Talking Heads' Fear of Music (33 13) by Lethem Jonathan

Author:Lethem, Jonathan [Lethem, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Continuum US
Published: 2012-04-25T23:00:00+00:00

So Fear of Music is a Concept Album. What Happens on Side Two?

“I Zimbra” tried an end run. The song outlined a preemptive workaround to the album’s claustrophobic consciousness and the various discontents trapped within. Its readymade claim is that the whole problem, the only problem, is that words fail. Simultaneously, “I Zimbra” presented the freeze-dried, just-add-rhythm solution: freedom from self. The rest of Side One remorselessly, meticulously and exuberantly exposes this too-neat attempt. First, by dragging words into worlds. Yep, they fail all right, but we live inside those crumbling premises. And: we fail too. And more: we’re never less free from ourselves than precisely in the act of failing — at the party, in flight from native habitat, or in vigilant, restless sleep — to free ourselves.

Free no mind and no ass may follow.

After the contradictory twin-thesis meltdown of “Wartime” and “Memories,” the album’s flipside will be thrown into the position of a pendant, a New Testament or Godfather Part II, in relation to the first. The camera dollies out, to gather more territory, natural and supernatural. The woods and sky and what’s above the sky. As if to place the urban disaster zone in some mitigating frame. The lens zooms in to investigate some possibly overlooked avenues of intimate mitigation as well. Contraptions and illegal substances, the toolkit of rebellion, venues of jacked-up DIY transcendence. Side Two benefits from the drama and tension of a sequence of escape bids. And who doesn’t like a prison flick? Will our heroes taste freedom, or end up burrowing into one another’s cells?

These arrows pointing outward: are they for real, or are they from Zeno’s quiver, therefore never to reach their goal? Or perhaps they’re like the Worm Oroborous, destined to bend with the curvature of the universe until they find they’re nibbling their own feathery tails.

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