24
CHAPTER THREE:
ON OTHER MUSIC: ENO AS CRITIC
Eno's impressions of the world of music were gathered primarily in the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s. During those years, he was exposed to a great deal of rock and other popular music, a
good deal of experimental and avant-garde music, a fair quantity of non-Western music, and
some traditional Western art music. Since reaching the age of thirty-two in 1980, however,
Eno has evinced less interest in keeping up with contemporary trends and with listening to
other people's music in general. The club scene had begun to pall on him, as he explained in
1986:
I used to go to clubs now and again, but I gradually stopped going be-
cause I couldn't find one that did the kind of thing that I wanted. The
accent of a club is towards somehow speeding you up, presumably
with the idea of obliterating what is assumed to be an otherwise aver-
age existence. Well, I wanted the opposite of that. I wanted to find
places that would actually be slower, bigger, more open and would
make me think in some interesting way. Clubs, in fact, prevent me
from thinking.
1
It is a fairly common phenomenon among composers that after a certain point in their creative
lives, they lose the desire or will to listen to a great deal of other music. In 1985, Eno said: "I
don't listen to records much." The interviewer asked, "Is that a deliberate thing, or do you
find you just don't want to?" Eno answered:
I don't think about it. I don't have a record player, funnily enough. I
think life's too short to listen to records, at the moment. Well, I do lis-
ten to some things, but I usually like to listen to the same thing over
and over for months.
I'm quite happy to accept that I don't know most of what's going on in
the world of music. I never have done. You have a choice when you
get interested in culture. You have a choice of trying to absorb it all,
the American style of "doing the sights" in two days, or else you can
just decide: "I'll stay in this one place, because I like it here anyway,
and I'll really understand this. I'll really find out about it." That's what
I do.
2
In 1982, Eno was pessimistic about the public value of airing his views on music (after having
done precisely that for a decade, it should be added). He felt that he had run out of interesting
things to say about pop music, and that whenever he started talking about it, people stopped
1
Brian Eno, "Works Constructed with Sound and Light: Extracts from a talk given by Brian
Eno following the opening of his video installation, Copenhagen, January 1986," color bro-
chure (London: Opal, Ltd., 1986), n.p.
2
Jensen, "Sound of Silence," 25.