Robot A. Hull, Creem, 11/79

When Paranoia Strikes Deep (Fear of Music)

"Seems I was holding a wrench, momma
And then my mind just walked away."
--Jack Kittel, "Psycho"

Jack Kittel's '74 country horror classic is a frightening
account of a psychopathic killer told through the deranged
mind of the looney himself as he murders his ex-wife and
her lover, a boy's puppy, a neighbor's little girl, and
finally his own mother--a bloodbath song that would even
scare the madness out of Chainsaw's Leatherface.

On their debut album in 1977, Talking Heads attempted a
similar song-narrative with "Psycho Killer"--but with a
tongue-in-cheek twist. It's a bright, snappy, almost
happy paean to the American mass murderer, a procession
(Speck, Whitman, DeSalvo, Corll, Manson) that essentially
began when Charles R. Starkweather, age 19, stalked the
Nebraskan landscape, killing ten people in eight days in
1958. When the clapalong "Fa-fa-fa"s jump out of "Psycho
Killer," the humor becomes obvious, the stab of the knife
only a cool jerk, as if the 1910 Fruitgum Company had
decided to celebrate the bombing of Hiroshima!

Of all the rock bands of recent vintage, Talking Heads
takes the most commendable approach. Examples of the band's
astuteness are endless. Their first single, "Love Goes to
a Building On Fire," was plastered with horns. Early on,
the band expressed a deep love for soul, even disco (April
'77 ish of National Screw, the Jackson Five's Get It
Together, Al Green's Living For You), which culminated last
year with their hit, a semi-discoized version of Green's
"Take Me To the River." After performing that song on
Bandstand, with proper modesty, the band briefly described
their music to Dick Clark as "organic"; with equal modesty,
the pic sleeve of "River" was a photo not of a group pose
at one of NYC's finest dungholes, but of Reverend Green's
church and community. To reverse an old critical cliché, I
do not agree with Talking Heads in theory, but their music,
even with all its quirks and squeaks, is just too exciting
to ignore.

Still, "Psycho Killer" remains the group's best structured
song, practically bestaining their initial LP (an album more
traditionally linked with late Sixties art-rock experimentation
than their fans would care to admit). And lead singer Byrne,
whose vocal style can only be described as a cross between
Sparks' choirboy crowing and Woody Woodpecker's chuckle, has
gradually assumed the role of "Psycho Killer"'s narrator
--quietly berserk, just on the verge of cracking and, like
Kittel's country killer, ready to squeeze a pup into a bloody
pulp in an instant.

Fear Of Music, then, is the inevitable consequence of toying
with psychosis. It's a work that is built, and also feeds,
upon the paranoia of Fritz Lang's cinema, the violence of The
Friends of Eddie Coyle and the terrorization of Mission:
Impossible. This album lacks, and constantly avoids, the
patriotism, sense of community and bubblegum-disco-psychedelic
playfulness that made Talking Heads' first two albums such warm,
albeit odd, friends. Like Randy Newman, Byrne has mastered the
ironic backhand (i.e., "The Big Country", "Don't Worry About the
Government"), but on Fear, songs like "Animals" and "Electric
Guitar" are ironically banal. Only on these lines from "Cities,"
almost tossed away into a fadeout, does Byrne show his heretofore
usual whimsicality, that humorous twist--"Did I forget to mention,
forget to mention Memphis/Home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks/
Do I smell? I smell home cooking/It's only the river, it's only
the river."

The beauty of More Songs About Buildings and Food is that one
can never figure out what the songs are exactly about (about
aboutness, perhaps). The disappointment of Fear of Music is
that one can immediately decode its aboutness: inertia, the
no-blink of the no wave, Eno Brain, artsy skool, obtoooose
conceptualism. It isn't the forced, disjointed music on the
album that bothers me (as on "Drugs," where a panting Byrne
sounds like he's jacking off), but the whole frightening
motivation behind it; that, at any moment, the words "helter
skelter" could be carved into one's flesh, the overwhelming
fear of every lurking shadow.

On a rock album, to put it simply, this is no fun. Perhaps a
key to part of the record's difficulties can be heard on
"Heaven," as magical a melody as "Gimme Shelter" (and maybe
the band's greatest moment so far), in which heaven is
celebrated as empty existence, white-on-white, an idle void
while the music (paradoxically?) transports the listener
beyond the stratosphere to "A place where nothing ever
happens." But as any real rock'n'roller knows, heaven is a
place where everything happens--Death Race 2000--with "White
Light/White Heat" blasting full volume, pure ACTION, the kind
that crazy-eyed Byrne perhaps only dreams about.

"Dear mom and dad," Charlie Starkweather once wrote home,
"The headaches are getting stronger."



Contributed by Steve Czapla