He breaks away from this termite-work to shine various lights—Is Fear of Music a New York album? A science-fiction album? A paranoid album?—seeing what kind of shadows the questions make. Never does he posit that his reading defines how one should hear the album, or, even more foolishly, that this is how the album was intended to be heard. Rather, he wonders what is gained or lost by examining the album within each frame. Amid all of this, Lethem murmurs theories about how to understand a work of art and drops personal revelations about the way culture shaped him during adolescence, but these never occupy him long enough to drown out the music.

This slow approach yields big, as it reveals a record composed not of disparate songs, like, say, a short-story collection, but a "concept album" in the most abstract yet perhaps truest sense. Fear of Music tells no narrative, but weaves together its bleak motifs in such a way that a resonance chamber forms, the pop music equivalent of the postmodern, fractured books of Italo Calvino. Parts that at first seem only distantly related start to feel of a piece the further one goes and the closer one looks. The majority of the song titles act as a table of contents of sort—"Mind," "Paper," "Cities," "Air," "Heaven," "Animals," "Electric Guitar," "Drugs"—all riffing on themes of restlessness, dissolution, and instability. Crackpots, conspiracy theorists, criminals, and druggies emerge as characters, and a bleak landscape forms. Make no mistakes, it's the apocalypse.

Lethem pays particular attention to David Byrne's use of pronouns, finding the songwriter lets them slip not to imply, as in most rock music, informality or off-the-cuffness, but to disturb and unsettle. In "Mind," for example, with its chorus of "I need something to change your mind," Lethem wonders if the I and you of the song are not in fact the same: whether there's an edge of solipsistic madness to the enterprise, with the listener overhearing a nutter trying to convince himself of something—what, we're never sure. In "Life During Wartime," Byrne flips the first-person from the singular to plural: "We dress like students / We dress like housewives," he sings, masking his personality in a way that would play out more fully on Remain in Light, where the lyrics rarely reveal a narrative voice, let alone one that could be mistaken for "David Byrne."

This shift in voice, Lethem suggests, coincides with Byrne struggling to define himself as an artist and rock star:

David Byrne didn't want to become the nerd Mick Jagger. For it was Jagger's fate to be seen as somehow both apart from, and utterly incomplete without, his musical collaborators, even as the potential meaning of the Rolling Stones' music became more and more a product and symptom of Jagger's projected persona, circumscribed by its established interests and attitudes.

Byrne responded by taking himself out of the limelight, erasing the neurotic "I" of his early work, and challenging the very concept of the band Talking Heads by introducing additional players, essentially disempowering each of the four members by turning them into "founding members," just one of many musicians that make up a revolving line-up of Talking Heads. Lethem doesn't deny that the enlarged band of Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues gained depths of sonic expression. But he laments what they lost, and so proposes that Fear of Music may in fact be the last Talking Heads album, meaning it's the final record where the four members worked cooperatively as a quartet.