With Talking Heads and David Byrne

With Talking Heads and David Byrne

Of greatest consequence, however, was Eno’s work with art-rock band Talking Heads, for whom he produced three albums between 1978 and 1980, and with the head Head, David Byrne, with whom he made My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, released in 1981. Talking Heads were a band with the right idea in the right place at the right time. The concept was to use a primitivist rock attack with a heavy African accent as a vehicle for a statement about rock and its relationship to the media and other social institutions. The context was the burgeoning performance art and mixed-media scene of downtown New York in the late 1970s, a scene that John Rockwell has described as “a cohesive artistic community” – a community that had sustained the experimental efforts of musicians like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Glenn Branca, as well as artists simultaneously involved in a number of fields, such as Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson.³⁹⁶ The scene fostered an exuberant disregard for traditional distinctions between artistic categories, not to mention the distinction between “high” and “low” art, or classical and popular music. Eno was in his element.

What attracted Eno to Talking Heads was the experimental attitude he had discerned on their first album:

I found it very, very attractive material, full of potential, and certainly manifesting an intelligence that stood behind the music. And it struck me that the music was all the product of some very active brains that were constructing music in a kind of conceptual way.³⁹⁷

Eno and the Heads worked together on three albums. More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) and Fear Of Music (1979) were co-produced by Eno and Talking Heads. Remain In Light (1980) was produced by Eno, and he is also credited with various vocal and instrumental duties as well as with sharing in the songwriting itself. By this time, he had become in effect a ghost member of the band, somewhat in the manner of the Beatles’ producer George Martin in the late 1960s. Under Eno’s guiding hand, the Talking Heads sound became ever more dependent on electronic processing. Following a working method established in his own progressive rock work and used in his collaboration with Bowie, he kept a few “spare” tracks for himself on the reels of twenty-four-track tape as the band laid down the instrumentals and vocals. On the spare tracks, Eno would feed in this or that instrument and treat it electronically. Playing the whole thing back in various rough mixes would lead to further refinement and manipulation of the sound. On the song “Animals” from Fear of Music, for instance, Eno took the bass drum signal, fed it through a synthesizer, added a repeat echo, and then filtered out the low frequency distortion.³⁹⁸ Rhythmic complications were frequently introduced by sending a snare drum or other instrument keeping a steady pulse through a delay unit set at some fraction or multiple of the basic beat.³⁹⁹ Since 1980 such sophisticated studio drum treatments have become commonplace in pop recordings of many varieties, rap music provides some of the most obvious, audible examples. Now, too, of course, electronic drums have become widespread: manufacturers make special drum-shaped, mounted pads which feed a MIDI signal directly into synthesizers, eliminating the need for an acoustic impulse altogether. But many of the types of sounds for which drummers and producers use these can be found on the Eno/Heads collaborative albums.

Particularly striking aspects of the development of Talking Heads’ musical style during the Eno years were the simplification of harmonic materials and the increasingly pointillistic nature of the rhythms. In many of the songs on Remain In Light, one or two chords provide the harmonic underpinning for an ever-shifting array of percussive and melodic events. In such songs, Eno’s graph-paper approach to composition is clearly in evidence: the pulse and its subdivisions, along with a few repetitive melodic or bass fragments, form a background matrix over which dabs or points of color or light are placed. Although the density of rhythmic events in a song like the Dorian-mode-based “Crosseyed and Painless” is high, and although the texture is highly layered (bass, drums, two electric guitars, and a number of cowbells or similar instruments), each layer sounds clean and distinct in the counterpoint of rhythms. Even though many of Eno’s ambient pieces lack a steady pulse, the coloristic, spatial approach to composition is much the same.

Eno’s increasing involvement with Talking Heads’ music-making process was apparently favored by David Byrne, but it was ultimately resented by other members of the group. Eno later told an interviewer of the frustrations of his position:

I really thought that if, at a certain point, I had had those tracks [from Remain In Light] and had carte blanche to write whatever I wanted, song-wise, over the top ... I think that I could have explored this intricate song form that I was getting into more thoroughly. But I didn’t feel comfortable about usurping the compositional role any more than I had done already.⁴⁰⁰

Eno had more of a “carte blanche” to explore this direction in his collaboration with David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, recorded in 1979 just prior to the sessions for Remain In Light. The title is borrowed from a metaphorical book by Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola about a young man who ventures out beyond the confines and traditions of his native village into the mysterious, unknown bush country. Both Eno and Byrne had, for a number of years, been interested in non-Western musical styles, particularly those of sub-Saharan Africa and of the Arabic cultural sphere, in the Talking Heads/Eno records, such influences function implicitly, but on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts they become explicit. Eno’s ambitions were high: he wanted to make “fourth world music,” which he defined as

music that is done in sympathy with and with consciousness of music of the rest of the world, rather than just with Western music or just with rock music. It’s almost collage music, like grafting a piece of one culture onto a piece of another onto a piece of another and trying to make them work as a coherent musical idea, and also trying to make something you can dance to.⁴⁰¹

Over rhythmic and harmonic backing tracks played by Eno, Byrne, and eleven other musicians, Eno and Byrne superimposed taped voices from a variety of sources, for example: on “America is Waiting,” an “unidentified indignant radio host, San Francisco, April, 1980”, on “Mea Culpa,” the voice of Dunya Yusin, a Lebanese mountain singer from a recording called The Human Voice in the World of Islam;⁴⁰² on “Help Me Somebody,” fragments of a sermon broadcast by the Reverend Paul Morton in New Orleans in June, 1980, and on “Moonlight in Glory,” the voice of Egyptian popular singer Samira Tewfik, taken from an EMI recording, Les Plus Grandes Artistes du Monde Arabe.

Some critics found the musical borrowings offensive. Jon Pareles wrote that “like most ‘found’ art, [My Life in the Bush of Ghosts] raises stubborn questions about context, manipulation and cultural imperialism.”⁴⁰³ Although the sources of the voices on the album are duly acknowledged on the sleeve, are there ethical or legal limits to the uses an artist can make of another’s material? The issue is complex, and is bound to be examined more closely as the media net – not to mention the web of ethnomusicological scholarship – extends its domain and efficiency with each passing year. The idea of fair use, which has always been open to various interpretations, is complicated by the undeniable fact that Westerners are possessed of greater means to reach (and exploit) the cultural products of less developed nations than the other way round.⁴⁰⁴ In the middle and late 1980s, the advent of sampling synthesizers, which enable users to take a digital snapshot of a sound from someone else’s music and then incorporate that sound into their own, has only made the debate over fair use more heated than ever.

What, if anything, distinguishes My Life In The Bush of Ghosts in the long history of Western art concerned with other arts and cultures – from the grafting of folk melodies into nationalist symphonies, the exoticism of Matisse’s paintings of harems or the transfigurative realism of Picasso’s cubist collages, the pentatonic orientalism of Debussy’s “Pagodes,” the antiquarianism of Bach’s stile antico ricercars, the classicization of jazz in Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto,” Mozart’s “Turkish” music, or the Beatles’ popularization of the sitar in “Within You Without You”? The main difference lies in Ghosts’s location in a cultural context much broader than most previous artists were capable of envisioning. The context grows ever larger owing to the increasingly accelerated nature of communication and cultural interchange in the contemporary world. In the 1950s, an Elvis Presley could listen to country music and R&B on the radio and make a kind of music that owed something to both in a straightforward sort of way. In the 1980s, American and British pop and rock, having thoroughly assimilated African influences, is broadcast and sent on vinyl and cassette to locations world-wide, including Africa, where it is re-processed into styles like highlife and Juju, which in turn quickly have an impact on the development of Western pop. At some point this process becomes a closed circuit, a perpetual feedback loop, a two-way or multi-way cultural mirror. The possibilities that remain to be seen in and through such mirrors are endless. Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in its playful celebration of technology, world singing styles, and folk religion, is such a mirror.