Talking Heads' Fear of Music

(Paperback)

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Description

It's the summer of 1979. A 15-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music" - and everything spins outward from that one moment. Jonathan Lethem treats Fear of Music (the third album by the Talking Heads, and the first produced by Brian Eno) as a masterpiece - edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky and fun. He scratches obsessively at the album's songs, guitars, rhythms, lyrics, packaging, downtown origins, and legacy, showing how Fear of Music hints at the directions (positive and negative) the band would take in the future. Lethem transports us again to the New York City of another time - tackling one of his great adolescent obsessions and illuminating the ways in which we fall in and out of love with works of art.

Reviews

His achievement in Fear of Music is to let his personal passion for the album inform his thoughts on it with a vital urgency, without ever allowing those feelings to run rampant and obscure the work at hand. ...[It is] a powerful piece of scholarship on a band that deserves, and whose work holds up to, close examination of the serious kind Lethem does here. [Lethem] revels in Fear of Music's strain, the way it encompasses punk and disco, aggression and passivity, paranoia and resolve, gleefully dancing its way off the brink. This ain't no party, indeed. * The Atlantic *
A single-minded investigation ... Lethem's book demonstrates what happens when the twin beams of passionate fandom and slicing critical intelligence intersect to illuminate a record you only thought you knew. * The Guardian *
The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can't escape being identified with New York - or, in Lethem's case, Brooklyn - and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. * Salon.com *
Lethem analyzes each of the songs in his book, alternating between close readings of lyrics, song structure, and meditations on the album as a whole. ...His prose is as sharp as ever, and his visual evocations demand accompaniment by the tracks themselves. As he puts it in the epigraph, "turn it up, for f--k's sake." * The Daily Beast *
Lethem looks for the heart of the record from all angles. The Bottom Line is that if you love this record, youll love Lethems book...Lethems Fear of Music is exactly what these books were made for: lyrical geeking-out, unfettered fandom, great writing about great music. -- Roy Christopher
By far the biggest name in the 33 1/3 roster of writers, Jonathan Lethem is no music critic, but an award-winning fiction writer His take on Talking Heads 1979 album forgoes fiction for first-person criticism, in which Lethems teenage self acts as a sympathetic protagonist. Even as he plumbs each song on Fear of Music for meaning and significance, he uses the album as a point against which he can measure his own growth as a listener, becoming older and wiser and hungrier for connection with each year and with each listen. -- Stephen M. Deusner * Pitchfork *

Author Bio

Jonathan Lethem is one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation. His books include Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City. His essays about James Brown and Bob Dylan have appeared in Rolling Stone. He is Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, US.