Talking Head's Fear of Music
$14.95

Talking Head's Fear of Music

Brand: Continuum
Current Stock:
UPC: 9781441121004
Gift Wrapping: Gift Wrapping Available
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Out of stock
  • Series: 33 1/3 (Book 86)
  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Continuum (April 19, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1441121005
  • ISBN-13: 978-1441121004
  • Product Dimensions: 4.8 x 0.4 x 6.7 inches

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.

Review

“By far the biggest name in the 33 1/3 roster of writers, Jonathan Lethem is no music critic, but an award-winning fiction writer ... His take on Talking Heads' 1979 album forgoes fiction for first-person criticism, in which Lethem's teenage self acts as a sympathetic protagonist. Even as he plumbs each song on Fear of Music for meaning and significance, he uses the album as a point against which he can measure his own growth as a listener, becoming older and wiser and hungrier for connection with each year and with each listen.” ―Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork

About the Author

Jonathan Lethem is one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation. His books include Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City. His essays about James Brown and Bob Dylan have appeared in Rolling Stone. He is Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, US.