FEATURE:
Heaven
Talking Heads’ Fear of Music at Forty-Five
_________
MAYBE the finest album…
PHOTO CREDIT: United Archives/Getty Images
from Talking Heads, Fear of Music turns forty-five on 3rd August. Recorded at locations in New York City during April and May 1979, it was produced by Brian Eno and Talking Heads. If someone asked me where to start with Talking Heads, I would recommend Fear of Music. Alongside well-known songs like Life During Wartime, I Zimbra, and Cities, there are great under-heard songs like Air, Heaven and Drugs. There is competition when it comes to the ultimate Talking Heads album, Maybe their debut, Talking Heads: 77, 1980’s Remain in Light or 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. I think that Remain in Light is their peak, though it is great to have conversation and discussion about this. As it turns forty-five very soon, I wanted to bring in a few articles about this incredible release. Prior to getting to some reviews, a couple of interesting features give us an insight into a masterful work from a legendary band. In 2019, Albumism dived into and explored Fear of Music:
“Made up of David Byrne (lead vocals, guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums), and Jerry Harrison (keyboards and guitar), Talking Heads were a tried and true New York art-rock band. Spawned when three of its members met while attending the Rhode Island School of Design, the group made its bones playing in the punk and rock clubs of Manhattan during the mid to late ’70s.
The band had released the critically acclaimed Talking Heads: 77 (1977) and More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) before beginning to draw some nationwide attention. After performing a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” on American Bandstand, people really started to take notice. And so the group reacted in the most peculiar way possible, recording and releasing Fear of Music, their third album, 40 years ago.
Fear of Music is an enigmatic album. The lyrics can seem to defy interpretation. Sometimes they are bellowed in thick, affected accents. Occasionally they are literally gibberish. Reading through the lyrics to some of the songs, it’s never quite clear whether or not Byrne is fucking with us. Like, did he really record a serious-minded song warning about the effects of air on human life? And not pollution, but, like, actual air?
Musically, Fear of Music is alternately busy, harsh, chaotic, mechanical, and occasionally stripped down. Both Byrne and famed producer Brian Eno, who had begun working with the group during the recording of their second album, utilized a whole host of studio wizardry to transform the group’s art-rock stylings into something almost unrecognizable
Fear of Music is a tough nut to crack, and much more talented writers than myself have spent thousands of words trying to decipher it. In 2012, famed author Jonathan Lethem wrote an entry in the 33 1/3 book series about the album. Unlike other entries in the 33 1/3 series, there were no interviews with the members of the band or others involved in the recording process or “making of” anecdotes from inside the recording studio. Instead, the book documents Lethem’s obsession with the group and Fear of Music as a whole, attempting to analyze the album and discuss its significance to Talking Heads’ legacy, as well as his deep and personal relationship to the long player, as it was integral to his musical development. Lethem later admitted in interviews that the album was “a really slippery subject” and just as inscrutable to him when the book was written as when it was originally released.
While I certainly love Fear of Music, I don’t share the same four-decade attachment to it. It came out when I was four years old, and I discovered it about 20 years ago when I began to really delve into the band’s discography. I appreciate it for being not only one of the group’s strangest albums, but also one that served as the bridge between their punk and avant-garde days into their attempts to expand their musical influences.
One such example of the group branching out musically is the album-opening “I Zimbra,” an amalgam of afro-beat and disco. It’s Fela Kuti as filtered through CBGBs filtered through NYU. Or in the reverse order. In a move that represents both the Talking Heads of this period and Fear of Music overall, Byrne, Eno, and the band chant phrases from “Gadji beri bimba,” a poem by Dadaist Hugo Ball.
It terms of subject matter and themes, when they can be discerned, Talking Heads seem to be concerned with exploring different facets of city life and the fear present in these environs. Byrne sings about the overt and beneath-the-surface difficulties that denizens of urban centers face, from existential dread to seemingly mundane minutiae. Many of the song titles seem purposefully bland, (“Paper,” “Heaven,” “Air,” “Electric Guitar,” etc.), allowing Byrne to deal with the topics in either a straightforward or, more often, abstract manner.
“Mind” is one of the album’s early highlights, a rock jam where Byrne vents his frustration with someone who appears completely resistant to change. It features the best guitar work on the album, especially the itchy, echoing main riff. “Cities” plows headlong at a madcap pace, guitars and keyboard charging with reckless abandon. The lyrics seem like a stream of thought on Byrne’s part, vacillating between prosaic and ridiculous. But even as he contemplates the benefits and costs of living in the city, lyrics like, “But it all works out, sometimes I'm a little freaked out” reflects the feelings of uneasiness that many can feel living in the city.
“Life During Wartime” is one of the best-known entries on Fear of Music. One of the group’s concert performance staples, the version that appears on the Stop Making Sense (1985) live album is already one of their most acclaimed recordings. The original version doesn’t have the same intensely frenetic energy, but it’s still an arresting piece of songwriting.
The song is a first person account of the rigorous life of a Weatherman-inspired revolutionary, attempting to scrape by on an austere existence in the heart of NYC. Subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and living without any of the basic luxuries (no headphones or record players allowed), he coordinates with his comrades as they attempt to blend in with the city’s population, while planning and instigating civil insurrection. Lyrics like ”I got three passports, a couple of visas, you don't even know my real name” and “I changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don't know what I look like” are integral in making it seem real and immediate.
“Animals” is another of the aforementioned “This is a joke, right?” songs on Fear of Music. The song is outright belligerent, with Byrne railing against the untrustworthiness of… animals? “I know the animals are laughing at us / Don't even know what a joke is / I won't follow animals' advice / I don't care if they're laughing at us,” he barks over a driving guitar riff. I’m sure there’s some subtext that I’m missing here, but in the meantime, I can’t make heads or tails of it.
IN THIS PHOTO: David Byrne/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Walter/WireImage
But overall, Fear of Music is at its best when Talking Heads get overtly weird. The creepiness of “Memories Can’t Wait” lends to its awesomeness. Byrne’s vocals are heavily laden with effects as he sings over a menacing guitar riff, as he explores the thought process of someone trapped by his own memories, unable to rest, due to his owns regrets on how he’s lived his life.
“Drugs” is Fear of Music’s true masterpiece in experimental rock and ambient music, with Byrne and Eno taking the song “Electricity,” a staple of their live performances, and turning it into something that’s both minimalist and complex. The story goes that Byrne and Eno worked separately, cobbling together disparate pieces into a darkly psychedelic piece that sonically approximates the feeling of taking drugs. Chimes appear frequently, with other odd elements being incorporated into the piece, such as frogs croaking and disembodied vocals. It’s a fittingly disquieted coda to a truly peculiar piece of work”.
In 2021, Guitar.com saluted the genius of Fear of Music. An absurdist masterstroke, they also spotlighted the “jarring and impulsive role” guitars plays through the album. I have found a new appreciation for Fear of Music after researching it. I hope there is a lot of celebration and new words written about it ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary on 3rd August:
“Never listen to electric guitar” commands a typically unbalanced David Byrne on Fear of Music’s penultimate cut, aptly dubbed Electric Guitar. With any other band, you’d likely expect that a track titled after this most cherished of instruments would foreground it prominently – a flashy lead break here, pummelling chords there. But Talking Heads were not like other bands. And, Fear of Music is quite unlike any other album. In fact, the closest Electric Guitar comes to such a moment is probably a skittish, minuscule riff that darts away from the songs’ taut chorus in abject terror. Strident stadium rock, this was not.
This is Fear of Music, Talking Heads’ third album, and their second (of three) that they would make in collaboration with Brian Eno. Across its eleven tracks, the interplay of the band’s instruments with each other and Eno’s synthetic froth is explored, leading to some of the band’s most arresting songs, wherein the conventional mechanics of a post-punk band are upturned, dissected and re-organised. The wonderful results encompass a spectrum of often warring tones, textures and moods.Ghosts in a lot of houses
Though Fear of Music would be the second part of a trilogy of Eno-collaborations (culminating in the venerated polyrhythms of Remain in Light), this wasn’t at all the initial plan. Though sessions for the new record initially took cues from the Eno’s often chopped-up working methods, the man himself would only be called back into service after a creative roadblock was hit.
Putting aside some early ideas to pursue a more disco-oriented direction, Talking Heads decided to get back to basics, setting up live in Frantz and Weymouth’s loft – their former practice space. “We came into our loft, we set our instruments up. We then did something we’d never done before, we brainstormed, or we jammed.” Weymouth told The South Bank Show in 1979, when explaining the Fear of Music writing process. “Half the time it was awful, But then all these little interesting things would happen and that would get recorded on tape, and David would take it home. He’d pick out the parts that went along with his lyrical ideas.”
But, without the guiding hand of Eno, the group faltered. A quick phone call later, and the synth sage delightedly returned to co-produce the record. Before long, the sketchy, half-formed ideas began to find their footing, as Eno encouraged even more loose-form songwriting. Guitarists Jerry Harrison and David Byrne worked tightly together, making sure their respective melodic and riff figures combined, or – more interestingly – didn’t.
Byrne recalled in his superb book, How Music Works, that, from the outset of their working relationship, Eno had suggested the band play totally live in the studio, “Without all of the typical sonic isolation. His semi-blasphemous idea seemed worth a try, despite the risk of it resulting in a muddy recording. Removing all that isolating stuff was like being able to breathe again. The result sounded – surprise! – more like us.” Further impediments to band harmony were removed further as the new album got underway, and studio recording equipment was largely kept outside within a pair of mobile recording studio vans. These vans were unobtrusively parked outside and wires were carefully threaded through the building and windows so they could capture the sound from the loft.
Putting aside some early ideas to pursue a more disco-oriented direction, Talking Heads decided to get back to basics, setting up live in Frantz and Weymouth’s loft – their former practice space. “We came into our loft, we set our instruments up. We then did something we’d never done before, we brainstormed, or we jammed.” Weymouth told The South Bank Show in 1979, when explaining the Fear of Music writing process. “Half the time it was awful, But then all these little interesting things would happen and that would get recorded on tape, and David would take it home. He’d pick out the parts that went along with his lyrical ideas.”
But, without the guiding hand of Eno, the group faltered. A quick phone call later, and the synth sage delightedly returned to co-produce the record. Before long, the sketchy, half-formed ideas began to find their footing, as Eno encouraged even more loose-form songwriting. Guitarists Jerry Harrison and David Byrne worked tightly together, making sure their respective melodic and riff figures combined, or – more interestingly – didn’t.
Byrne recalled in his superb book, How Music Works, that, from the outset of their working relationship, Eno had suggested the band play totally live in the studio, “Without all of the typical sonic isolation. His semi-blasphemous idea seemed worth a try, despite the risk of it resulting in a muddy recording. Removing all that isolating stuff was like being able to breathe again. The result sounded – surprise! – more like us.” Further impediments to band harmony were removed further as the new album got underway, and studio recording equipment was largely kept outside within a pair of mobile recording studio vans. These vans were unobtrusively parked outside and wires were carefully threaded through the building and windows so they could capture the sound from the loft.
That ain’t allowed
Byrne was growing into a masterful rhythm guitar player by this point, as evidenced by the flurried chords underpinning the verse of Air, the tense muted chug of Animals and the almost Chic-like slick funk that circles the congas of I Zimbra. Meanwhile, Harrison was keen to accentuate the guitar landscape with laddering riffs and subtle arpeggiations. The eastern sounding riff which surges with an electricity between the lurching F and G chords that open Paper is a notable example of the pair’s approaches working harmoniously in tandem. Byrne’s funk guitar playing would only strengthen as the years passed, leading engineer Eric Thorngreen to eventually describe him as “One of the best rhythm guitar players who ever lived.” (Sound on Sound).
Though exact details around the precise gear that was used on the album is hard to verify, tone was most likely provided by a pair
Byrne was growing into a masterful rhythm guitar player by this point, as evidenced by the flurried chords underpinning the verse of Air, the tense muted chug of Animals and the almost Chic-like slick funk that circles the congas of I Zimbra. Meanwhile, Harrison was keen to accentuate the guitar landscape with laddering riffs and subtle arpeggiations. The eastern sounding riff which surges with an electricity between the lurching F and G chords that open Paper is a notable example of the pair’s approaches working harmoniously in tandem. Byrne’s funk guitar playing would only strengthen as the years passed, leading engineer Eric Thorngreen to eventually describe him as “One of the best rhythm guitar players who ever lived.” (Sound on Sound).
Though exact details around the precise gear that was used on the album is hard to verify, tone was most likely provided by a pair of Fender Twin Reverb amps, and Byrne was rarely seen without one of his two identical ‘63 sunburst Fender Stratocasters at the time. His tight Strat tone is unmistakable on tracks such as the bouncy Life During Wartime – the record’s first single, and perhaps the most ‘conventional’ sounding track on the record. At least from an instrumental point of view. Its bluesy double-stopping riff in A minor, tightrope-walks back and forth across Frantz and Weymouth’s robust groove. On the track, Byrne also paints one of the album’s most visceral lyrical landscapes – lyrically depicting a future wherein a revolutionary character keeps his head down within a violent dystopia.
Memories Can Wait
Upon release, on 3rd August 1979, Fear of Music was immediately recognised as being both a darkly hued, unsettling record as well as something quite special indeed by critics, and a notable evolution of the band’s musical universe. Despite critical adulation, this “brilliantly disorienting” (Rolling Stone) album failed to break significant commercial ground on either side of the Atlantic, though time has rightly shone more light on the album’s importance not just in the unfolding narrative of its creators, but to the broader progress of pop as the 1970s reached a downbeat climax.
Though the band’s third collaboration, Remain In Light is often held as the band’s singular greatest recorded achievement, it’s here amid the tense, paranoid musical landscapes of Fear of Music where the most balanced combination of the ‘Heads’ propulsive, wiry energy and Eno’s near-academic, investigative creative ethos is heard. As Simon Reynolds perfectly summed up in Rip it Up and Start Again, “Fear of Music represented the Eno/Talking Heads collaboration at its most mutually fruitful and equitable. His role encompassed being a kind of fifth player and an editor who spotted ‘little playing ideas that might have been accidents, or accidents of interaction’ that the band might otherwise have missed.”
On Fear of Music, you can hear a band adjusting themselves from being just four members of an oddball post-punk guitar band, into an expansive and multifarious musical vehicle. Diversifying their instrumental flavours, dabbling with complicated syncopation and taking their sharp instrumental textures in unconventional directions, Fear of Music marked a perfect bridge between what the band were, and what they would become. It remains, even on its own terms, a bewitching listen”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews for Fear of Music. Undeniably one of the best albums of the 1970s, it was the start of a remarkable trilogy of albums from Talking Heads. This is what AllMusic noted about the third studio album from David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz:
“By titling their third album Fear of Music and opening it with the African rhythmic experiment "I Zimbra," complete with nonsense lyrics by poet Hugo Ball, Talking Heads make the record seem more of a departure than it is. Though Fear of Music is musically distinct from its predecessors, it's mostly because of the use of minor keys that give the music a more ominous sound. Previously, David Byrne's offbeat observations had been set off by an overtly humorous tone; on Fear of Music, he is still odd, but no longer so funny. At the same time, however, the music has become even more compelling. Worked up from jams (though Byrne received sole songwriter's credit), the music is becoming denser and more driving, notably on the album's standout track, "Life During Wartime," with lyrics that match the music's power. "This ain't no party," declares Byrne, "this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." The other key song, "Heaven," extends the dismissal Byrne had expressed for the U.S. in "The Big Country" to paradise itself: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." It's also the album's most melodic song. Those are the highlights. What keeps Fear of Music from being as impressive an album as Talking Heads' first two is that much of it seems to repeat those earlier efforts, while the few newer elements seem so risky and exciting. It's an uneven, transitional album, though its better songs are as good as any Talking Heads ever did”.
I am going to end up with a review from Pitchfork. Discussing the album in 2020, they wrote how Fear of Music took Talking Heads from New York Art Punks to a spectacular Pop Group. For anyone who has never heard Fear of Music, I would advise that you seek it out. It is a phenomenal listening experience that demands repeated spins:
“Fear of Music can be read, in part, as an attempt to throw buckets of conceptual cold water on everything that had made the Talking Heads beloved, or to at least submit it to rigorous forensic testing. They experimented with their songwriting process; instead of working from Byrne’s compositions, they entered the studio cold, jamming together until the shape of something promising emerged. As they did on More Songs About Buildings and Food, they enlisted Brian Eno as producer, but this time Eno played a much bigger role: It was Eno who suggested a Table of Contents approach to the tracklist, which turned the song titles into a litany of proper nouns, and it was he who furnished the Hugo Ball poem for inspiration when Byrne was struggling with writer’s block.
As a band of former design students, the Talking Heads thought harder than most about presentation, about the telling power of surfaces. On Fear of Music, they repeatedly drew attention away from the picture to gesture at the frame: The radio announcement for the album was a simple, stilted intonation—“Talking Heads have a new album/It’s called Fear of Music”—repeated over and over. The album cover was a black obelisk, alternately bumpy and smooth but admitting no light and emitting no clues. There was a song called “Electric Guitar,” and the refrain, as the electric guitars gnashed their teeth in every available space, was “Never listen to electric guitar.” The bittersweet futility of this command neatly encapsulated a band that was a tangle of conflicting impulses in 1979. They shunned every method that had worked for them before, attempting perhaps to become a different version of themselves, and yet they only purified their essence. In jettisoning old methods and throwing themselves into new ones, they embraced the only true underlying force of their music: relentless interrogation.
The album plays out like a series of mini-stand up routines about the absurdity, or the pointlessness, of human observation. Each song contains at least one declaration of seeming authority (“Hold on, because it’s been taken care of”; “Find myself a city to live in”), which Byrne goes on to repeat with increasing mania and decreasing confidence. As the music subdivides itself into a million tiny repeating phrases, you feel a grasping mind trying and failing to find purchase.
“Everything seems to be up in the air at this time," Byrne observed mildly on “Mind,” with deadpan irony. On Fear of Music, he became our metaphysical straight man, able to defamiliarize the world, object by object, with his through-a-telescope gaze and his curious tone. He describes his “Mind” like some peculiar object that has crash-landed in his living room. “Drugs won’t change you/Religion won’t change you/What’s the matter with you?/I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Byrne mutters. Imagine a multi-tentacled alien attempting to put on a pair of pants; this was Byrne trying to make sense of reality.
The scratching sound on “Cities” mimic pencils blackening every inch of a paper’s free space, and the keyboards, the vocals, strike with the force of a typewriter hammer smacking paper. This was writing and thinking as a percussive act, each note a small panicked violence on reality, the force and insistence belying the foreknowledge that all this would disappear eventually. Cities would fall to war, the good times would end, were always ending—if Byrne wasn’t going to break his bug-eyed poker face to spell all this out to you, Jerry Harrison’s guitars and keyboards were going to scream it. The guitar that intrudes at the end of “Mind” is like a pained groan, begging Byrne to shut up. The ratcheting sound ringing throughout “Cities” sounds like a scythe trying to sever the talking head from its body, once and for all.
At the center of Fear of Music is “Life During Wartime,” inarguably one of their five most iconic songs. The lyrics ratchet paranoia all the way to the top: We open with a van loaded with weapons, rumored but not seen, and a gravesite “where nobody knows.” A triumph consists of finding some peanut butter to last you “a couple of days.” Everything else—records to play, letters to write, identity crises to have (“I’ve changed my hairstyle so many times now…”) is just quaint, a reminder of better times when we were allowed to be miserable for our own little reasons. Significantly, it’s the calmest that Byrne had ever sounded on record to that point—all the quavers in that reedy voice were suddenly smoothed out. The panic is always in the anticipation; when the disaster hits, we’re oddly calm. “The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.” I’m getting used to it now—is there any proclamation of success bleaker?
The song, and Byrne’s vocal performance, offered a premonition of the shellacked hair and hard angles of his big-suit, early-’80s Stop Making Sense era, which would begin in earnest with 1980’s masterpiece Remain in Light. There was an incipient pitilessness to the American air; the country had just elected Reagan. New York City was a pyre of burning tenements and a city teetering on the brink of financial ruin. When chaos descends, talk is the first thing deemed cheap. So Byrne burned his notebooks, as the lyrics went, and all that was left was the burning in his chest that kept him alive. Civilization is a privilege; anxiety is a privilege; worrying about paper and minds and dogs and drugs are privileges, and they might constitute the best and sweetest moments of your life. That’s the joke, that’s both the setup and the punchline: You think you’re miserable now? This misery is the good part.
And that would be the epigraph of Fear of Music if it weren’t for “Heaven.” It’s a song that Byrne almost didn’t write, based on a melody he nearly threw away. Eno heard Byrne humming it to himself and drew the song out of him, like a forced confession. The band in heaven plays your favorite song, plays it all night long. It’s a place where nothing ever happens; everyone leaves the party at the same time, and every kiss begins again exactly the same. The song is a prayer for order, a cessation of observation. When the act of observation, which grants us our humanity and fuels our neurosis, falls away—what’s left? Pure experience, untouched by anything else. “There’s a party in my mind, and I hope it never stops,” Byrne says on “Memories Can’t Wait.” Maybe the best moment happens when everyone leaves”.
On 3rd August, we mark forty-five years of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music. It is not only one of the best albums Talking Heads released. It is among the greatest albums ever released. To be fair, Talking Heads released five incredible albums in a row. Their debut, Talking Heads: 77, into More Songs About Buildings and Food. Fear of Music was an evolution and new step up that kept this golden streak going. With Brian Eno as producer, Remain in Light was another masterpiece. There then came Speaking in Tongues (which the band produced themselves). Although 1985’s Little Creatures was a slight dip in quality, it was still another acclaimed release. To many, Fear of Music remains the pinnacle of Talking Heads’ creative output. There is stiff competition. However you feel, one cannot deny the fact Fear of Music deserves new respect and investigation ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary. All these years later, it remains…
A true masterpiece.