Fear of music

by Jonathan Lethem

  The point is how right and wrong you can be at once. And that the “information” is only as good as what your ears already know. Or not as good. Like a lot of people, when I — for I am that boy in that room — first heard it I thought “I Zimbra” sounded African. Not, I hasten to say, in the sense of African music as I presently know and revere it, for I didn’t know what African music sounded like. Rather, under the influence of the track’s conga drums, the singing to me sounded like fake-tribal-chanting in some African language, Swahili or Zulu or, worse, an invented ooga-booga tongue, an art-school highbrow’s version of the cannibal grunts and moans in The Cadets’ “Stranded in the Jungle.”

  In as much, the resemblance embarrassed and bothered me, but I could never have articulated the botheration for many years to come. It was too personal. My disapproval of white-boys-acting-black had determined the plot of my life to that point, my schoolyard crises, musical and otherwise, and was the exact reason I’d fallen on non-blues-based punk or new wave bands with such exultant relief. Talking Heads were meant to epitomize my opportunities to construct a cool that pointed away from “the street,” and towards bookish things, but was still cool. I didn’t need them glancing at Africa, with or without quotation marks.

  Later I’d learn that this band had conceived Fear of Music as a chance to close some of the distance between punk and disco. For me, though, it was for the best at the time that I hadn’t learned that fact, and that my aural defenses were good enough to keep me from hearing it. I needed Talking Heads to be a punk band, not a funk band. But in “I Zimbra” I couldn’t help hearing — as anyone would, and everyone did, at least in the retrospect of Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues — the homeopathic tincture, the minimum effective transformative dose, of all the funk to come.

  This white band was going to have black people in it.

  Maybe already did.

  But that’s getting way, way ahead of ourselves, especially ahead of the boy in his room.

  Brian Eno, the only acknowledged intruder on the “official quartet” of Talking Heads to this point, was British and bald, and played not drums or bass but keyboards, or sat geekishly behind a console. Talk about Trojan Horses!

  Into this confusion plopped the clue: Hugo Ball. Finding “I Zimbra” credited in part to the dead Dada poet, I could modulate my worries about this turn to the African, but only a little. My ears were still telling me something, still anxiously parsing this harbinger of the band’s future (destined, of course, to consist of a series of collaborations with live black musicians, not dead Dada poets).

  But what did it mean? Inquiring minds, licensed to overthinking by this band’s fundamentally cerebral founding premise — heads, talking, rather than bodies unhinged from self-consciousness on the dance floor — might be obligated to bear down on the thing. Hugo Ball’s poem, by deflecting meaning, accumulated speculative-interpretive force, like a Rorschach blot. Dada — European, collagistic, prone to manifestos and provocation, to sneering at history — made a fair bedfellow for punk. The song claimed a precursor in Dada’s guttural and spasmodic presentation, and its freedom from conventional logic, but also its tendency to the regimented and doctrinaire. Hugo Ball’s drill-sargeanty nonsense, and the immobile geometric armor he wore while presenting it onstage: these both satirized the human impulse to control human impulses, and exemplified the discipline needed to make that kind of artwork (if nothing else, a song or poem composed in an invented language foregrounds the labor of memorization that’s normally taken for granted in performance).

  Still, 1916 Zurich is an awfully long way for a rock band to venture merely to authorize use of nonsense syllables. From well before the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” and long after the Police’s “Da Doo Doo Doo,” the rock lexicon abounds with blurts and grunts and gibberish of a zoological diversity. Some historically-minded folks place the very origin of the rock song-form in the realm of verbal hoo-ha: early rock-and-roll as a jubilant, irreverent expansion of the nonsense asides in vocal jazz and rhythm-and-blues, or of the kind of Pentecostal babbling-in-tongues recorded by John Lomax in the 1934 “Run Old Jeremiah”: “I gotta rock / You gotta rock / Wah wah ho / Wah wah wah ho.” The conventional reading of the nonsense lyric — or the James Brown grunt, or of jazz scatting — might be that the voice, seeking to reproduce the wild expressivity of the band’s instruments, finds it necessary to leave verbal meaning in the dust.

  The vocal manner of “I Zimbra” stakes out a different turf. It distinguishes itself not only from the above-described premises for nonsense verbiage, but from Talking Heads’ previously established default conceptual-scheme, which goes something like this: freaked-out singer tests his anxieties, vulnerabilities, and yearnings against the bounds of a music that’s fierce and impassive in ways he can only dream of. The metronomic drumming and monolithically regular bass lines, the tight-wound guitar-and-keyboard figures, sometimes menacing, sometimes chipper, sometimes both, but always crucially less — or more — than human: on Talking Heads’ first two albums, the band frames David Byrne’s voice and lyrics as a fragile human entity locked into a ferocious exoskeletal structure, one driving him through confessions, passive-aggressive fits, and bemused homilies about work, love, art, and television.

  That voice, when bored, sighs: stays human.

  When alienated, reveals dread: stays human.

  When angry, goes spastic: stays human.

  It is only with “I Zimbra” that this voice inscribes its complicity with the machine or machines that bear it forward. Chanting in lockstep, the vocal of “I Zimbra” reveals and celebrates a new possibility of neurosis-free compliance to the music’s urgency. It’s not only nonsense, it’s impersonal. Nobody’s home. Or maybe it’s an undead lifelessness. Like a vampire, the song gazes in the mirror and finds nothing reflected; it dashes through the room before we’ve noticed it casts no shadow.

  * * *

  “I Zimbra,” considered as an envoi to Fear of Music, plays at refuting the album’s methodology before it even gets started, and at the same time clears the ground for that methodology’s deepest operations. For Fear of Music is all about its subject matter. Like a high school social studies teacher chalking a heading on a blackboard, the song titles function as “topics for discussion.” “I Zimbra” coughs into its fist and says “bullshit” to that plan: your pedagogy is all talk, perfesser, and talk is all nonsense.

  The implicit “I” of the band, to this point, was nothing to sneeze at. The persona on Talking Heads ’77 and More Songs About Buildings and Food had been funny, neurotic, pretentious, and nerdishly intense — capable, variously, of Dylanesque break-up songs, anthems of mixed emotion, and deadpan self-help advisories which dare you to take them at face value. Yet in every case it tended to exhibit a “personality” — someone, whether you want to call him “David Byrne” or “Psycho Killer” or something else — who can be safely taken by the listener as either a portrait or a self-portrait.

  What “I Zimbra” announces is the destruction of this individual limit to the band’s paranoiac worldview. This is a huge, if stealthy, gain for the album’s overarching authority. Our lives all feature air, paper, cities, mind, animals, memories, war, and so forth. “We dress like students, we dress like housewives …” Fear of Music will be a collective enunciation in which the listener is helplessly enmeshed or it will be nothing much — a “comedy album” (cf. Lester Bangs). By evaporating his individuality into the group-incantation of “I Zimbra” the singer prepares us, if only subconsciously, for our complicity with matters beyond any individual character’s neurotic grievances.

  “I Zimbra”’s origin encodes Fear of Music’s motifs in one other sense: the Dada movement itself was a response to “life during wartime.” The European aftermath of the Great War seemed to dwarf all attempts at humane commemoration or remorse; trench warfare and mustard gas and shellshock were the language Hugo Ball and his fellow Dadaists sought to overwrite with their avant-gibberis
h.

  * * *

  If there’s any back door out of the future-shock corridor of “I Zimbra” it is proposed not by the singers, but by the bass player, who frequently seems to direct her instrument’s line into a rubbery skid toward this one-lane-highway’s ditch. The propulsive quorum — drums, guitar, and vocals — ignore her renegade proposal, pushing ever forward. The keyboard, gnarling in a neurotic collision with itself, never betrays the song’s pace, and so seems celebratory, a bow on the tightly wrapped package. This keyboard sound, ascending in jubilant dysfunction, concludes the track, boasting no exit, no exit, no exit. Relief comes not from within “I Zimbra”’s tensile structure, but from our easeful fall to the next song’s seeming amplitude and warmth. But look out.

  Is Fear of Music a Talking Heads Record?

  The opening few songs in Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads’ concert film, Stop Making Sense, reenact or allegorize the band’s early formation and later expansion: first the songwriter, alone with guitar and a beatbox, then bass player and drummer to form a rhythm section in support of him, then the keyboard player, who also plays second guitar. Expansion follows: conga players, back-up singers, a second bass, and a second keyboardist — yet anyone who cares for this band is meant to understand that the inner nougat, the band’s hard chewy center, is made complete when the fourth member appears on stage. Jerry Harrison, that fourth member, was actually added after Talking Heads had already declared themselves — and, as these things go, I do know at least one stone purist, happy privileged witness to a string of early gigs, who swears by the band as a threesome, claiming their ferocity and focus was irrevocably diluted by Harrison’s entry into Talking Heads — but he made it aboard in time for the first record. That’s good enough to qualify for a World Series share, or a plaque in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, should a band make it that far.

  Brian Eno, the first “Fifth Head,” the aforementioned Trojan or stalking horse for all expansions to follow, doesn’t appear in Stop Making Sense.

  A Talking Heads record? To the kid in the room, a stupid question. The quartet of the band, as presented on the first three records, and as would be reaffirmed by the back-to-basics (and post-Eno) Little Creatures, never, at the time of Fear of Music, seemed in the faintest doubt. Brian Eno was a producer. He hadn’t joined Devo, had he?

  Yet as quickly as the band’s next album, Remain in Light (1980) and then the Byrne–Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) — two records as undeniable in their force and mystery as anything a listener could have wished — the original band’s integrity was partly conquered by another story. This went something like: a prodigy, a genius, outgrew, or anyway became impatient with, a context and a format — “rock band” and “pop song” — and at the same time, or as a result, began to separate himself from a group of friends, his bandmates. At the same time, the genius became infatuated with another genius, he who happened to be famously an outgrower too, specifically of the context and format of “rock band” and “pop song.”

  Please understand: I’ve discovered that I’m uninterested in the personal historical facts in the matter at hand, no matter whether these would be labeled grievances or gossip or trivia or cultural history depending on the person or persons consulted or the angle or attitude of the accounts given. Any speculations I’ve framed here are from the perspective of someone invested — utterly and dangerously — in a work of art: Fear of Music. Such investment extends to a stake in the notion of that work’s implied author: in this case, Talking Heads.

  When I say “implied author,” I mean of course not the ‘real’ Talking Heads, but the Talking Heads — or David Byrne, or Brian Eno — in my mind.

  When I took on this perverse task, of writing a book with the same title as Fear of Music, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, nor how to begin doing it. My suspicion, though, was that the best value I could offer (to myself, I mean, for I was the only reader I could allow to matter) was to simply draw a circle on the page the exact size of an LP. Then to step inside, and put down in words exactly what I heard there.

  I didn’t want to write about Fear of Music, I wanted to write Fear of Music.

  Once begun, I found that the more I invited other stories inside that LP-sized circle — already so crowded with the enormity of the songs, plus the boy in his room who I’d discovered waiting to meet me there — the less I was able to make my own language for what I heard. In our age of information and access, getting off-line is already a commodity. (I write these words while using Freedom, a program I downloaded from the internet which temporarily kills the internet on my computer. I paid for it.) What’s less clearly valued (and impossible, I hope, to commodify) is the value of what Donald Barthelme called “not-knowing”: the manifold mercies of ignorance when setting out to do or say nearly anything.

  Facts won’t do what I want them to.

  Like any artist a part of what I want is to make my needful guesswork, my cherished misapprehensions, so persuasive and glorious that they become more valuable than any fact could ever be. In that pursuit, though I’ve had a stack of books at my elbow (listed in the endnotes), I’ve mostly used them to prime the well of my own biases. Otherwise, I’ve made it a point to undertake this work utilizing no direct sources whatsoever. Not only were no animals (or electric guitars) harmed, no one was interviewed in this effort beside myself — myself, and that kid in his room. Who are in many cases the same person, but at other times are not only two people but are complete fucking mysteries to one another.

  Thus, in exclusive consultation with Selfipedia, allow me to declare that every once in a while rhetorical questions have definite answers. Of course Fear of Music is a Talking Heads record! Its permanent force and presence arise from the context and format of a rock band playing pop songs. The boy in the room was right never to question this.

  What he couldn’t have known until Remain in Light and beyond, but what he then began to suspect and I have found myself troubling over ever since, is that in some ways it may be the last Talking Heads record. And that suspicion — that it is for the boy in his room not only the summit of the efforts of his favorite rock band, but a kind of too-sudden termination of those efforts (no matter how compelling some of the subsequent work done under the name seemed to him at the time, or later), the possibility that the secret of its terminal status is disclosed throughout the album in the form of a series of small but unmistakable fissures, in the form of tiny farewells, will be one of the subjects of this book.

  Mind

  One place this band has always excelled is in what a comic-book fan would call the “gutters” — the white space between panels on the page, and the implications created by the panels’ juxtaposition, which resides in that white space. Of course, songs on LPs always had pauses between them. What self-conscious Pop Art did to the comic-book panel was isolate it and put a frame around it. (As the Dadaists will tell you, it’s context that turns an artifact into art.) From then on, any artistically ambitious page of comic-book panels — or, if you accept my analogy, any album conscious of being more than a collection of singles (i.e. post-Sgt. Pepper’s, at latest) could be taken as the equivalent of a museum full not only of artworks but of transitions between artworks. These intervals are charged with the interference of residual vibration, smashed up against the arrival of new forms after an unspecified duration of anticipatory silence.

  The heartbeat between the first and second track of Fear of Music is one of the best gutters in Talking Heads’ repertoire. Where “I Zimbra” is closeted, “Mind” blurts open. Guitars chime to declare an atmosphere of musical and mental spaciousness, but not a chilly spaciousness (at least by contrast to “I Zimbra”). Fleshier tonalities and a goofy call-and-response by the guitar and keyboard seem to present a humane invitation to the reasonable listener, whose presence — “you” — is now acknowledged, as is his/her native tongue. The elastic, plosive bass line has not only got the song firmly in its grip this time, the rhythm
section seem to be the only players with a sense of the song’s plot.

  Elsewhere, loose-jointed guitar figures evoke a marionette stumbling onstage, keyboard washes point straight to Sun Ra’s outer galaxies, and the singer’s gone all dreamy, humming and mumbling to himself when he’s not detailing his unguarded and tremulous desire to locate the magic ingredient that will “change your mind.” The proposition’s initially inviting; it might be gratifying to satisfy the yodely pining of the song’s narrator, who resembles, for an instant, anyway, the Hank Williams of “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)” or “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do” or “Half as Much.” We may find ourselves compelled, when those songs reach our hearts, to sing back: “I’ll change!” or “I still do!” or “I love you twice as much, you big dummy!” Where the album’s first song seemed to leapfrog beyond Fear of Music’s stated premises, at the start “Mind” seems to slip back, toward the manner of the two earlier Talking Heads’ records. A listener could reassure herself that this is just another alienated and neurotic take on the “first-person relationship complaint” song. This narrator is charismatic, so his petition is flattering. “Don’t give up!” the listener may wish to reply. “You’re changing my mind, I can feel it now!”

  Yet “Mind” gets a second chance to make a first impression. As the pleasant contrast with “I Zimbra” fades in sonic memory, the song’s warmth abates too. Its invitation becomes steadily less promising — harder to imagine taking, and more baited than it initially appeared. The first thing that overtakes the song’s pleasant aura is a hostility deeper than can be cheerfully resolved within the song’s terms, if one takes it for a relationship song. The second thing that overtakes it is the suspicion that it can’t be taken for a relationship song. There’s a kind of M.C. Escher action of self-erasure in “Mind”’s inmost pattern, an unwinnable game between an uncertain number of players. The song has trapdoors in its pronoun structure: the “I–You” doesn’t persuade us, in the end. Or should I say that it doesn’t persuade you?