
(Sire)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!
It seems that most bands have a record which, even without the aid of a discography, is clearly a transitional moment between a pair of seminal efforts. The Beatles have their Help!, Stevie Wonder his Fulfilligness' First Finale, the Replacements their Tim, Radiohead their OK Computer. In many cases the "happy medium" record, blending the virtues of early work and later experimentation, could be argued as the definitive work of an artist and frequently is a fan's common choice for artistic peak. Fear of Music is one such recording, and despite lukewarm critical reception upon release, it has become one of Talking Heads' most renowned albums. In their second set with Brian Eno behind the dials, the Heads begin to run afoul of their original sound, tweaking their work with ambitious production, arrangement, and mystique. Fear of Music is the closest this band would ever come to a concept album, and it lays the cards on the table. Every song is a David Byrne discourse on why something should be feared. Fear of mind, paper, cities, memories, air, heaven, animals, guitars, drugs.
Anything human and warm about Byrne on the previous two records has, in line with the disturbing finish to "The Big Country," been eradicated. He is a paranoid nutcase, tolerant of nothing and resentful, terrified, and skeptical of everything. The results can be funny ("I know the animals are laughing at us!") but are more often scary ("I'll be here all the time / I can never quit"), and what's most distressing is how by the end of it he has begun to almost make sense to us, so accustomed have we become to his barking, cartoonish philosophies. Not many other album in the annals of conventional rock music have become as notorious as this one for its lyrics alone. The opening track, "I Zimbra," is a nonsense poem by dadaist Hugo Ball set to music, and it's the most optimistic thing here. Elsewhere Byrne doubts everyone and everything, and he no longer raises himself as a good example (the playful David of the last album who demanded "Please respect my opinions, they'll be respected someday" is gone). On "Cities" his quest for a new home turns into an epic journey that leaves him barely gripping his sanity. "Do I smell? I smell home cooking / It's only the river! It's only the river!"
Byrne is still more or less himself on the first half, and with the exception of "I Zimbra" and "Cities," so is the band, elevating Talking Heads: 77-style material with slick Eno polish ("Paper" is practically a rewrite of "Tentative Decisions"); they come close to being the first band to create sensuality through punk on "Mind," and hint at their polyrhythmic future on the oddly laid-back, lyrically prophetic "Life During Wartime." "Cities" expands upon the dramatic instrumentation of "Found a Job" in full color, with appropriately creepy sirens signaling the start and finish of the number.
"Memories Can't Wait" marks the breaking point, and even on compact disc it divides this record in half. Standing with "Lady Godiva's Operation" as one of the few truly horrifying pop songs, it casts Byrne's mind as an endless "party" (a very New York theme repeated on "Heaven") and immerses us in it with backward loops and plenty of otherworldly effects that emphasize the thematic displacement. The line "Everything is very quiet" returns us to the warmth of the guitars but we are no less disrupted. It's hard to discern how much sequencing played a role in the execution of the record, but the songs after this point are nowhere close to anything the Heads had done before. Brian Eno goes for full-force pop treatment on the B-movie soundscape of "Air," with Byrne sounding alternately like Willy Wonka and an infuriated politician, explaining the dangers of oxygen. He has similarly potent ideas against most living creatures on "Animals," a stark and angular song matched by another raging diatribe. On paper it's hilarious -- "They like to laugh at people / They're setting a bad example" -- but there's so much conviction behind it that you feel yourself repelled by Byrne's indignation. At the same time, particularly today, you relate to the blind need to blame everything around you for increasing insecurity. In a terrible way, he's not acting abnormally.
"Electric Guitar" is a more precise production, with an amusing tuba line, but the band is dining on themselves, shunning their medium in a satirical sense but with that same curious sincerity. "Never listen to electric guitar," Byrne orders. Far from the working-class ideal of rock & roll, the persona is suspicious of the capabilities of pop music and, breaking all the walls around him where he sits, breaks to us his devastating conclusion: "Someone controls electric guitar." The moment inevitably recalls the climax of John Lennon's young career: "I don't believe in Beatles."
Meanwhile, there's "Heaven," one of the most endearing songs in the Heads' catalog; again a party that never ends, again the challenge and boredom of excess and ultimately the fear that comes from not understanding, which in this case translates to believing every myth handed to you. It's far from a shunning of religious thought, but it is a subtle celebration of humanism, a glimmer of hope amid the tirades. Eno allows Byrne to sing within his range, giving us a performance that's beautiful and moving but still witty and not free of anger and doubt. As usual, what makes this such an outstanding ballad -- one of the finest of its time -- is the refusal to tone down Frantz and Weymouth, who pound their way through it, one of the many reasons the Stop Making Sense performance can't hold a candle.
The song that leaves the threatening final impression, "Drugs," also disturbs more than any other track from Fear of Music, including "Memories Can't Wait." This closing song -- oppressively bare and claustrophobic, sounding unlike any other pop song of its time but still very clearly the work of Brian Eno -- leaves us hopeless. Byrne has searched in every dark corner of the world and has found solace nowhere; the only thing that's apparent to him is insanity, and it's starting to be the only thing that makes any sense. After World War I, the reaction to nonsense was to conquer it with nonsense. When we hear this man railing about the reasons he hates everything he sees, we know we are witnessing something facetious and silly, but we are also witnessing a shred of something real and thought-provoking. Byrne himself claimed decades later that these early lyrics are the window into not so much a disturbed soul as a truly confused and desperate mind. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Fear of Music is how beautifully it fits in with the following album, Remain in Light, which finds the resolution and a bleak dead end. (Speaking in Tongues escapes through the roof.)
He had the answer at the beginning: "Drugs won't change you... religion won't change you." Moreover, Hugo Ball had the answer in "I Zimbra." This opening song was recorded after everything else, and it shows, its surrealism happy and reeling, the leaping arrangement and bizarre vocal treatment capitalizing on an Afrocentric tendency that would pay off on Remain in Light. Eno's importance to the record and to all three of his albums with the Heads can't really be overstated; the recordings fit in as much with his career as with theirs, and no two ways about it: he is their perfect match. He has their sense of adventure, their ambition, their delicacy, and their restraint. He was not tilting the band so much in a specific direction as guiding them along their way. Fear of Music is a wonderful experience because, in every nuance from Harrison, Weymouth, Frantz, and Byrne, plus Eno, we can sense the often bleak but always lively power of each moment, and we can observe the emergence of a musical wisdom that would produce a landmark in pop culture, Remain in Light. On its own terms, Fear is a story that may leave a person drained -- it's not the undeniable masterpiece the other two Eno records are --, but if you can appreciate its nervous humor and the buried fun of it all, it's a trip worth taking constantly.
[Written and originally posted on my old webpage in 2004, when I was 19. Thus: please forgive any sloppiness.]
[SEE ALSO:]
Sand in the Vaseline: Popular Favorites (1975-92)
Bonus Rarities and Outtakes (1975-92)
Talking Heads: 77 (1977)
More Sons About Buildings and Food (1978)