In Jonathan Lethem’s new book, “Fear of Music,” a study of the Talking Heads album by the same name and a riff on his emotional history with the band, Lethem refers to an earlier essay of his on the subject: “At the peak, in 1980 or 81, 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.” But no sooner has he quoted himself than Lethem applies the eraser of time, deciding “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.”
Lethem likes this Romantic arc—dreadful longing, the regretful revision that follows—and in Talking Heads he has the perfect subject and mirror. In the late nineteen-seventies, in primordial downtown Manhattan, the band sonified not just longing and regret (most great musicians do that), but also dread (some do that), and then—this is what made them really special—mingled the feelings in single songs, sounds, and even couplets, while never letting listeners forget they knew what they were doing.
Take the opening of “Life During Wartime,” an apocalyptic swamp-funk transmission in four-four time. In the first line, the front man David Byrne molds his plastic tenor into a paranoiac-newscaster voice to announce, “Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons”; then, in the second, he steadies it as though to disown his excitement, and, like some repentant father pointing at the family station wagon, avers, “Packed up and ready to go.” (Note, too, that reluctant collusion between the “o”s in “loaded” and “go,” which Byrne emphasizes—a dissociative gulch somewhere between assonance and rhyme.)
For Lethem, “Life During Wartime” is the band’s pinnacle, and the song is still a hell of a thing to hear. (A point about Talking Heads not often enough made: they cooked. Byrne was the funkiest white man in pop until Flea showed up.) But most of the iTunes generation has never heard it. “Fear of Music” appeared in 1979. Indeed, while Talking Heads can be detected in so much music today, from Radiohead to Vampire Weekend, years-old dust covers most of their catalogue. (...)
Between 1977 and 1983, Talking Heads posted one of the great learning curves in rock history, releasing five albums, each an elaboration on the one before it. Byrne and two Rhode Island School of Design classmates, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, had formed The Artistics with the idea of combining conceptual and performance art with popular music (their sound earned them the nickname The Autistics). Redubbed Talking Heads, they played alongside riotous groups like The Ramones in refuges from disco, like CBGBs and the Mudd Club. They were a different organism, however, incorporating elements of Motown, punk, African music, funk, and minimalism, all while gigging in collared shirts and corduroys.
Similarly, Byrne’s lyrics were a blank-verse switchboard, patching through Dada language experiments, imagist poetry, scientific literature. (To the disappointment of his engineer father, Byrne had chosen art school over Carnegie Mellon, because, he explained, the former had better graffiti in the halls.) One critic characterized his singing style as “passing on information.”
There was that current of fear in the early songs—of music, technology, animals, the air—the stuff of an Asperger diagnosis, at least. Byrne, who moved around the stage like a hasty votive offering, was a one-man rebuke not just to the Gibb brothers but also to E. M. Forster’s advice to “only connect.” (“Okay, how?” Byrne seemed to reply. “And with whom, exactly? You?”) But there was a merging current, one of childlike bafflement and delight in the world of objects and people. The band played the cosseted prodigy set loose in a decaying America. The precursor to “Fear of Music” is entitled “More Songs About Buildings And Food.”
Lester Bangs, theorizing about the band in The Village Voice in 1979, wrote “Talking Heads are the for(wo)men in charge of that section of the human remodification factory where no one wants to set these mutants careening off nightraze pathogenic highways.” Pleasingly Bangsian, but in hindsight probably wrong. Better, I think, is Lethem’s image of “four musicians using their instruments like an erector set to construct a skyline that won’t fall down before they’re finished.” (The fourth member, Jerry Harrison, dropped out of Harvard’s architecture program to join the band.)
In her memoir, Twyla Tharp, who collaborated with Byrne in 1981 and in the process became romantically involved with him, wrote that he seemed to want “to find the residue of ancient thoughts in the most up-to-date aspects of society.”
by James Verini, The New Yorker | Read more:
