Mind

I like DevastatorJr's take on this LP. The coldly clinical abstraction is off-putting (an understatement). "Fear of Music" was a perfect title.

Though apparently that was at least partly an incidental thing, where either Byrne or Eno heard about an unusual mental state in which people literally do become afraid of music in general. And then thought, that sounds like a title...

The intensity of the desire expressed: that's a bit out-of-character for David in those days, who still had odd ideas about emotion being a useless imaginary construct (refer to "I'm Not in Love" for a kind of treatise on this subject). Yet this need, this near-compulsion to control another person? It doesn't seem to be directed to a particular human being, or even a specific trait that "ought" to be changed.

It almost makes me laugh, this inhuman lack of referent! Change whose mind? Change what about it? It's as if the song doesn't express anything real.

Paranoia: yeah, that's like a mood which hangs over everything David wrote (at that time). Which achieves a kind of frenzied peak on "Animals"--everything alive is laughing at me, I just know they are, but they won't admit it...

Also, I think of the term "flattened affect," used to describe the classic negative symptom of schizophrenia. The starkness of the cover art and song titles: I feel as if they reflect a deeply-ingrained refusal to become engaged with anything resembling a "normal life."