Talking Heads' Fear of Music

It?s the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (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.

CONTENIDO:

-Prelude I: Talking Heads have a new album. It's called Fear of Music
-Prelude II: Another intermediary artifact
-I Zimbra
-It's Fear of Music a Talking Heads record?
-Mind
-It's Fear of Music a David Byrne album?
-Paper
-It's Fear of Music a text?
-Cities
-Two cities hiding
-Life during wartime
-It's Fear of Music a New York album?
-Memories can't wait
-So Fear of Music is a concept album. What happens on side two?
-Air
-It's Fear of Music a science fiction record?
-Heaven
-It's Fear of Music an Asperger's record?
-Animals
-It's Fear of Music a paranoid record?
-Electric guitar
-What was the fate of the Fear of Music songs in live performance?
-Drugs
-Breaking up with Fear of Music
-Notes/Thanks