Talking Heads' Fear of Music (33 1/3 Series)

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 (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.