Talking Heads' Fear of Music

Talking Heads' Fear of Music

Title: Talking Heads' Fear of Music
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Release: 2025-05-13
Kind: audiobook
Genre: Nonfiction
Preview Intro
1
Talking Heads' Fear of Music Jonathan Lethem
It's the summer of 1979. A 15-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.

More from Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
John Joseph Adams, Stephen King, Paolo Bacigalupi, M. Rickert, Jonathan Lethem, Tobias S. Buckell, George R. R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, Jack McDevitt, Cory Doctorow, James Van Pelt, Richard Kadrey, Catherine Wells, Jerry Oltion, Gene Wolfe, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Octavia E. Butler, Carol Emshwiller, Neal Barrett Jr., Dale Bailey, David Grigg, John Langan, Claire Bloom & Susan Hanfield
Jonathan Lethem, Hary Mathews, Julia Slavin, Miranda July, Philip Roth, Saki & Thomas Meehan
Russell H. Greenan & Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem