Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Pop Songs

Pop is the melodic side of rock – the legacy of show tunes and popular songs of the prerock era. Pop’s standards of what makes a well-constructed song still apply to much of rock, which strives for memorable tunes and clear sentiments, the tension between pop virtues (such as sophisticated chord structures and unusual melodic twists), and incantatory, formulaic blues elements animates much of the best rock, like that of the Beatles. “Pop” also connotes accessibility, disposability and other low-culture values, which rockers have accepted or rejected with varying degrees of irony.³²⁷

There is a further stylistic distinction to be made between pop and rock: pop songs tend to be based on more “realistic” instrumental sounds than rock – that is, sounds less manipulated or distorted through electronic processes. In terms of production values, the formula rock=dirty while pop=clean may be oversimplified, but has a certain validity. While absolute volume levels can be determined by the listener on his or her stereo system, pop will sound psychologically softer than rock played at the same level. Rock is aggressive, sometimes even assaultive, in pop, the tendency is toward a more intimate, confidential tone. Obviously the potential for irony is high if what is being confided by the singer is of a non-personal, incomprehensible, ambiguous, or even slightly perverted nature.

Some such irony is usually what Eno was after in the pop songs on his progressive rock albums, an effect evident even in some of the titles which cover music of a deceptively innocuous sort: “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” “Back in Judy’s Jungle,” “Mother Whale Eyeless.” One is reminded once more of Satie, with his penchant for absurd titles.

“Cindy Tells Me” (Warm Jets) by Eno and Manzanera is a Beatlesque example of musical irony. While a poppish backing track replete with falsetto “oohs” and a tinkling piano runs through a clichéd set of chord changes, slightly spiced with a treated electric guitar, the singer tells a sad story of modern times in which affluent housewives cannot cope with “their new freedoms”, although they have supposedly chosen their fate, it turns out that it is just a “burden to be so relied on.” The British pop/rock tradition of lightly lampooning the middle class was well established when Eno wrote this song, going back to songs like the Kinks’ “Well Respected Man,” about a punctual personage whose daily routines never change, and the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper,” in which prescribed drugs help the housewife “minimize her plight.” At three and a half minutes, “Cindy Tells Me” fits neatly into the smallish duration requisite of a pop song, and its form – sung and instrumental verse sections alternating with a bridge – is likewise conventional.

“Put a Straw Under Baby” (Tiger Mountain) is incomprehensible until one realizes that the title refers to the Catholic practice Eno was induced to carry out in his childhood of doing homage to the infant Jesus by placing a piece of straw under an icon. The song is not so much a satire as an attempt to capture the mixed effect such fathomless rituals are likely to have on a child’s consciousness. The kindergarten innocence of the musical setting – highlighted by the organ, which evokes images of church and fairground – is belied by the bizarre content of some of the lyrics, in which the child has woven incomprehensible Christian symbols together with stories he has been told into a surrealistic personal mythological tapestry: “There’s a place in the orchard/Where no one dare go/The last nun who went there/Turned into a crow ... There’s a brain in the table/There’s a heart in the chair/And they all live in Jesus/It’s a family affair.” Eno used the (intentionally out-of-tune) Portsmouth Sinfonia string section and his own slightly cracked falsetto in this song to add to the atmosphere of childhood foreboding.

“St. Elmo’s Fire” (Green World) is the most unblushingly poppish song Eno has ever committed to record – it was doubtless prominent in the minds of those critics who called Another Green World Eno’s most accessible album – and it is a considerable puzzle why he did not release it as a single, as it seems to have most of the ingredients of a popular hit: conventional verse/refrain form, a lively beat, simple major tonality, pleasant and unobjectionable though original instrumentation, a dynamic guitar solo, suave falsetto harmonies on the refrain, and – most importantly – a genuine melodic/lyrical hook in the refrain (the words “In the blue August moon/In the cool August moon”). If the song lacks one crucial element for the hit parade, it is the earthiness and sensuality of explicit romantic interest: “St. Elmo’s Fire” is a love song of a sort, but its imagery is too rarefied for the Top 40, telling of a couple’s metaphorical journey through moors, briars, endless blue meanders, fires, wires, highways and storms (“Then we rested in a desert/Where the bones were white as teeth sir/And we saw St. Elmo’s fire/Splitting ions in the ether”). “St. Elmo’s Fire” is completely non-ironic, a beautiful pop song that accepts and embraces the limitations of the medium.

Only two musicians took part in making the song. Eno plays organ, piano, Yamaha bass pedals, “desert guitars,” and synthetic percussion (including tom-tom-drum-like and wood-block-like effects, whose driving rhythms compensate for the lack of actual drums), while Robert Fripp adds the “Wimshurst guitar” solo whose genesis has been described above (see p. 77). Overall, the texture in “St. Elmo’s Fire” is more dense than usual for Eno, but this is in keeping with the song’s more popular nature. At three minutes, it does not overstay its welcome. The song’s form is easily schematized:

Straightforward as it is harmonically, rhythmically, melodically, and formally, Eno was correct in pointing out that songs like this cannot be reductively analyzed in such terms alone: “You can’t notate the sound of “St. Elmo’s Fire.”³²⁸ (Emphasis mine.)

Perhaps Eno’s most soothing song of the pop variety is “Here He Comes” (Science). An endless stream of tonics, dominants, and subdominants wash across the listener while muted drums, basses, guitars, and synthesizers contribute their pastel tone colors to the mix. Once again, the ambiguity of the lyrics, about “the boy who tried to vanish to the future or past,” who “is no longer here with us with his sad blue eyes,” takes this song out of the realm of unreflected pop, but this type of song does have clear precedents, such as the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man,” written a decade earlier: “Nowhere Man” and “Here He Comes” have the same tempo and harmonic similarities, and share the idea of a wistful masculine anti-hero. While the Lennon tune is based on a descending melodic sequence, however, Eno’s is a prolongation or embellishment of essentially one note. Whether, at five and a half minutes, “Here He Comes” must be judged too long depends on the receptivity of the listener and the mode of listening. In the linear, horizontal mode, little or nothing seems to “happen” for the piece’s duration, but listened to vertically, the song reveals a perpetual play of timbral and motivic elements: strip away the drums, voice, and steady pulse, and we are not far from the ambient style.