FEAR OF MUSIC
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For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book
Fear of Music
Jonathan Lethem
Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
© Jonathan Lethem, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lethem, Jonathan.
Talking Heads’ Fear of music / by Jonathan Lethem.
p. cm. -- (33 1/3)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2100-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-2100-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Talking Heads (Musical group). Fear of music. I. Title.
ML421.T27L47 2012
782.421660922--dc23
2012003060
ISBN: 978-1-4411-3292-5
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
For
Joel Simon
Donna Jones
& Philip Price
“The war has been based on a crass error. Men have been mistaken for machines.”
Hugo Ball
“The earth is the most remarkable of all museums: everything that has every happened on it is exhibited in situ. From its ‘lunar beginnings’ to this very moment, every tremor left its mark as an archeological gesture. We leaf through the pages of a global past whose factuality can’t be simulated … some day we will learn to decode this earth we trample on, deciphering every little bit of evidence on it in order to make sense of it by reassembling cosmic history through our planet by carefully inspecting it as a dinosaur bone of the infinite.”
Malcolm De Chazal, Sens-Plastique
“A man has barricaded himself inside of his house. However, he is not armed, and nobody is paying any attention to him.”
George Carlin
Warning: Contents under pressure of interpretation. User may suffer unwanted effects vis-à-vis a cherished cultural token — possibly including sensations of demystification, or its opposite, mystification.
Recommendation: While using this product, actually listening to the record is strongly indicated. I don’t mean just on those crappy little speakers built into your computer, either. And turn it up, for fuck’s sake.
Prelude I: Talking Heads Have a New Album. It’s Called Fear of Music
In the summer of 1979, in New York City, a fifteen-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom heard a voice speaking to him over his radio. The voice said: “Talking Heads have a new album. It’s called Fear of Music.” The voice was that of David Byrne, the lead singer of the band Talking Heads. The voice had restricted itself deliberately to a halting and monotonous presentation, but the words, spoken softly, their speaker miked close, admitted a degree of tenderness — that high, reedy vulnerability this singer generally finds it hard to mask, even as he delights in masks, in vocal mummery.
Now, after a heartbeat interval — “dead air,” in radio jargon, and an enigma, on the terms of a 30-second radio spot meant to advertise a rock-and-roll record — the line repeats: “Talking Heads have a new album. It’s called Fear of Music.” The voice hasn’t altered its sense-neutralized, dead-but-still-warm delivery, but it’s been altered, by some force of distortion. A phase shifter? A vocoder? (A similarly sound-effected, flat-affected human voice would hit the charts, in 1981, with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”) Whatever the element, the illusion created is that of the voice multiplying into a swarm of ethereal clones, a chorale of electronic angels. The result is to both modulate and highlight the flat voice’s lonely presence in the foreground: if a man stumbling across a cold landscape is shadowed by flights of seraphim, but cannot join in their ascent, is he better off, or worse?
Eventually the voices begin to reverberate and echo, becoming like a tide caressing a pebble as it washes backwards and forwards simultaneously. “Talking Heads have a new album new album. It’s called Fear of Music Fear of Music. Talking Heads Talking Heads have a new album a new album Talking Heads it’s called Fear of Music it’s called Fear of Music.” The pebble of the singer’s spoken voice is smoothed or soothed away; the cipher transmission concludes without having varied once, nor repeated itself, not exactly. FM.102.7, WNEW (“Where Rock Lives”) resumed its regular broadcast, the soothing, informal voice of Vin Scelsa or Pete Fornatale or Jonathan Schwartz commanding the dial, hyping a Bruce Springsteen appearance on the King Biscuit Flour Hour, or setting up the new Randy Newman single “It’s Money That I Love.”
Flights of seraphim? Unlike any other piece of close description in this book, there’s likely no way to triangulate my paraphrase with your own ears. Don’t go fishing for this experience in the infosea; it isn’t there to be found. Those of us who received the original transmission have had to make do with our cargo cult recollections for three decades now, and counting.
Speaking of whom, what about the boy in his bedroom? Can’t we leave him where we found him? Need we contend with the burden of his awe and innocence, or may we hit eject? Nope, he’s along for this ride. In fact, sometimes, as I set out in this work, I find my present self slackening into passivity. Suddenly the keyboard’s entirely in that kid’s hands. In 2003 I wrote: “I played the third album by Talking Heads, called Fear of Music, to the point of destroying the vinyl, then replaced it with another copy. I memorized the lyrics, memorized the lyrics to other Talking Heads albums, saw Talking Heads play any chance I got … At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” Like everything I’ve ever said about Talking Heads, or about any other thing I’ve loved with such dreadful longing — there’s only a few — this looks to me completely inadequate, even in the extremeness of its claims, or especially for the extremeness of its claims. It’s untruthful in its bogus tone of retrospective consummation, its false finality. A
s though I’d imagined I could have left it at that!
That kid in his room: I’ve dragged him into the light of so many contexts he ought to be pictured by now as if blackened from head to toe with font. I want to leave him alone but I can’t quite yet, need his assistance for this one last run (last — hah!) on the fortress of his vulnerability. He’s essential to me, not only because he knows what it’s like never to have heard of Fear of Music and then to have heard it for the first time, but because he thereupon arranged himself in a posture of such abject identification with Fear of Music that he no longer can imagine who he’d be had he never heard it. Fear of Music wrote the boy, in other words. Which I suppose means that what you hold in your hands is a book Fear of Music wrote about itself.
Here’s more freight: letting that kid in, you’re bound to take aboard New York City too. Fair enough, that’s an unavoidable subject when discussing Fear of Music anyway. But for the boy in the room it’s personal. He hasn’t exactly lived all over this town, but the room in which he’s listening to the radio is a definite-brownstone in a maybe-ghetto. In 1979 and the years just following, the kid will visit CBGB’s plenty of times (though Talking Heads, like the other front-line performers associated with the club, had graduated to bigger venues before he’d stood any chance of seeing them there), and the Mudd Club, too.
And the boy knows fear. Whoever knows fear burns at Fear of Music’s touch.
But we’re ahead of ourselves. The boy hasn’t heard Fear of Music yet, just the words: “Fear” “Of” “Music”. (Is it “Fear-of” music? Of what would “fear-of” music consist? Is fear made of music? Can an album be afraid of itself?) For the signal peculiarity of the long-lost Fear of Music radio spot is that though it was a commercial for an album, it didn’t consist of any actual music. It was a map that not only wasn’t the territory, it didn’t consist of more than the word “map.” A connect-the-dot diagram with only one dot. An artifact inviting you to consider your own possible future encounter with a subsequent artifact. To presume to say more would have been to betray the spirit of not-yet-knowing which still shrouded, for the boy in room, merely the whole area of everything that matters most: cities, drugs, sex, music, memories, life.
Prelude II: Another Intermediary Artifact
The matte black cardboard sleeve within which the Fear of Music LP is housed features an odd decoration, made of raised, cross-hatched ridges. The design is more interesting to the fingertips than the eye. Like the radio advertisement, the album jacket practices the minimalist magic of arresting attention while withholding stimulus, or at least of falling short of what might be regarded as the ordinary standard of generosity for its form. The band’s name and the album’s title appear in dull caps, restrained within a rectangular box, as though stamped on as an unimaginative afterthought. This seems to restrict them — name and title — from interaction with the “real” jacket, which manifests in a sculptural range where language is destroyed: texture v. text. The subliminal implication being that the album truly ought to be nameless, perhaps a reply record to the Beatles’ White Album, or anticipation of Prince’s Black Album by a decade and a half. The design evokes a steel door or box, imprinted either for friction’s sake, or to repel graffiti or stickering. It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, and it isn’t, exactly, but it does command a chilly authority and yet at the same time suggest a desire to be stroked.
The wish to be impervious and impenetrable, yet still seductive to the flesh of others, isn’t rare, only (usually) unattainable by human beings, as opposed to monoliths, orgasmatrons, blarney stones and the like. The typical animal reaction, of course, is to reach out and cop a feel, like the apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The edifice of Fear of Music’s packaging takes this formula further. Rather than portraying a monolith, it becomes one, therefore turning you, with yearning fingertips, into the petitioning ape. As in a Kafka parable, you might wait at this door forever; it never opens. Not the first or last time buildings and people will be mixed up in this band’s lexicon: if “love is building on fire,” fear, apparently, is a building with its steel gate drawn down.
What the album jacket says that the radio spot also says is that this is a band that cares to examine the formal properties of even its most marginal emissions into the cultural stream: not only songs and albums, but the commercial detritus attaching to songs and albums. No surprise. They’re former art students, but not merely in the Mick Jagger or Paul Simonon “dropped out of art school” sense. The investment of artisty formal pressure on their music is a hallmark of what this band has on offer — has had on offer, from the start — as well as one of the tensions generating the band’s fruitful discomfort, and forecasting its eventual demise.
Also like a lot of assertively powerful artifacts — Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and various other minimalist monuments — the long-term status of the Fear of Music LP jacket is in truth subject to the depredations of entropy. So, in its physical evolution, the jacket carves out a relation to time. That’s to say, move Fear of Music in and out of a tightly packed shelf enough times and you’ll notice that the album’s upraised ridges are gradually being buffed clean of their pigment. These bared ridges grow increasingly prominent, so the jacket gains a new degree of visual intrigue even as it craps out. Are they little minnows, arcing from their black pond in an Esther Williams-style water ballet? Or is Fear of Music actually a woven basket?
I Zimbra
The sinuous crisis of “I Zimbra” attains maximum velocity before we’re prepared, a transmission in Morse code and stroboscopic scratch guitar thrusting us at once into the album’s future (dystopian) and the band’s future (utopian). In this double action it remains fundamentally impassive, discrete, impersonal — atopian. “I Zimbra” reaches beyond Fear of Music even as it opens a door into the record, makes an overture for it. Inscribing a seductive emergency state in our bodies while refusing to name a subject our minds can grasp, the song inoculates us with a “killed virus” version of Fear of Music that strengthens and sickens simultaneously. “I Zimbra” is untrustworthy. It compels the listener without bothering to persuade him. The formerly human band has mistaken itself for a machine in operation outside space, time, and mind. Or has it graduated and left us behind? No one’s saying. “I Zimbra” has its way with us, like sexual desire or fear itself, which enact themselves in a place beyond language.
Yet, mocking us, there is language, of a kind.
Gadget berry bomber clamored
Lazuli loony caloric cad jam
Ah! Bum berry glassily gland ride
He glassily tufty zebra—
Or so it might unfold, in the fool’s yearning spell-check of the ear — at least until corrected by the lyric sheet. For anyone demanding sense, or instructions on how to feel about the journey you’ve undertaken in dropping the phonograph’s needle on this particular record, here’s a Dada left hook to the jaw.
* * *
The mind making retrospective sense of the artwork is a liar. Or a lie. Unspooling expertise and arcana, the critic spins a web of knowingness that veils its manufacturer, a spider shy of the light. Now here you come, whistling down the bookstore aisle — “Always liked that record; wonder what he’s got to say about it?“ — to be enmeshed in the web of expertise. Before you blink, the spider’s remade you as his double, another presider over this mesh of opinions and trivia, which you’re free to brandish as your own. Or maybe not free, but imprisoned. Caught. Do you care to recall what it was like to hear “I Zimbra” before, like a scoop of ice cream rolled in chopped peanuts, I got my words all over (and embedded inside) it? Better retreat quick, friend.
At what point did I learn that Hugo Ball (1886–1927), German-born Dada poet and manifesto-writer, was the source of the crypto-tribal chanted nonsense syllables that pass for lyrics on “I Zimbra”? I can’t tell you. I do know this: I was, from the start, an inveterate inspector of credits, a curator of microdata. “H. Ball
” as a co-composer (with D. Byrne and B. Eno) was there to be spotted on Fear of Music’s label, and I probably spotted him before too long. But I’m also certain of this: there was a before. For I remember, dimly, the collision of that knowledge with my primal distrust of the song’s refusal of meaning. I resolutely didn’t want this band to stop making sense.
The boy in his room demands we take this confession further, take the opportunity to say how, when in first inspecting More Songs About Buildings and Food’s label he discovered the names “A. Green and M. Hodges” credited with composition of his favorite punk rock hit of 1978, he tucked a throb of embarrassment behind a rapidly constructed tinfoil hat of knowingness: oh, sure, “Take Me to the River” was an old R&B or gospel song, makes sense. What a cool gesture on the part of his heroes! At the time the boy guessed the song was probably from the fifties or early sixties, had been funked up by Talking Heads. The boy recalls, with absolute clarity, going on to wonder to himself whether he’d ever know anything more about “A. Green and M. Hodges” than the fact they’d written the song.
Then again, a mere seven years (and seven thousand revolutions of emotion and taste) later, that boy — not such a boy now, but still enough of one to deserve the name — sat on a mattress with his college girlfriend and played her selected tracks from his complete collection of original-issue Al Green Hi Records LPs. Between tracks, in the manner of bragging how far he’d come, the boy retailed this exact saga of his innocence: that he’d once stared at a Talking Heads’ label and wondered whether he’d ever know who Al Green was. By that time, the boy found his old attachment to Talking Heads an awkward thing, incriminatingly callow, the residue of awkward origins. Meanwhile, his devotion to the works of Al Green seemed to him to define his worldliness. If you’d announced to that twenty year-old that a quarter-century on he’d be writing a book about Talking Heads, rather than one about Al Green, he’d have arched a skeptical eyebrow.
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