Fear of music

by Jonathan Lethem

  So far, rock ‘n’ roll had barely attended this party. David Bowie made gestures — and loaned himself to Nicholas Roeg, which seemed in turn to deepen his earnest engagement with the material (in albums created with Brian Eno, or Neo Brain) — but his foppish chameleonism also risked making his science fiction seem a pose, with a glam Buck Rogers costume hung embarrassingly in the closet. New Wave bands seemed allied, if only by the accident of their synthesizers and urban props — Gary Numan’s “Cars” was great science fiction pop — but dance floor power fantasies, like Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, pointed back to wish fulfillment — a Jules Verne or Hugo Gernsback tour of glossy wonders — rather than critique. If you cared for science fiction as a mode of inquiry, an angle of attack on everything, there were only two choices: Devo, and Talking Heads. The boy in his room looked at that menu and said I’ll have both, please. These two bands alone seemed to have grasped the essence that bridged Kafka and Rod Serling: the future was a thing happening to you, whether you wanted it to or not, and it would be encountered not in outer space but in food and buildings, in your workplace and government and sex life.

  And Talking Heads, the boy’s most special companions on this journey, knew the fact that he’d found no way to enunciate, and wouldn’t ever, not completely, even after growing up to write several books in the attempt: that this city you lived in might be a kind of dystopia, or future ruin. A future ruin already, and no regrets. Indeed, the boy in the room liked it better that way. This city, perhaps unlike all others upon the earth, seemed to the boy designed to broadcast rather than conceal the truth about what the world now consisted of. (Hence the special awkwardness still to come, both for the band and for the boy in the room: that freeing oneself from this city’s deprivations and stresses, instead of reciprocating their embrace, might feel like a kind of flinching.)

  Unlike that boy, though, I’m not sure the science fiction definition offers very much that’s worth clinging to. First of all, if the definition widens to include too much — everything cool and urban and remotely alienated or portentous — it can only seem to need to be dissolved. Neither Don Delillo nor Talking Heads required the genre definition to find their way to the statements they wanted to make, right? It’s just art. (In that spirit you’d also say that someone like J.G. Ballard made his statement despite the genre definition.) You could as easily use the science fiction label to define all the pulp baggage, the iconography and stylistics that we’re glad this better art excluded on grounds of taste. Not just the wish-fulfillment tropes, but the specific flavor of fetish illustration, airbrushy stuff like a Jefferson Starship or E.L.O. album cover, and its equivalent in prose or music (the mellotron, say).

  What’s more, at nearly fifty, I can know — know in my bones, not just in my brain — how much the present’s made up not only of the future-already-here, but the past-still-around. The same part of me that can much more easily see now how much, despite its anti-nostalgic tenor, “Life During Wartime” has to do with a 1950s-style air-raid drills, the Cold War fear I’m old enough, just barely, to have tasted myself before it was replaced with something else. (Replaced, but also left laying around, for handy reference and use.) It’s that part of me which is equally better able than the boy in his room to recognize how Talking Heads sound not only “like music from the future” but also like the Beatles and the Zombies and Buddy Holly. Not only because I’ve subsequently listened to more of those earlier things than the boy had at the time, but because he never would have permitted himself to see how much “his” music was entrenched in the world of his parents’.

  Similarly, however much the future may be described by the city, the countryside exists. People live their whole lives there (or, rather, here, since I’m writing these words in a farmhouse). As I’ve already taken pains to point out, this was something coming increasingly to the attention of the band’s songwriter. Even further, another suspicion appears already to have been sneaking over that same songwriter: believing New York City was the city of the future — or, at least, that it was the only city of the future — might have been as nearsighted and self-congratulatory as the Steinberg New Yorker cover. The city of the future might be Sau Paulo, or Lagos.

  The city of the future might also be Chocolate City, that Blackopolis secreted not-so-secretly inside the official U.S. urban reality. For, if the boy really had been casting the widest net for “science fiction” music, he ought to have landed on Parliament and Funkadelic, right? George Clinton’s starchildren optimized as full a spectrum of the genre’s marvels as the New Wave bands. At least. But the boy in his room was elaborately defended against those bands, for reasons humiliating to recount (making matters worse, the records were even in my house, hence ignoring them was an active, not a passive, crime. My brother listened to them. Younger brother.)

  Those defenses would soon break down, in order that I become a proper hipster of my generation; if they hadn’t by the time Bernie Worrell was made a member of Talking Heads, they’d have needed to at that point. (A digression: somewhere in the ocean of time between being the boy in his room and being the aging fan writing these words, while riding in a car with a friend older than myself, I slipped a tape into the car’s player, a mix of favorite late-seventies tracks from the various permutations of George Clinton’s bands. This was after Speaking in Tongues. My friend — a sophisticated listener, but with zero exposure to black music after Otis Redding — said, “Wow, these guys sure stole everything from Talking Heads, didn’t they?” Up to that instant I still nurtured a will-to-believe that Talking Heads’ career consisted of a sequence of advances into the radical absolute, each album a singularity devising itself in vacuum; Speaking in Tongues needed to conform to this view. So, even as I’d become a Funkadelic fan, I couldn’t hear the extent to which the new Talking Heads record was basically Funkadelic with David Byrne singing. There in that car my brain’s firewall melted.)

  Is Fear of Music science fiction? Sure, but only because Kafka is too, and the entire twentieth century. And no, not at all, since (unlike Devo or Funkadelic) it barely glances at the iconography, the kit of endearing devices and ingrown references. (Apart from those Star Trek harmonies.)

  Heaven

  There is a piano in “Heaven.” The guitars defer to it. This is “the slow song,” not because the tempo’s so different from “Memories Can’t Wait” or “Mind” (and “Drugs” will be far slower), but because the song demands it be understood that way. The guitars, to this point always doubled up as if in laughter or gasping for breath, now unkink themselves, quit scratching and jeering. The wide-open chords of the so-called “solos” in earlier songs here play tonal paintbrush, opening vistas of eternity and fulfillment. (In fact, their soaring layers faintly forecast the producer’s future liaison with Daniel Lanois and The Edge.) The guitars chime sincerity, and fall in obediently with a balladeer’s palace-staircase piano. Someone better croon soon.

  Someone better send a memo to the rhythm section.

  “Heaven” may seem so integrated and inevitable by this point (and to hear it once is to have heard it a thousand times) that a listener fails to register the blithe disobedience of two of the players from the very first note (an irreverence that sets the original aside from nearly every subsequent and gorgeously soporific cover version you’ll ever encounter, including a few by the original artists). The drummer stiff-arms the subject matter, like a Heisman Trophy persisting downfield against all obstacles. He just martially toughs it out, fingers in his ears while he chants “rock song, rock song, rock song” all the way through. If, a couple of tracks earlier, you semi-consciously registered a play on the title “Heaven Can Wait,” well, the drummer’s here to say this “Heaven” can’t. Not if it’s up to him. Even more rudely, the bass player’s just doing way too much, blobbing all over the track with webby all-thumbs-footprints, gurgling and belching and totally earthbound. Hey! A frog jumped out of “Animals”! Catch the little guy!

  The bass is ea
sily the best thing and the worst thing on the track.

  Best because worst: the bass punctures any sanctimony or bogus mystery here. Otherwise, “Heaven” risks a deadly perfection. The song enacts the ennui it rails against, by never railing against anything at all. It drowns in its gorgeous reservations. Or maybe it’s only you who drowns, in “Heaven”’s unsarcastic sarcasm, its thrilling boredom, its overwrought dispassion, as you plunge through the gummy stasis of its surface, on which floating petals conceal a murky whirlpool of reverb and echo and guitars. (What guitars! “Under” heaven, it seems, every kind of strife occurs.) The bottom’s simply not visible from shore, but when you reach it you’re not certain you ever swam a stroke, or did more than just gaze into the pool from the bank and wonder what the black water would feel like: if heaven’s impossible to know, “Heaven”’s hard to recollect, in the eerie fullness of its shallows, once the track’s not playing.

  “Heaven” is deadpan. What, you object to such simplicity and spaciousness? Well, you’re simply not ready yet. Just be grateful the song hates its own beauty a little, a kind of inoculation against feelings of unworthiness, and a hatred that’s likely its most beautiful feature.

  What was the truth the guru told you, the third time you climbed his mountain to ask? “Don’t bother, it’s conundrums all the way down.”

  * * *

  In certain philosophical systems there is a difference between what something is called and its “true name.” “Heaven” occupies a zone where basic terms are frozen in paradoxical transition, neither wave nor particle, beginning with a neat piece of slippage in its second line: “The name of the bar, (hesitation), the bar is called Heaven.”

  The name of the bar is called Heaven.

  (The name of this band is Talking Heads.)

  (Talking Heads have a new album. It’s called Fear of Music.)

  So, now we know what the name of the bar is called. But what is the name of the bar?

  The band in the bar is playing your favorite song. But is the name of that band called Talking Heads and is the name of their new album called Fear of Music and is the name of the song called “Heaven”? Okay, but what is its true name?

  The reference to “your favorite song” is certainly a passing scrap of tautological arrogance, and a provocation. It basically dares you to say well, this isn’t it. The fact that they “play it once again, play it all night long” reminds you, too, to notice how much repetitiveness can be achieved merely in a single 4-minute stretch — forget about playing it once again. I think they already did this number, didn’t they? No, this is still the first time. You just nodded off.

  The secular heaven of “Heaven” is a nice place, a good and desirable place, yet it’s deadly boring; the whole song is designed to give evidence of this fact. And yet the given evidence — ah, the evidence! — is sublime, or at least it’s nice and good and desirable.

  “It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all / Could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” Hard to imagine, yet aren’t we, listening, imagining exactly that? The word “nothing” is itself a hinge, or dumb pun: is nothing exciting, a description of a situation that’s rather convincingly boring (even if you choose to call it “Heaven”), since when nothing’s exciting there’s nothing interesting at all — or is nothing exciting, a very rare and fascinating condition in which the less there is the more scintillating we’re finding “it” to be? And what’s “it,” anyway, if “it” is nothing?

  I’m still waiting to learn the name of the bar.

  I tried to warn you, seeker: Conundrums all the way down.

  * * *

  One thing’s clear, anyway: Fear of Nowhere’s back with a vengeance. Here’s the risk that “Air” only flirted with, a precursor intuition: seek release, rise into the stratosphere, and you’ll find it was waiting for you all the time, heaven, the heavens, the blankness of secular outer space. “Heaven” is at root a meditation on the seduction and horror of that blankness, the place where nothing ever happens. It’s probably the band’s clearest deer-in-headlights glance at the theme (Forget “Big Country” — the Great Plains are no longer to blame).

  From this point, the Fear of Nowhere theme will be free to evolve toward reconciliation, first on Speaking in Tongues’ “This Must Be the Place,” a song about abiding with nowhere — understanding that you can dwell there, even gratefully, so long as you don’t require it to be heaven, only a home. Next it moves on to active celebration: “We’re on the Road to Nowhere,” from Little Creatures. By this time all dread, all critical irony, has been drained from the portrayal of that lonely band of wanderers trying to get to that bar. They’re us! And when we get there we’ll really be somewhere!

  * * *

  Then again, the mention of a “bar” requires we read “Heaven” in light of the ain’t-no-Mudd-Club motif. Could this be merely a trickily sublimated adieu to some specific after-hours place, a Warholianly bland dive where everyone’s trying to get — and “everyone (who’s everyone) is there” — but isn’t remotely interesting when you get inside. Is Heaven a hip nickname for the VIP room at Max’s Kansas City, say?

  A party where “everyone will leave at exactly the same time” is, if you needed this to be the Christian heaven, a pretty fair quick sketch of Life During Rapture. Taken literally as a party scene, it’s weirdly comic, a kind of Monty Python routine, like the one in Meaning of Life where the Grim Reaper informs everyone at the dinner party that they’ve eaten the same curdled salmon mousse and must put down their wineglasses and come with him immediately. (Really, anytime you trouble to actually picture heaven it’s a joke about vagueness, blandness and boredom, fluffy clouds and zithers, as in a single-caption cartoon, so “Heaven”’s big reveal is no surprise at all.)

  The party in question may also be the one “in your mind.” If so, its abrupt finish makes perfect sense as a solipsist’s death scene: you hope it never stops, but if it does, who can believe the fun will continue after you’re gone?

  Or is it, sigh, just another break-up song that’s embarrassed to be one? “When this kiss is over it will start again / It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same.” (Dylan: “You say my kisses are not like his / This time I’m not going to tell you why that is”). Maybe boring heaven is you, dear. I mean to say, don’t feel bad. The problem isn’t you, it’s me. You, you’re perfect, you’re my favorite song. Snore.

  * * *

  This “Heaven” is a little humiliated not to be the last song on its record. (“Big Country,” “This Must Be the Place,” and “Road to Nowhere,” compatriots in the Fear of Nowhere sequence, each get to be.) Its hint of grandiosity, its aura of afterglow, cry “Coda!” and are rebuffed. Maybe this is to be blamed on that damned frog. Or maybe the fact is that Fear of Music, with its air of restless inventory, with its tendency to autonomically self-cancel, can’t permit the song such a romantic role. It is only in the reverent view that heaven comes last. Here, it’s hastily sandwiched between air and animals, where heaven couldn’t possibly belong, if it even exists in the first place.

  * * *

  As “Heaven” wends through exasperation with its own graciously cloistered layers, the singer actually begins moaning “Arrrgh, ayyy, yoiiii, yoiiii” — everything short of “Oy, vey.” The song begs for a fade but isn’t granted one. Instead the guitars, which had attempted to smother the rhythm section in sacred gauze, give way completely, and the drums and bass thump and chuckle like they’ve just played “Louie Louie.” Frog wins.

  Is Fear of Music an Asperger’s Record?

  In a 4-minute video released in 1983 to promote Stop Making Sense, David Byrne, doubled by camera trickery, interviews himself, on the cheesy set of a fake television talk show. On the left he plays a caricatured “David Byrne,” dressed in the Big Suit, his hair slicked and body rigid with discomfort, eyes darting like those of a caged robot. On the right, in a series of campy costumes, wigs, and false moustaches, Byrne plays a sequence of different int
erviewers, each unpleasant in a different way (or several): snide, louche, uninterested, assuming, insulting, half-asleep. “Byrne” copes with his interlocutors with mechanical civility; at the outset he says, as if held hostage, “I will do absolutely anything you say.” To questions that affront or bewilder him, he recites, flatly, “I’ll tell you later.”

  The sleaziest and most insinuating of these talk-show hosts wears shades, a pimp’s moustache, and a wide-lapelled banana-yellow suit. He offers to sing Byrne a song he’s written himself — Byrne suggests he might listen to it, later — and then, having browbeaten Byrne into reciting the cliché, “I would like to show people … the … movies … in my head,” threatens him with reciprocation: “I got a movie in my head! You wanna see it?”

  “No,” says Byrne. “But do you have anything to eat?”

  For anyone keen to make such an interpretation, the clip could seem to show this artist throwing an Asperger’s Syndrome coming-out party for himself, only scantly veiled as the typical famous-person’s gripe about demeaningly brain-dead publicity occasions. In presenting himself as an affectively challenged intellect beset by a world of opaque social codes, unspoken demands, and bullying assumptions, it predates by a decade Byrne’s casual acknowledgement on his website, in 2006: “I was a peculiar young man. Borderline Asperger’s, I guess.” He expanded to an interviewer for the Guardian UK:

  I’d only heard of Asperger’s a few years ago, when a group out of Stanford proposed a spectrum that goes from autism to Asperger’s to sort-of-good-at-math. I thought “Wow, I see a lot of myself in that.”