8. Drugs

Talking Heads: Fear of Music (Sire, 1979);
composed by David Byrne & Brian Eno

My unpopular theory about Talking Heads is that everything they did after the breakdown of their working relationship with Brian Eno in 1981 was just recontextualization and amplification of things that had already happened. David Byrne reportedly tried to leave after Fear of Music, and in a sense, he did leave – Fear is the last album on which the quartet manifested as a coherent self-contained sound concept, although the (great) joke is that they needed Eno to make it work. The difference between the spare audio verisimilitude of the debut and the seductively disorienting reassembly of the same working parts on the follow-up is one proof of concept. Another is how they and Eno turned a jangly nonentity Byrne wrote in 1978, called “Electricity,” into “Drugs,” in 1979. On old bootlegs, “Electricity” is just the first verse with no chord change or actual tension. “Drugs” instead starts with a recording of Australian birds, leading into a murky shuffle that sounds like the Fatback Band played at 16 rpm. Byrne gasps knowingly silly received crap about drug experiences, punctuated by a creeped out electronic refrain and a loud guitar coda far more “intense” than whatever is being described could possibly be.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).