34
have come from that area they haven't come from people who are
dealing with electronics exclusively. They've come from people
searching for gimmicks, something as banal as "What kind of sound
can we get now that nobody's got before?" What I like about the Par-
liament/Funkadelic people is that they really go to extremes. There's
nothing moderate about what they do.
38
And here Eno reiterates his dream of bringing together the "strange, rigid" electronic music of
Kraftwerk with the "weird physical feeling" of Parliament: "Put those two together and say,
`Make a record.'"
39
In addition to Eno's own My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was then
in the planning stages with David Byrne, a large quantity of popular music in the 1980s has
turned out to parallel Eno's dream rather closely: with Prince and Michael Jackson leading the
way on the black side and Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel on the white, synthesizers have come
to dominate the sound of popular music, and many musicians have learned how to take the
hard, metallic edge off electronic sounds, or to use them creatively at cross-purposes with
their mechanical nature.
Although Eno was momentarily enthusiastic about funk and disco, at least with regard to their
possibilities when taken to creative extremes, by 1983 he had had enough of "the formula
disco style where it has to have this or that and it has to have the girls doing a refrain. You
hear so much of this junk coming out all the time."
40
Like many other white musicians of the late 1970s (most notably the Police, who forged a
distinctive popular style based on the angular vocal melodies and off-beat bass lines of reg-
gae), Eno was fascinated with the sounds of Jamaican reggae music. Once again, it was the
procedure of how the music was put together, as much as the sound itself, that interested Eno:
The contemporary studio composer is like a painter who puts things
on, puts things together, tries things out, and erases them. The condi-
tion of the reggae composer is like that of the sculptor, I think. Five or
six musicians play, they're well isolated from one another. Then the
thing they played, which you can regard as a kind of cube of music, is
hacked away at things are taken out, for long periods.
A guitar will appear for two strums, then never appear again, the bass
will suddenly drop out, and an interesting space is created. Reggae
composers have created a sense of dimension in the music, by very
clever, unconventional use of echo, by leaving out instruments, and by
the very open rhythmic structure of the music.
41
The "sculptural" approach has clearly influenced Eno's own way of composing. It is charac-
teristic that he has shown no interest in reggae's political implications, neither in terms of the
indigenous philosophy or life-style of Rastafarianism nor in terms of Western white musicians
38
Glenn O'Brien, "Eno at the Edge of Rock," Andy Warhol's Interview 8 (June 1978), 32.
39
O'Brien, "Eno at Edge of Rock," 32.
40
Bill Milkowski, "Brian Eno: Excursions in the Electronic Environment," Down Beat 50
(June 1983), 57.
41
Brian Eno, "Pro Session Part II," 53.