stop Making Sense a few times, and that was back when it felt more like an odd extravagance to see a movie more than once. Then it became a casualty of backlashing reassessments.


That itself raises questions I think are interesting about what we do with our favorites. Sometimes we slavishly follow along, pretend it's all of a certain high level, though we rarely listen to it more than a few weeks, or days. You see this in followers of David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and others. Bob Dylan, though he also has lifelong followers, represents more starkly the other avenue: rejection, loathing, and feelings of betrayal, which Dylan has actually managed to do many times, losing me for 10 years for example with the late-'70s turn to Jesus. Thinking about it, I have tended toward this second avenue a little more often, not just with Talking Heads but also Steely Dan. The Beatles took the choice away from me by breaking up. With the Pet Shop Boys I have clung to the first, slavish avenue (although with Fundamental even I have had to stop pretending the new albums interest me that much).

It was more than 20 years since I had seen Stop Making Sense (always in theaters) when I picked up the DVD and took a look again. But one more thing I should say about favorite bands—I realized I'm more talking about recording acts and records, where the relationship is largely conducted via recordings played at home. I have never seen the Beatles, Pet Shop Boys, or Steely Dan, and saw Talking Heads only once, in 1979, and it was not a good show. A whole other part of my brain is dedicated to performing acts (James Brown, Patti Smith, Wedding Present, Jesus Lizard, Walkabouts all high on this list) and it's like I have a different relationship with them. One of the greatest shows I've ever seen was U2 in 1983, but otherwise I don't give that band much thought. Their recordings are always at a certain listenable range but rarely compelling.

So when I say Stop Making Sense is the greatest concert film ever made, it's in something of a narrow way. It's a good show, but cluttered with camera crews and extra lighting crews, some light show stuff I think doesn't work even in the movie, and a whole shtick about starting it out by putting the band together one piece at a time. It's hard to know what I'd think if I were there. But what it does to see it in this movie—it's hard to describe. It's visceral and exciting and gripping—yes, this tired old smug art-damaged relic of the arch '80s. Everything that made Talking Heads great, and more specifically everything that made Talking Heads records great, is here. They are funny, creative, clever, they never stop trying, and the groove is set at constant lock-solid irresistible.

The picture from above is a good example. The image itself charges me up. It's from the opening, after the Dr. Strangelove lettering of the credits in silence, when David Byrne walks out on stage by himself with a guitar and a boombox, sets down the boombox, says, "I've got a tape I want to play," pushes the button, and begins the greatest 30 to 35 minutes of live music on film, adding members with each song: first "Psycho Killer" with Byrne solo, getting the obligatory signature song out of the way, then "Heaven" with Tina Weymouth (and Lynn Mabry offstage), "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" with Chris Frantz, "Found a Job" with Jerry Harrison, "Slippery People" with Mabry, Edna Holt, and Steve Scales, and "Burning Down the House" with Alex Weir and Bernie Worrell. It is, in itself, a précis of the history of the band, missing only (and sadly so) some sort of cameo for Brian Eno.

It is also amazingly good. By the time "Slippery People" is full throttle, and the running in place and all the sheer physical exuberance takes hold, it's a locomotive engine at full steam, dense, powerful, thrilling. Mabry and Holt in kinda sorta jogging outfits are a great presence, pure energy and sexy, looking good, sounding good, following Byrne's lead on all the big goofy gestures. On "Burning Down the House," full band, a band that can flat play. Amazing version. That's followed by "Life During Wartime," probably the single best performance here, with Byrne running circles around the stage and the band just tearing it up. At the end of it, the smug Byrne who cannot help himself, approaches the mike and says, "Thank you. Does anybody have any questions?"

I'll give him that moment of triumphalism. He and all of them earned it for what just transpired. The remaining hour is afterglow, with many more high points from the catalog, including a turn for the Tom Tom Club. Jonathan Demme directed this movie but it feels less like a Demme film and more like a Talking Heads film, in the way that Swimming to Cambodia feels like a Spalding Gray movie—that transparency is Demme. So is the love for music and the visual latitude he is willing to give Byrne in staging it. I remain deeply suspicious of David Byrne and even to some degree of Talking Heads, which are the same thing in many ways—all that is a whole other subject. But it's not hard to set aside every bit of it when this movie plays.

Top 10 of 1984
I went to a lot of movies in 1984 so I'll give you 20. There was a lot of entertainment to be had, a lot of popcorn made and eaten, and that's what seemed to matter. It was a time when multiplexes were still a new thing and one could spend all day in them ducking from theater to theater. I lived in Minneapolis then and they were particularly good for getting out of the heat in the summer. Good times, good times.
1. Stop Making Sense
2. This Is Spinal Tap
3. Once Upon a Time in America
4. Paris, Texas
5. Streetwise
6. Stranger Than Paradise
7. Choose Me
8. Amadeus
9. Starman
10. Racing With the Moon
11. Gremlins
12. A Nightmare on Elm Street
13. Body Double
14. The Terminator
15. Blood Simple
16. Beverly Hills Cop
17. Ghostbusters
18. Romancing the Stone
19. Purple Rain
20. Broadway Danny Rose

Didn't like so much: Boy Meets Girl, The Cotton Club, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 1984, Swing Shift

Gaps: Comfort and Joy, Heimat, Love Streams, A Passage to India, Where the Green Ants Dream

Other write-ups: Little City in Space

Detail: Stop Making Sense (1984)