I was stoked to see that Wikipedia classifies this album as “psychedelic funk”—only after “new wave, postpunk, and art-rock,” but still. I thought I might be out on a limb stanning one of my all-time favorites since the day it was released, whatever category you want to put it in. But songs like “Mind,” “Memories Can’t Wait,” and of course “Drugs” make the sonic and lyrical case (and the band finishes the thought with supreme funk). What often confuses me about Fear of Music is the unexpected layer of humor wrapped into it. It may be most obvious in the hilariously bizarre “Animals,” which the raging singer cries “are laughing at us” when they “don’t even know what a joke is.” Yes, he’s talking about the extant nonhuman fauna on the planet at large. “They think they know what’s best,” he says. “They’re making a fool of us.” Further sins: “Shit on the ground ... see in the dark.” Other songs continue in similar veins, often named for nouns (“Mind,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Electric Guitar”). We hear that “Air can hurt you too,” that heaven is a place where nothing happens, and that members of a jury at trial have rendered verdict. “Never listen to electric guitar,” they solemnly chant. “Someone controls electric guitar.” David Byrne’s lamentable inclinations to mock people he considers ignorant and/or beneath him can be discerned developing here. His main character, who wavers in some detail from song to song, remains recognizably a type of political crank prone to conspiracy theorizing. No doubt he is as worried about fluoridation as he is about the conspiracy of the air when the weather turns cold. Byrne’s impulse would continue with the album he made with Brian Eno in 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, where a lot of the vocals are screeds tape-recorded from late-night religious stations on the AM band. It would be worse and most fully on display in the 1986 album and related movie True Stories. But these things are still more indeterminate on Fear of Music.
The most famous song from the album is likely “Life During Wartime,” which is more dystopic than psychedelic and seemed uniquely suited to the Cold War moment in the late ‘70s, on the eve of the conservatism that continues to metastasize into fascism, a hit in the UK but not the US. “Cities” is another song that’s not particularly mind-altering by intention, but I hope it remains relevant to people in their 20s and 30s trying to figure out where they want to live. Implicitly it recognizes that a better life can be consciously sought by starting with this vital choice. Preach. Most of the rest of the album is trippy one way or another. “Mind” reminds me a little of P.M. Dawn’s “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” in that the lyrical concerns are more on the order of pedestrian love troubles. “I need something to change your mind,” the singer wails plaintively. Then a walloping “MMMMMIIIIINNND,” reminds us where we got the idea this music is psychedelic. The strange, unlikely views of air, heaven, animals, and the electric guitar infect us with new ways of looking at them. The longest song on the album, at 5:10, is also the last. Called “Drugs” here, and “Electricity” in earlier versions, it presents a guy (likely the same paranoid-delusional we’ve seen in many of these songs) obviously tripping out on hallucinogens. Byrne reportedly got the unusual intensity of his vocal in this song by going outside and running around the block a few times at top speed, and then recording while he was still out of breath. The effect is stunningly accurate, full of the strange sights and sounds and feelings, the coincidences and the social anxieties, of the hallucinogenic at full effect. “I'm charged up ... I'm kinda wooden / I'm barely moving ... I study motion.” You know it when you hear it. Play loud.
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