A virtuoso performance by a writer at the peak of his powers, tackling one of his great obsessions: Talking Heads.
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.
His achievement in Fear of Music is to let his personal passion for
the album inform his thoughts on it with a vital urgency, without
ever allowing those feelings to run rampant and obscure the work at
hand. ...[It is] a powerful piece of scholarship on a band that
deserves, and whose work holds up to, close examination of the
serious kind Lethem does here. [Lethem] revels in Fear of Music's
strain, the way it encompasses punk and disco, aggression and
passivity, paranoia and resolve, gleefully dancing its way off the
brink. This ain't no party, indeed.
*The Atlantic*
A single-minded investigation ... Lethem's book demonstrates what
happens when the twin beams of passionate fandom and slicing
critical intelligence intersect to illuminate a record you only
thought you knew.
*The Guardian*
The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both
can't escape being identified with New York - or, in Lethem's case,
Brooklyn - and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the
formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms.
*Salon.com*
Lethem analyzes each of the songs in his book, alternating between
close readings of lyrics, song structure, and meditations on the
album as a whole. ...His prose is as sharp as ever, and his visual
evocations demand accompaniment by the tracks themselves. As he
puts it in the epigraph, "turn it up, for f--k's sake."
*The Daily Beast*
Lethem looks for the heart of the record from all angles. The
Bottom Line is that if you love this record, you’ll love Lethem’s
book...Lethem’s Fear of Music is exactly what these books were made
for: lyrical geeking-out, unfettered fandom, great writing about
great music.
*Roy Christopher*
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.
*Pitchfork*
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