Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Assaultive Rock Songs

The history of rock has seen waves of assaultive sound-types crash against and wear away the shore of the musically acceptable, each wave seemingly more violent, more absolutely noise-like than the last: the electric guitar sonorities of black musicians like Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters in the 1950s, the fuzz-tone menace of mid-1960s songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”, the bass-heavy, cavernous, ear-splitting heavy metal sound pioneered by Led Zeppelin in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the vengefully, violently, deliberately anti-musical cacophany of late-1970s punk.

Eno’s adoption of the assaultive sound-ideal was not an unpremeditated, instinctive act, as it has been for so many rock musicians. Even early in his career he was making music about music: his pieces are part of a process of distancing, they are once removed from the unreflected level of everyday rock realities and myths. He has never espoused violence except at the artistic level, and it is just at this level that the images and textures of his assaultive songs play themselves out.

The lyrics of the assaultive Eno song tend to be macabre and disturbing, evoking a generalized malaise not directed at anything in particular, and thus lacking the confrontational, us-against-them dialectic of much assaultive rock. “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch” (Warm Jets), in Eno’s words, “celebrates the possibility of a love affair” with a man “who emerged from the forests around Paw Paw, Michigan with a strange ailment – his breath caused things to ignite.”³²⁴ “Baby’s On Fire” (Warm Jets) is a bizarre fantasy about a photography session involving a burning infant and unthinking, laughing onlookers – possibly referring to the napalm tragedies of the Vietnam War. “Blank Frank”‘s (Warm Jets) hero, in the words of the song, “is the messenger of your doom and your destruction [like Dylan’s “Wicked Messenger” on John Wesley Harding?] ... His particular skill is leaving bombs in people’s driveways.” Birds of prey, headless chickens, zombies, dead finks, opium farmers, suicidal Chinamen, deadly black waters, fallen meteors, dark alleys, guns, weapons, satellites, black stars, and burning fingers, toes, airlines, uncles, books, and shoes: such evil images restlessly prowl through Eno’s assaultive rock songs, often disconnected from any logical or comprehensible sequence of events, shadowing the barely controlled logic of the musical presentation.

Another assaultive “instrumental with singing on it,” whose lyrics probably can be ignored, or at least left uninterpreted, is “Third Uncle” (Tiger Mountain). Here the words were undoubtedly arrived at through free phonetic and linguistic association, Eno singing nonsense bits along with the instrumental tracks: they consist of litanies of randomly chosen words set to formulas like “There are tins/There was pork/There are legs/There are sharks/There was John/There are cliffs/There was mother/There’s a poker/There was you/Then there was you,” delivered like a spoken magical chant in a tone of voice than takes on menace through its very lack of coloration. “Third Uncle” is an example of Eno restricting himself to minimal harmonic materials (||: I | bVI :||) throughout the five-minute duration in order to bring melodic, textural, and rhythmic elements to the fore. (There is one slight harmonic complication: towards the middle, the bass begins playing the note Ab while the guitars are playing their C major tonic, creating the suggestion of an augmented chord, when the guitars switch to Ab major, the bass moves to C. The whole-tone feel is further heightened by Phil Manzanera’s animated guitar solos, which have a motive that rotates the notes C, E, and F#.) As the song goes on, the interest shifts from the back-and-forth rapid strummings of the two rhythm guitars to the increasingly noise-like careenings of the lead guitar. Although such repetitive songs, in which fixed elements alternate and vie for attention, may be worlds apart from Eno’s later ambient music in terms of sound (being loud and abrasive rather than soft and yeilding), they are not really so very different in concept.

Eno adopted three basic approaches to form in his songs. “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” and “Third Uncle” both utilize theme and variations form, in which an unchanging harmonic progression is repeated with vocal and/or instrumental textural variants. The second approach is that most frequently used in rock and pop: a strophic structure with or without refrain, and with some kind of contrasting instrumental or vocal “bridge” or “B section” placed typically between the second and third verses. The third formal approach is best described as through-composed: formal units, though they may be repeated altered or unaltered, follow one another in a design unique to the given work. (In traditional classical music, pieces that have no standard set form such as sonata, theme and variations, etc., are said to be “through-composed.”)

“King’s Lead Hat” (Science), a song whose title is an anagram of “Talking Heads,” is of the strophic type, built around a pattern of sectionalized verses, with an instrumental middle section:

“King’s Lead Hat” is the last manic screamer that Eno put out on his solo albums, although it is convincing enough as a rock piece, the aesthetic of chaos implicit in the verbal and musical attack was something he saw no point in taking further. How much further, after all, could it be taken? This song, though well crafted in its way – Robert Fripp’s syncopated, pitch-restricted minimalistic guitar solo adds an element of cerebrated discipline to the Dionysian mayhem, while Eno’s synthesizer solo at the end represents the last word in “funny” electronic sounds in an assaultive rock medium – says little that “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” did not say four years earlier with somewhat greater economy. “King’s Lead Hat” is more complicated than the earlier song, both verbally and musically, but complication in this genre is difficult to reconcile with the primal force that gives it life.

Nevertheless, it is true that what I am calling the assaultive rock idiom has a great deal of expressive musical potential that Eno, precisely because of his lack of instrumental expertise, and because of the limits of his knowledge of music theory, was disinclined to explore. Heavy metal groups, with the possible exception of Led Zeppelin, have not fared much better in this regard, though one suspects that in many cases both commercial pressures and lack of imagination have contributed to the musical stagnation of the genre. The pinnacle of intelligence and imagination in the assaultive rock medium remains Robert Fripp and King Crimson’s album Red of 1974: working with a peerless guitar technique, a command of music theory that enabled him to draw freely on whole-tone and other unusual scales (and construct large-scale tonal structures outside the conventional major-minor idiom), and an adventurous rhythmic sense that led him to integrate into his pieces odd meters based on five and seven beats per measure, Fripp extended the medium far beyond what was possible for Eno. Like Eno, however, he abruptly dropped it and went on to a variety of other musical projects in an assortment of styles. For both musicians, it is unlikely that the decision to cut off further experimentation in the genre was a purely musical one: heavy metal in the late 1970s and 1980s became increasingly associated with cynically commercialized satanic symbolism and with with a very young, loud, and primarily male audience, with whom neither Fripp nor Eno were especially keen on cultivating a continuing relationship.