David Byrne + Brian Eno

Producer extraordinaire Brian Eno had hooked up with Talking Heads early in their career, and became their producer of choice after working on their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. Eno and Talking Heads’ vocalist and presumed leader, David Byrne, seemed to hit it off especially well – both being somewhat nerdy intellectual types. Talking Heads' third album, Fear of Music, continued the productive collaboration between the band and Eno, and included one small track that would signal a radical change in the group’s direction and change the course of popular music. That track was I Zimbra, and it sounded out of place on the album. Fear of Music is filled with traditional songs that sound like they were played by a traditional rock band – here’s the rhythm section, here’s the guitars, here’s the verses and chorus, here’s the solo, and so on. Basic Rock Form 101. I Zimbra, on the other hand, sounds positively African, at least to Western ears. The rhythms are much more complicated and, what’s more, everybody seems to be playing them. The drum and bass are playing rhythm parts, sure, but so are the guitars. There doesn’t seem to be any lead in the song. Even the vocals are more of a rhythmic element than a focal point. The whole structure of the song is different, focusing on the way the different parts fit together rather than creating space for alternating solos.

The band was exhilarated by this approach, and adopted it completely for the next album, the sublime, trend-setting Remain in Light. Instead of four musicians, the band swelled to eleven. Songs were built up carefully using overlapping rhythmic elements. Nobody had the lead, nobody played support, all musicians were equal in this new musical paradigm. Most American popular music is based more on competition rather than collaboration. Who can play the loudest solo? Who can grab the most attention? This music was much more democratic than that, and showed a model of a different way that society could be organized. Highly intellectual concepts, to be sure, but they were just what the moment needed. Suddenly everybody was turning to Africa for inspiration. Surely some were doing it to add a taste of the newest flavor to their project, but some, I believe, like Peter Gabriel, like Martha and the Muffins, perhaps even Paul Simon (although I’m somewhat skeptical of his motives), were doing it to really try out a new social order. It sounds revolutionary, and it is. Unfortunately, music in this culture is seen as a detachable part of society, something different and separate from the daily concerns of life. Nobody’s going to listen to this music, hear that it’s structured in a much more democratic way, and decide to change their life and the life of those around them based on this new appealing structure. Still, it was the idealism of this music that was exhilarating at the time – every generation thinks they can save the world with their music, and for me and my generation, the great polyrhythmic experimentation of the early '80s was our bid for making the world a better place.

After the balloon pops and the dust clears, each generation fails to change the world with their music, but they’re all able to add something positive to the culture, and today’s blossoming of interest in the music of other cultures and in the kind of cross-pollination experiments that are going on between radically different musical idioms can, I believe, be traced back to the early 80s and Brian Eno’s work with Talking Heads.

Not that there weren’t some problems. Ironically enough, it’s just at the point where Talking Heads became more socially idealistic that the band started pulling apart. The traditional rhythm section, bassist Tina Weymouth and her husband, drummer Chris Frantz, resented the way Eno and Byrne used the band as they’re own private musical laboratory and, especially, how reluctant producer Eno was to putting anything in that he felt was too poppy. God forbid we should be popular, thought Chris and Tina, and they splintered off to form Tom Tom Club, a band based on a lot of the same communal principles that Talking Heads was dealing with, but with a decidedly less intellectual, more populist agenda.

Eno and Byrne also took their ideas and a few trusted musicians and a lot of unusual source material into the studio and created My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Which was recorded before Remain in Light, but released later. All of the songs were built up by weaving together complicated layers of rhythmic elements and unusual sonic treatments. To give the songs a voice, they pieced together bits of old radio broadcasts and tapes of Algerians singing the Qu’ran and exorcisms and sermons and played them against their dense rhythmic jams. The result is like listening to the world crossbreed through a faulty short-wave radio. The music is dense and foreboding and contemplative and jarring and exhilarating and frightening all at once. It sounded like the future in 1981 and it still sounds like it today.

Named after a (really, really strange) book by African writer Amos Tutuola, the album itself is a bush of ghosts. Deep, exotic foreboding textures that pull you into the heart of darkness while strange disembodied voices swirl around you. I made the mistake of listening to this album on a Walkman while walking through the woods. In the middle of the night. Stoned. Not the best idea.

I once lent the album to Andrew, a friend who lived on a different hall of my dorm in high school. He came pounding on my door half-an-hour later, pale and shaky. He had gotten to the end of side one, and started getting really creeped out by the last track, The Jezebel Spirit. He looked at the album, and read that the stolen vocal was from an exorcism, and bolted out of his room, begging me not to leave him alone and to come and get my record. An extreme reaction, to be sure, but one that pays tribute to the emotional power of this album.

I would even venture to say that My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a perfect album – there’s not one track that is anything but exemplary. It’s a beautiful, exhilarating, endlessly fascinating album. It’s as big and mysterious and comforting and frightening as the whole wide planet. It is the sound of the distant past merging with the right now, blurring into the eternal future. It’s a fevered dream, a frenzied dance, a familiar face in a foreign place, a dark secret that changes everything. It is a haunted land, a forgotten totem, a sliver of eternity. It is David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and it is quite possibly the finest album ever made.