2. Fear of Music (1979)

If you listen to the alternate version of “Cities” from the Fear Of Music reissue, you’ll notice one major change besides the less-disco/more-freaky mix: the siren blaring at the beginning of the song is actually blaring. What was an element of collage (maybe bricolage — the practice loft they recorded in was in industrial Long Island City) in the original mix is elevated to aural offense.

It’s more appropriate: Fear Of Music operates at that level from the literally gibberish “I Zimbra” onward, blurring the distinction between an entire house party on funky uppers and academic urban criticism.

Loud and clear behind that siren is the dark downtown no recent New York transplant really knows, where “people sleep in the daytime/ if they want to,” a world so insular, warfare can only be understood as not going to party at the Mudd Club or CBGB. Jerry Harrison’s album cover, an inhospitable black print of diamond plate metal flooring, perfectly mirrors the production of Fear Of Music, at once offering mesmerizing efficiency and repetition (the spidery patter of “Mind”), an obdurate impenetrability (the sad determinism of “Heaven”), and of course, a frotteuristic friction (the paranoia fetishism of “Paper” and “Life During Wartime”).

We leave with a disturbing map of what sounds like a total urban environment: air quality, transportation, news, drugs, nightlife, government, violence. It’s just barely tempered with the sexy thrust of dance music (funk and disco most prevalently) and the occasional parroting of a bar ballad’s chorus.