Brian Eno and John Cale enjoy a cup of tea and tune in to each other’s brainwaves. From whence presumably sprang Wrong Way Up. Eno and Cale had revolved in some of the same circles (the ones with Nico in them) for a long time and the only surprise was that they waited until 1990 to really pool their resources. Brian Eno is famous for making everyone else’s records sound better, but he benefits from a good collaborator as much as anyone. His tendency towards quiet elegance – or ambient dullness, whathaveyou – needs a balancing chaotic force. He seems to produce special brilliance when teamed up with neurotic crazy people; Nico, Bowie, Byrne, Cale. Opposites attract, obviously. Cale’s creeping sense of doom only needed Eno’s refinement to become the perfect electronic chillout.
I often dream of what movie would have all Brian Eno compositions as the soundtrack, and how great it would be if whatever the movie was could fit perfectly the music with the images. Does such a movie exist? There are movies with Brian Eno music in them, sometimes even a lot of it, and sometimes they’re even good movies. I even think there’s one where all the music is Eno and it might be a very atmospheric documentary about floating down some endless river. But none of that is what I imagine of course. Then I get it; I don’t need to imagine a movie because this music is the soundtrack of my life.
Here is another very heartwarming song. If I hadn’t had such an exceptionally productive day yesterday, I would have taken the time to wax more rhapsodic about the Velvets. Now I will have to rhapsodize enough for both. There really aren’t that many songs that make you feel good about yourself. I mean, there are a hundred thousand ‘I feel sexy’ songs that pump you up and make you strut down the street. But not that many songs that make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Songs that make you feel loved. It’s hard to explain, and maybe it’s just me who relies on music for emotional fulfillment. Still, think on it, how many love songs do you know that aren’t actually thinly disguised odes to lust? How many songs about inner beauty are there? Not too many. Yesterday we had a song about loving someone for the beauty inside, which they cannot see for themselves. (That song alone is enough to place Lou Reed in the echelon of greatest poets.) Today, we have Brian Eno, singing about devotion. Is this even a love song? I wouldn’t expect Eno to do anything as straightforward as a plain old-fashioned love song. But it is about love, and I’ve always believed it was about paternal, not romantic love. For whose shoes would you ever run to tie but a child’s? It’s not a romantic gesture, it’s a protective one. It’s what you do for someone small and helpless who you take care of. A man doesn’t tie a lover’s shoes. A father ties his child’s shoes. Maybe that’s not what Brian Eno meant at all, who knows, but I’ve always found the sentiment profoundly moving. Because it’s such a simple gesture of love, something from childhood that we often don’t remember, but when you think about it, it means the world. Because when you’re little, having someone there to tie your shoe makes the difference between feeling safe and loved and taken car of or feeling helpless, tiny and frustrated. My dad tied my little shoes when I was a child, and I hope yours did too, and that’s a very, very comforting feeling to remember. How many other records bring that back to you?
If you’ve ever wanted to see David Byrne perform interpretive dance, below is the video for you. In 2009 he took it on the road, performing material from Everything That Happens… his most recent Brian Eno collaboration. That included a scad of white shirted dancers undulating their skinny arms to Eno’s beats. The frolicking might barely be skirting complete ridiculousness, but you can’t fault Byrne for his fearless edginess. Not for him, settling into I’m-a-rich-old-guy-with-lots-of-hits complacency. This year he’s touring another unexpected collaboration, this time with Annie Clark aka St Vincent. Honestly, St Vincent never really sparkled with me, but that’s not to say they’ve made a bad record. David Byrne has never made a bad record. And as always, there’s the waiting to see what direction he plunges off in next, and who’s coming along for the ride. How about Kimbra?
Here’s to David Byrne’s friendship with Brian Eno. May it never end and produce many more great works of music! Eno has the magic power to make anyone sound better. He made Coldplay sound legit, for god’s sake. But earning the big bucks for making mediocre bands suck a little less aside, he’s at his best among equals. Of course. Eno and Byrne had a great run of collaboration in the 80′s with a series of classic Talking Heads albums and the trailblazing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. So it was great to see them getting back together on Everything That Happens… That wasn’t exactly Bush of Ghosts level work, but still pretty great. It had Eno’s impeccable sense of atmosphere and Byrne’s dry wit – a classic combination. Some people found it snoozy, but I think it’s a worthy addition to the canon.
Who is this boy? I don’t know, but every time I hear this song I get to missing someone. Someone, anyone, whoever I happen to be in love with, I guess. Or missing the feeling of having someone to miss. Makes me feel like emotion is a beautiful thing. Never mind that feelings are terrible fragile things meant to be hurt and broken, and we’re all better off being cyborgs – this song makes me warm and fuzzy. If maybe you don’t think of Brian Eno as a warm and fuzzy guy, you just don’t know him very well. You think of Eno the brain-in-a-vat genius commanding and army of synthesizers or something like that, because of the whole inventing electronic music thing he’s been credited with. He didn’t literally do that, but yeah, he’s one of a select few who can be indirectly blamed for the existence of Skrillex. But electronic music isn’t all wub-wub-in-the-club, and no one proves better than Eno how much warmth and emotion scientifically produced music can be made to carry.
Ominous. I never thought of it as a creepy song before, although it’s highly dramatic. But this remix (I couldn’t call it a cover) adds a layer of sound that enhances the drama in a rather dark way. I can’t say it’s an improvement – that’s not possible – but it is an interesting experiment. Brian Eno’s compositions, when they’re not being purposely ambient, are very cinematic. Without words there’s a definite story, arcing to a climax. Eno songs do pop up in movies with some frequency. They’re atmospheric without descending into Philip Glass territory. That is, Eno is never atonal, unpleasant or droning, nor does he strive to be depressing. There’s also a minimalism there that leaves room for tinkerers to add new elements. Whomever pasted the burbles and voice onto this track was no genius, but they’re on the right track. Why there isn’t a stronger flow of Eno remixes I don’t know. Because he’s still very much alive to possibly disapprove? But I don’t think he would. The inventor of the cut and paste remix would probably only applaud others taking bits of his work to refashion something new.
David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album My Life In the Bush of Ghosts is so much fun that at first you don’t notice how some of the found sounds they used are actually kind of disturbing. In that regard the audible whipping in The Jezebel Spirit takes the cake, but this one is pretty scary too. I’m not sure if the insistent percussion makes the preacher’s voice creepier or if he’d be more scary alone, but it’s definitely eerie. And genius to take something no one in their right mind would want to listen to, and make it worth listening to. Eno and Byrne used snippets of obscure records, old radio broadcasts and whatever else they liked the sound of, mixed with a trailblazing combination of new instrumentation and electronic sound effects. It was absolutely unique in its time and stands as one of the cornerstones of basically the entire genre of electronic music. Many, many careers have been built on duplicating its principles of sound collage, but no one has ever done it better.
I’ve mentioned before and want to reiterate my delight at discovering a thriving and youthful Brian Eno fandom online. Surprisingly to me, I’ve found that I’m not the only one hooked on his eccentric genius. Nothing aggravates me more that the casual dismissal of Eno’s music as ‘elitist’. The fact that anything remotely intellectual and outside the deepest mainstream is called ‘elitist’ is infuriating. As if not being able to appreciate the novel and challenging were somehow a point of pride. Just as bad are fans and followers who actually embrace that label and start to think of themselves as being part of some kind of ‘elite’ just because they bought a Brian Eno album. Those people are called ‘hipsters’. I wish they would die. Eno’s music is outsider music, designed not to sell to the broadest audience (though he’s capable of that too) but to speak and connect with a small and devoted fanbase. That teenagers in Oklahoma are finding warmth and comfort in Taking Tiger Mountain doesn’t make them an ‘elite,’ but it does showcase the remarkable and magic connection formed between an artist with a vision and individuals years and miles away who respond to that vision. And yes, I do think I’m Brian Eno’s intended audience, in that his music does require a mindset specific and different and inaccessible to large swatches of Top 40 fansj, and maybe after all, that does make me better than everyone.
“I can’t see the lines I used to think I could read between”
“Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled” Brian Eno observes dryly. Anything but. I’ve been an Eno fan all my life, and for many years I suspected him to be a figment of my imagination. Not literally, of course, but it just felt that way simply because I never crossed paths with anyone who’d ever heard of him. As far as producers and composers and experimenters and tech whizzes go, he’s a pillar of celebrity, which is a nonentity by actual fame standards. Outside of music geek circles, Eno just isn’t that famous. So nothing warms my heart more than discovering the existence of a small but vocal community of teenage Eno fans on the internet. I’ve found a number of blogs by high school girls for whom Brian Eno is a god. I’ve never thought of Eno as a sex symbol myself, but it’s cute to see some 16-year-old in Ohio blogging about her crush on Brian Eno. They are also, naturally, followers of Bowie and Bolan, supporters of Ferry and Genesis and Adam Ant, worshipers of Morrissey, fans of Sparks, even a young lady who is able to distinguish the various members of Duran Duran. This is so encouraging, in a world where entertainment for young people is increasingly vacuous and retarded, to see so much good taste and enthusiasm. If I had had a likeminded community when I was fifteen, I wouldn’t have felt like the last one in the world. That’s the eternal blessing of the internet – a chance to find solidarity, whatever your interest, to know that you’re not the only one sitting in the dark with a record player.
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