I 1979 ga Talking Heads ut sitt tredje album, Fear Of Music - et tøft, paranoid, funky, avhengighetsskapende, rytmisk, skummelt og morsomt mesterverk. Med produksjon av Brian Eno kom Fear Of Music som en kule ut av New Yorks mangefasetterte musikalske undergrunn, med frampek til retninger (både positive og negative) som bandet snart skulle komme til å ta.

I denne boka tar Jonathan Lethem oss med tilbake til det seine 70-tallets New York, hvor Talking Heads finner sin plass som et av tidenes mest bemerkelsesverdige og enigmatiske amerikanske band. Med elementer av teori, fiksjon og memoarer trekkes linjer til Fritz Lang, Edgar Allen Poe, Patti Smith og David Foster Wallace.

Dette er den engelskspråklige originalutgaven av boka.

Om forfatteren:
Jonathan Lethem (født 1964) er en av sin generasjons mest kritikerroste amerikanske forfattere. Han har skrevet bøker som Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude og Chronic City, og har hatt essayer om James Brown og Bob Dylan på trykk i Rolling Stone. Lethem er Roy Edward Disney Professor i kreativ skriving ved Pomona College i California.

"Lethem, who writes about music better than most professional critics, explores every possibility, considers every angle, unpacks every generalisation ... Lethem's book demonstrates what happens when the twin beams of passionate fandom and slicing critical intelligence intersect to illuminate a record you only thought you knew ... So be warned: his obsession is contagious." – The Observer

“In his new book Fear of Music, Jonathan Lethem delivers an impassioned, hilarious and unabashedly personal take on the classic Talking Heads album of the same name.” – Wired.com

“His achievement in Fear of Music is to let his personal passion for the album inform his thoughts on it with a vital urgency, without ever allowing those feelings to run rampant and obscure the work at hand. …[It is] a powerful piece of scholarship on a band that deserves, and whose work holds up to, close examination of the serious kind Lethem does here. [Lethem] revels in Fear of Music's strain, the way it encompasses punk and disco, aggression and passivity, paranoia and resolve, gleefully dancing its way off the brink. This ain't no party, indeed.” – The Atlantic

"The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms." – Salon.com

"Lethem analyzes each of the songs in his book, alternating between close readings of lyrics, song structure, and meditations on the album as a whole. …His prose is as sharp as ever, and his visual evocations demand accompaniment by the tracks themselves. As he puts it in the epigraph, “turn it up, for f--k's sake." – The Daily Beast

“This ain't no party/ This ain't no disco/ This ain't no foolin' around. No, this is music criticism, and in the right hands it's serious business. The latest installment in the addictive 33 1/3 line of music books—each of which pairs an author with an iconic pop album—finds novelist Jonathan Lethem in deep consultation with his 15-year-old self over the secret messages hidden all over Talking Heads' third album, Fear of Music. …When Lethem's really on a roll, as he is through most of this, overthinking becomes contagious.” – Details

"The book, part of the 33 1/3 series, is full of long, brilliant passages of music criticism interspersed with riffs on topics such as science fiction, paranoia, fame, and Asperger’s syndrome. But it’s at its most interesting at those moments when Lethem tilts the mirror of autobiographical reflection at just the right angle to reflect both himself and the music of Talking Heads in some new light." - Slate.com

"Lethem's collection Anxiety of Influence proved him the consummate essayist...These are the themes of Fear of Music, and this is what made Lethem literally the most perfect writer in the world to reflect on it. He is writer as fanboy writing about an album for disappointed fanbots, people who have loved something that turned out to be dangerous for them, people who have come to question all commonly accepted wisdoms ("People say not to worry about the air") and who still, for some reason are willing to let their fear of art break their already broker hearts." – PopMatters