Aaah, great article on one of my all time favourite albums- time to whack this in the player again:Fear Of MusicTalking Heads' Revolverby Julia Rubiner
Many among Talking Heads' fervent faction of fans and the countless critics who've fallen all over themselves lionizing this band consider Remain In Light, the quartet's fourth album, their masterwork. But, as David Byrne himself asks on that LP's "Once In A Lifetime," "Well, how did I get here?"
How the band got there is at least as interesting as their arrival at that admittedly astonishing artifact. The path to 1980's Remain In Light led through Fear Of Music. If the former is Talking Heads' Sgt. Pepper, the latter is their Revolver. With this LP, it became clear to even the least discerning ear that something was up, and that something wild and fantastic -- only God knew what -- was just around the corner.
After two idiosyncratic but essentially pop albums, Talking Heads descended into a dark and disturbing netherworld that had only been intimated by 1977's Talking Heads: 77 and 1978's More Songs About Buildings And Food. Then again, the oft-cited paranoia that makes Fear Of Music so tense -- a tension that finds release in Remain In Light -- may have been simple prophecy: The Reagan era was dawning.
This album sounded produced, which was an intriguing development after two discs that seemed to be more-or-less live-in-studio recordings. But it was the rhythm, or more precisely, rhythms that appeared to be headed most resolutely in a new direction. In fact, Talking Heads were on their way to becoming a groove machine -- the direction they were headed was toward Africa, by way of Detroit and Memphis.
There are a few obvious factors that identify Fear Of Music as a transitional album, aside from its decade-straddling timing. First of all, Fear Of Music was the second Talking Heads album produced jointly by Talking Heads and Brian Eno, the visionary who would come to be called the fifth Head for his pivotal contributions to their oeuvre. But for Remain In Light, the band surrendered to Eno, who is credited as sole producer. Secondly, Fear's basic tracks were recorded at Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth's loft in Long Island City, New York. Like More Songs, Remain In Light was recorded at Compass Point Studios, in Nassau, Bahamas.
Moreover, most of Talking Heads' material up to this point had been written part and parcel by Byrne -- with the notable exception of standout "Psycho Killer," from 77. Fear Of Music's indelible -- and in some ways era-defining -- "Life During Wartime" is attributed to Byrne/Frantz/Harrison/Weymouth, but with little variation, the album was Byrne's to compose. Each and every song on Remain In Light, however, is an official group creation (frequently with Eno also earning copyright privileges).
For Fear Of Music, David Byrne was the singer and guitarist, Jerry Harrison the keyboardist, Tina Weymouth the bassist, and Chris Frantz the drummer. But with Remain In Light, they started to mix it up: Maybe Chris would play keyboards; perhaps Tina would lend a hand on percussion. And others contributed substantially: For starters, Eno (who'd added "treatments" to Fear Of Music) provided keyboards, bass, percussion and backing vocals; Adrian Belew played guitar; Nona Hendryx came in on vocals; Jon Hassell blew trumpet; Robert Palmer and Jose Rossy brought additional percussion. Live, legendary Parliament/Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell joined the crew, as did bassist Busta Jones.
"I had a special feeling for the enlarged band because I had tracked down most of these great musicians and then hired them," remembers Harrison in his notes to Once In A Lifetime. "I remember leaving Sigma Sound, where we were finishing Remain In Light, and coming back two hours later with everyone hired.... The big band came about because we had played too many interlocking parts on Remain In Light to handle as a four-piece. We decided to try this experiment.... The show was amazing, and we never looked back."
Then there were those two songs, about which Ken Tucker said in Rolling Stone, "On 1979's Fear Of Music, they made a defiant connection with funk and disco in 'I Zimbra' and 'Life During Wartime,' both of which aid in preparing us for Remain In Light's startling avant-primitivism" (Dec. 11, 1980). "Life During Wartime" did boast congas, but lead-off track "I Zimbra" was the real tip-off. Said Jon Pareles of the song in a Nov. 15, 1979, Rolling Stone review, "One by one, the instruments click into place in a rhythm pattern fleshed out by Afro-futurist harmonies and topped by the meaningless chanted syllables of a poem by Twenties Dadaist Hugo Ball. At composition's end, Robert Fripp's guitar phases through the whole pulsing assemblage like the shuttle of a high-speed loom." Byrne's affection for African highlife guitar had been clear from the beginning and is amply evident on Fear Of Music, but on Remain In Light, Talking Heads took us to Timbuktu.
Still, it's the more subtle signifiers of Talking Heads' Fear Of Music transformation, perhaps only grasped in retrospect, that resonate most fully. These are issues of tone, sound, meaning -- and booty.
Fear Of Music, despite several downright gorgeous turns of melody, can be scary. Songs like "Animals," "Drugs," "Air" and especially the majestic/menacing "Memories Can't Wait" engender a profound sense of foreboding. Testified Robert A. Hull in a November 1979 Creem piece, "At any moment, the words 'helter skelter' could be carved into one's flesh."
Many of the production innovations that helped inspire this dread can be attributed to Eno, who by then was becoming key to the band's sonic gestalt. "What makes Eno a great leader is that he's willing to share everything he knows," Weymouth explained to Creem writer Barbara Charone in October 1979, commenting later in the article, "Even though we had confidence in ourselves, Eno knows how to make people do things they would think impossible." (Better yet, in his notes to Once In A Lifetime, Frantz reminisces about "Eno washing the dishes in our loft.")
"[More Songs About Buildings And Food] was ... manic, oddly funky, hard-edged, catchy, " Pareles determined. "On Fear Of Music, Talking Heads take that style and proceed to torture-test it under every distortion they and coproducer Brian Eno can devise.... Fear Of Music is Talking Heads' most elaborate production so far, teeming with overdubs and effects.... Sounds emerge out of nowhere, echoes tangle the beat, instrumental timbres form unholy alloys. [On] 'Memories Can't Wait,' ... Byrne's vocal is echoed, reverbed, tape-reversed and dizzyingly sped up while he sings about an endless 'party in my mind.'" (That's one event only the most intrepid would dare attend.)
Perhaps even more significant, this was the album on which Weymouth and Frantz (married since 1977 -- a fact that is rarely cited as a reason for their taut chemistry but is nonetheless noteworthy) revealed themselves as a force to be reckoned with, indulging in the unmistakably African polyrhythms that would render Remain In Light such a profound departure. Byrne's increasingly syncopated guitar work enhanced this.
According to Rolling Stone's Mikal Gilmore in a Nov. 29, 1979, feature, "The title, Byrne says, refers to a disease called musicogenic-epilepsy, which throws its victims into fits whenever they hear music." Much can be made of that alone. But Lester Bangs, writing in the Village Voice (Aug. 20, 1979), for his part seems to think he's teased out "David Byrne's basic philosophy of existence: To feel anxiety is to be blessed by the full wash of life in its ripest chancre -- everything else is wax museums. Having [on Fear Of Music] rejected drugs [on "Drugs"], animal husbandry ["Animals"], jogging not to mention breathing itself ["Air"], towns, cities, and whole continents ["Cities"] in his search for some little nook where he can relax for even one instant, Byrne finally lays it on the line: 'Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens' ["Heaven"]."
Furthermore, Pareles notes a key change in the singer's thematic orientation: "Byrne has drastically shifted his verbal approach for Fear Of Music. In his lyrics for earlier records, he let himself be self-conscious; he'd observe, analyze and make judgments. His new lyrics virtually eliminate abstraction -- he doesn't consider, he feels. There's very little past and no future, just a jumble of sensations...."
Which brings us to booty, or more precisely, the shaking thereof. Fear Of Music is the record that made people begin to reconsider their conception of Talking Heads as uptight, new wave, art-school nerds and view them rather as bottom-heavy, funkified lords of the dance.
"To a large degree, their success [with Fear Of Music]," Gilmore ventures, "has to do with a point the band put across in last year's hit version of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River': Talking Heads' music is nothing if not danceable.... Maybe we're missing the point, but it's a party if I've ever seen one. Or maybe that is the point: Talking Heads' music evokes paradoxes in the same motion that it deflates them. A song about paranoid delusions ... is probably nothing to celebrate, but a song with a seismic beat is.... It purges anxiety by bringing it to the surface."
This state-of-the-art dance music reached its fruition on Remain In Light and persisted into 1983's Speaking In Tongues and beyond, though in a less explicitly African framework. "On Remain In Light, rhythm takes over," Rolling Stone 'sTucker states plainly. "Each of the eight compositions adheres to a single guitar-drum riff repeated endlessly, creating what funk musicians commonly refer to as a groove."
This is not surprising when one bears in mind Frantz's words to Rolling Stone's Michael Aron (Nov. 17, 1977): "The big difference between us and punk groups is that we like K.C. And The Sunshine Band and Funkadelic/Parliament [sic]." Byrne also lists among the group's shared record collection The O'Jays and J.B.'s, confessing in his notes to Once In A Lifetime, "we had an arty take on dance music -- or disco, as it was called then -- a sense that it was actually just as radical, at least musically and structurally, as the more critically hyped avant rock stuff that we also loved." In 1983 (Aug. 12), a writer for the Toronto Star concluded of Talking Heads' impact: "The new wave suddenly found a way to bridge a gap between its own refinements and the straight, human, danceable beat of black music. The new wave, in fact, came back to earth."
Nevertheless, four years earlier, this did not keep "the engineer [from] quitting after the first few days of recording Remain In Light because he thought we should have been making a great pop album," as Frantz recalls.
Not that Talking Heads had become all about the vamp. Tucker identifies the Heads' peculiar genius in finding "a solution to a problem that was clearly bothering David Byrne on Fear Of Music: how to write rock lyrics that don't yield to easy analysis and yet aren't pretentious. In compositions like 'Born Under Punches' and 'Crosseyed And Painless,' phrases are suggested and measured, repeated and turned inside out, in reaction to the spins and spirals of their organizing riff-melodies. At no time does the music change to accommodate the completion of a conventional pop-song sentiment or clever line."
Says David Fricke in his (typically lucid) notes for Once In A Lifetime, "When Talking Heads dissolved after the 1988 album, Naked, they left behind a body of art. But everything -- songs, performances, the pioneering videos on the 'Storytelling Giant' DVD included here -- started as music for the body."
This brings to mind the sage wisdom of a great pop-cultural critic whose name, alas, has been lost to the sands of time: "Fuck art -- let's dance."
