Brian Eno
Bastard
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As Eno and Newman have spent a good part of the last few decades broadening the definition of rock, this twin case of tunnel vision is puzzling and a little distressing. After leaving Roxy Music in the early 70s, Eno broke new ground on four influential progressive rock albums, all with vocals. Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science incorporated elements of free jazz and classical minimalism, crafted hooks with percussive instruments and out of nonmusical sounds, made the recording studio serve as an instrument, and highlighted what Eno called “harmonic stacks” of his own overdubbed voice–imagine a one-man Beach Boys. The lyrics didn’t matter as much as the sound of his singing; he often sang nonsense syllables or turned to the word-generating techniques of dadaist poets Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters. Through the 80s, Eno was better known for his instrumental discs, which presaged the ambient genre, and a long list of innovative productions for artists such as David Bowie, the Talking Heads, and U2. But he started singing again on Wrong Way Up, his 1990 collaboration with John Cale, and he incorporated vocals on 1992’s Nerve Net, which found him struggling to extend his old rock work via electronic dance music.
Newman has been almost as influential. The three albums he recorded as front man for Wire between 1977 and 1979 pointed the way from punk to new wave to the roots of what would become alternative. He nodded to Eno with his own ambient release (1981’s Provisionally Entitled the Singing Fish) and recorded four strong, vocally oriented solo albums before joining a reactivated Wire in 1986. (Alone among such reunited peers as Pere Ubu, the Buzzcocks, and the Sex Pistols, the group refused to play any old songs, recording and performing only new material until it once again disbanded in 1992.)
Too bad neither he nor Eno felt the onus to bring vocals into their updated repertoires as well. The voice is an instrument, and as with any other instrument, its limitations are in the mind of the user. The recent albums by The Sea and Cake and Jessamine, on the labels Newman says he admires, are two of many examples of new vocal music based on this thinking: The Fawn combines impressionist singing, sampled and sequenced sounds from all walks of music, and real-time playing to make inventive pop, and The Long Arm of Coincidence is a reminder that vocals don’t have to be the most dominant thing in the mix of a rock song. Newman and Eno are cult heroes precisely because they never accepted any limitations. The bigger challenge for both would have been to incorporate the instruments that made them famous in their attempt to craft nonlinear, open-ended dance music. Instead, they shut their mouths and took the easy way out.
