The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Talking Heads · produced by Brian Eno · Sire · about 40 minutes
Mode
Art punk turned to polyrhythmic funk: grooves of interlocking parts, mostly on one chord, with the voice as one part among them
Mythos
Possession and waking: a voice taken over by the groove, Everyman waking inside his own life, a goddess on whose movement the world turns
Phase
Eight tracks; three long grooves on side one build the trance, five shorter tracks on side two take it apart, slowing to a drone
Presentation
Album; eight tracks, about forty minutes, three on the first side and five on the second; the band’s fourth album and the third produced by Brian Eno
Register
Interlocking guitars, a fixed bass and drums, keyboards for colour, layered and chanted voices, a sermon’s cadence and a spoken monologue
Scale
One self dissolved into pattern, with a house, a wife, a face made for the screen and a colonised valley around it
Governing Proposition
A New York art-punk band gives up the written song for grooves of interlocking parts, mostly on one chord, and sets its singer’s words inside them as chant, patter and sermon, so that the form is the claim: the self is a meeting of patterns, and losing it is felt first as ecstasy and then as loss. A large turn made in a language others had found, rising by trance rather than by peaks, with a second side that takes apart, more plainly, what the first builds.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with stabbing guitars over a bass and drum pattern that does not change, and then the voices enter one by one, layered, answering each other, until a self has been assembled in public out of parts. No instrument leads. The voice is one part among the others, often doubled, often answered by a chorus of itself, and it does not stand in front of the music to tell the listener what the music means. Before a word has been made out, the record has stated its claim in its form: a person is a meeting of patterns, not a centre that the patterns serve.
Sire released the album on 8 October 1980: eight tracks, about forty minutes, the fourth Talking Heads album and the third produced by Brian Eno, after More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) and Fear of Music (1979). The band was David Byrne, voice and guitar, Tina Weymouth, bass, Chris Frantz, drums, and Jerry Harrison, keyboards and guitar, with Eno on keyboards, voices and treatments. Other players are heard, a guitar that tears across The Great Curve and a trumpet that floats over Houses in Motion; who they were, and how the tracks were built in the studio, is reported but not given here.
Most of the tracks rest on one chord or a two-chord vamp, and they move by layering rather than by change. Weymouth’s bass and Frantz’s drums hold their figures without variation and without going slack, the guitars of Byrne and Harrison interlock in short repeating cells, and the keyboards add colour without chords. The words sit inside the grooves as chant and patter. The singer had been, on the band’s earlier records, the tense individual of the nervy New York song; here he becomes a voice among voices, and the band, widened by other players, is no longer a quartet.
Movement II
Side one is three long grooves, and it is built as a possession. Born Under Punches assembles the self; Crosseyed and Painless drives harder, finding that “facts are simple” and of no help, and runs into a chanted coda; The Great Curve thickens its polyrhythm until a guitar solo tears over it, an exultation sustained rather than reached once. The voice speaks in tongues over the groove, like a preacher or a man taken by a spirit, and the self that was assembled in the first track is carried away in the third by something larger than itself.
The Great Curve has a goddess at its centre, on whose movement the world turns (“a woman’s hips”). Around her the record evokes older patterns, water as time and baptism, the wind as a messenger, but it builds only one: possession and the waking from it. The height of the side is the trance, and its kind is one kind. The record rises by accumulation, adding a part and then another until the sound is dense enough to lift, and its heat varies in density more than in temperature. Crosseyed and Painless and The Great Curve run in one mode, fast and dense, and the second adds height more than a turn.
What the side discloses is felt before it is understood. Losing the self in the groove is heard as release, and the dissolving that the words will later describe as a loss is offered here as pleasure. That is the record’s method and its risk: the sound discloses as fully as the words, and the words, mostly fragments, leave the sound to carry the meaning. A listener can take the first side as a dance record and miss nothing that it insists on. The insisting is left to the second.
Movement III
Side two opens with the waking. Once in a Lifetime is a sermon preached to a man about his own life: he looks at “my beautiful house”, “my beautiful wife”, and does not know how he came to them, while time runs on as “water flowing underground” and the refrain answers that nothing has changed. At each chorus the preacher’s patter lifts into a wide, sung swell. It is Everyman finding himself inside his own life, and it is the one place the record states plainly what it has been enacting: a man can wake inside a life he does not remember choosing.
The sermon form is part of what the song knows. A man is preached at by his own house, his own car, his own wife, and the cadence of the pulpit, applied to the furniture of an ordinary life, makes the ordinary strange. Played as a conventional song, with a verse, a chorus and a singer in front confessing, the same words would be one man’s complaint. Set as patter over a groove that does not change, they are the voice of the pattern speaking through the man, and the dissolving the first side offered as pleasure is heard for the first time as fear.
Seen and Not Seen follows with a case history, spoken rather than sung: a man who reshapes his face to match the “faces in movies”. It is the media’s version of the same condition, a self made from images, and it is the record’s sketch, thinner in arrangement than anything on the first side. Houses in Motion, between the sermon and the monologue, restates the groove and theme of Born Under Punches at a lower heat, with a trumpet floating over it. The second side is plainer than the first throughout, and its argument is carried more by slowing than by form.
Movement IV
Listening Wind turns the record round. It is the one narrative song and the one political one: a villager, whom the song calls Mojique, plants bombs against the foreigners who have taken his valley. The condition the record has described, a self taken up into a pattern larger than itself, is here seen from the side it lands on, a village taken up into a foreign pattern and answering with violence. The song is cold and slow, its menace in what the voice does not say, and its wind is a messenger. Few records of its kind attempt the colonised view at all.
The song also names, without saying so, the record’s own inheritance. The band had turned toward African rhythm already, in I Zimbra on Fear of Music, and beside that turn stand the funk of James Brown and Fela Kuti, Eno’s ambient work and his collage with Byrne. The turn away from the written song was large and it was a real risk: the band’s identity as a New York art-punk group, and its audience for short songs, were both put on it. But the bet had been placed by others, and the record imports a language more than inventing one.
That import has been argued over since, homage or appropriation, and the argument is part of the record’s life rather than a settled charge against it. Listening Wind is the best evidence in the record itself that the question was felt from inside: the one song in which the outside world speaks back is about a people whose valley has been taken. It does not settle the question. It keeps it open, which is one reason the record has stayed in argument for four decades.
Movement V
The record ends by slowing. The Overload brings the pulse down to a drone, the groove that had carried the first side reduced to a weight, and the ecstasy of possession is shown its cost. It is the most desolate track and the counterpart of the most exultant: The Great Curve and The Overload are the same dissolving, once into rhythm and once into drone. The drone is less achieved than its intent, and its heavier, darker manner sits a little outside the record’s own. But it is required, the end of the groove, and the record means its ending.
What the record holds is wide for its kind. Consciousness is held fully, and its dissolving is the subject; the body is held, as dance; a household in a house, a car and a wife seen as strangers; the media in a face made for the screen; empire in a valley taken; the sacred as sermon and possession; nature as water, wind and heat. One condition joins them, and the groove holds them in one sound. But most arrive as single images, labour and history are glimpsed, and only Listening Wind gives an order a place and a person.
Its later life has been strong among musicians and steady with a wider public. The record is commonly credited with shaping the art-funk and dance-rock that followed and with opening the path of the rock album built on African sources, and Once in a Lifetime became a standard that has stayed in broadcast and in common speech. The album as a whole is heard less than its one song. Its grooves were played by hand and avoided the drum machines of its year, and the record has aged little. It is the work of a band that gave up its centre and made that the subject.
Act III · The Twelve
Eight tracks in about forty minutes, and the subtractive test finds little to cut but finds slack. Born Under Punches must open: it sets the method, a self heard as a machine of interlocking parts. Once in a Lifetime must open side two, the one place the record states its condition plainly. Listening Wind is required as the only view from outside, and The Overload as the end of the groove, where the ecstasy is shown its cost. The test bites twice. Crosseyed and Painless and The Great Curve run in one mode, fast and dense, and the second adds height more than a turn. Houses in Motion, the track a hostile listener would cut, restates Born Under Punches at a lower heat. One soft track and one doubled mode.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the self is not a centre but a meeting of patterns, habit, image and rhythm, and a man can wake inside a life he does not remember choosing. Once in a Lifetime sets it as a sermon, “my beautiful house”, “my beautiful wife”, time running as “water flowing underground”. Seen and Not Seen gives a man who reshapes his face to the “faces in movies”; Listening Wind sees the condition from the side it lands on. The sound discloses as fully, losing the self felt as release. What holds it well below the gate: the statement rests on three songs, most of the words are fragments and patter, and the meaning is felt more than stated. Level with Kid A at 8.2, under Closer, of the same year, at 8.4.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is real and of one kind, the transport of trance more than the summit, and it comes often. Born Under Punches lifts when the layered voices enter; Crosseyed and Painless drives into its chanted coda. The Great Curve is the height: the polyrhythm thickens until a guitar solo tears over it, an exultation sustained. Once in a Lifetime lifts at each chorus from patter into a wide, sung swell. Listening Wind is dread, cold and slow; The Overload is dread made drone, a low height. Houses in Motion and Seen and Not Seen stay level. The record rises by accumulation, not by peaks, and most of its heights are of one warm kind; that and two level tracks hold it well under Closer at 9.1.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: possession. The voice speaks in tongues over the groove, like a preacher or a man taken by a spirit, and the self is entered and carried by something larger. Side one is the possession; Once in a Lifetime is the waking into a house and a wife one does not recognise, Everyman finding himself in his own life; side two follows the aftermath, through the remade face, the colonised valley and the drone. Around it archetypes are evoked: the goddess of The Great Curve, on whose movement the world turns (“a woman’s hips”), water as time and baptism, the wind as messenger. What holds the axis below the gate: the particular is withheld. Mojique is a person; most figures are voices without a place.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own art punk, the nervy, angular New York song, and the turn toward African rhythm begun in I Zimbra on Fear of Music; beside it Eno’s ambient work and his collage with Byrne, and the funk of James Brown and Fela Kuti. The turn is large. The written song is given up for grooves, mostly on one chord, with no verse and chorus to drive them, and the words come as chant and patter from a singer whose persona had been the tense individual; the band’s identity and its audience were risked. What holds it near the bar: Fela, Brown and Eno had placed the bet, I Zimbra had opened the path, and the swerve imports a language more than inventing one. A tenth under Kid A at 8.7.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes, because the form is the claim. A record that says the self is a meeting of patterns is built of interlocking parts with no centre: no instrument leads, and the voice enters as one more part, often answered by a chorus of itself. Played as conventional songs, with a singer in front, these words would be one man’s complaints; here the individual is already dissolved, and the dissolving is pleasure. The sequence is counted here, once: side one builds the trance, side two takes it apart. Held below the top by the second side, which argues its undoing more by slowing than by form, with Houses in Motion nearer a container, and by the first side’s two fast grooves, which share one form.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over forty-six years, though its particulars, stage versions by an enlarged band and whole-album re-recordings by other musicians, are reported here rather than verified. The argument over the record’s borrowing, homage or appropriation, is itself a yield: the record keeps the question open rather than settling it. In the recording, the interlocking parts separate on close listening, each groove holding several rhythms at once, and the words, assembled from fragments, give more on return than at first. What holds the figure: part of what is found is projection invited by fragments, and the second side yields less than the first, so the depth is uneven. A tenth under White Noise at 8.6.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the art-rock and new-wave album of its years, and the rock band’s relation to African music and the dance floor. The intrinsic force is the larger part: the record showed that a rock band could build tracks from layered, repeating rhythms rather than write songs, with the words set inside the music, a way of making that later pop made common, here done by hand. It is held at the bar because part of the force was shared with Fela and Eno’s own collage, and its public reach was narrower than its reach among musicians. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited with shaping the art-funk and dance-rock that followed and with opening the path of the rock album built on African sources, and Once in a Lifetime became a standard.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed over forty-six years. The form is whole, in print since release. Presence is continuous and wider than first sales: Once in a Lifetime has stayed in broadcast and in common speech, and the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted. The fabric is little fixed to 1980: the record avoided the period’s drum machines and gated sound, and its grooves are played by hand, though the synthesiser tones and some treated guitar are of their year. Charged: the album is heard less than its one song, and much of its presence is among musicians and critics. It stands in the upper part of the records of its age, level with Closer at 8.7, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Tina Weymouth’s bass and Chris Frantz’s drums hold patterns that never vary yet never go slack. The guitars of David Byrne and Jerry Harrison interlock in short repeating figures; the keyboards add colour without chords. Eno’s production keeps a dense polyrhythm legible, each part placed so the ear can follow any one and hear the whole, and the layered voices are arranged as a choir. The faults fall across a share of the record: Byrne’s narrow range and some thin patter; Seen and Not Seen a sketch; The Overload’s drone less achieved than its intent; the second side’s arrangements plainer than the first’s. Two tenths under Closer at 8.9.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs the record: the self taken up into a pattern larger than itself, felt first as ecstasy and then as loss. The two most distant elements obey it: The Great Curve, the most exultant track, and The Overload, the most desolate, are the same dissolving, once into rhythm and once into drone. Listening Wind, the one narrative and political song, obeys too: a village is taken up into a foreign pattern, and answers with violence. Seen and Not Seen is the law’s case history. What holds the figure: the palette is largely one, groove and layered voice, and narrowness is not coherence; and The Overload strains the law in sound, its heavier, darker manner a little outside the record’s own. Two tenths below Infinite Jest at 8.7.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, and its dissolving is the subject; the body is held, as dance. The household is present in Once in a Lifetime, a house, a car and a wife seen as strangers; the media and their images in Seen and Not Seen and Crosseyed and Painless; the state and empire in Listening Wind, seen from the colonised side. The sacred is sermon and possession; the natural order is water, wind and heat. One condition joins them, and the groove holds them in one sound. What holds the figure: most orders appear as single images, labour and history are glimpsed, and only Listening Wind gives an order a place and a person.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Imperishable and The Made at 8.7. A form that is the claim, a self with no centre built as music with no centre, in which the voice is one part among the parts; forty-six years of continuous presence on a fabric little fixed to its year; and a making in which a fixed bass and drums, interlocking guitars and layered voices hold a dense polyrhythm legible.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness and the body are held fully, and the household, the media, empire, the sacred and the natural order enter under one condition, but most as single images, with labour and history glimpsed and only one song giving an order a place and a person. Below the rest, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: a disclosure carried by sound more than stated, its statement resting on three songs; and one pattern, possession and waking, built across the sequence while most of its figures stay voices without a place.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.4, stands below it as well.
Basis · the LP as released by Sire on 8 October 1980, eight tracks in their original order, three on side one and five on side two, about forty minutes, produced by Brian Eno; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. Outtakes and bonus tracks of later editions, the singles and their videos, the band’s stage versions and later recordings by other musicians are evidence for the record’s return, reach and survival, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the studios and dates of recording, the method by which the tracks were built, the sources the band drew on beyond those heard, the outside players and their parts, the writing credits, any model for The Overload, the making of the sleeve, the chart figures, and the particulars of the later stage film and re-recordings, are not given or are given as reported.