In the words of noted musicologist Steve Jobs, “It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.”

If Jobs had to ask what Ringo did, well, it proves every genius has a blind spot. But the ineffable mystery is this. There are many precedents for single geniuses that spontaneously combust into existence (see Dylan, Bob, or Hendrix, Jimi), but how do four extraordinary elements come together to produce a world-changing hydrogen bomb of musical genius? I’ll leave the Texas School Board to explain that to me. Or, watch the two films in this week’s double bill.

Today marks the DVD release of “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” the four-hour Martin Scorsese dissection of the life and offhand times of George Harrison. The film’s compiler — not really director (more on that later) — Martin Scorsese, knows from musical genius and genius in general, being something of one himself. His last core sample on this subject, “No Direction Home,” spent four hours getting as close to the genesis of Bob Dylan’s genius as the artist would allow, which is to say, not very. It wisely did the next best thing, which was just showing Dylan being Dylan, while a chorus of friends and acquaintances tried to figure it all out. Nobody came close, of course, and Dylan’s own interview was conducted by his manager, Jeff Rosen, with all of the hardball questioning one would expect of Fox’s Chris Wallace interviewing John Boehner. Scorsese did the best he could – and that is very good indeed – overseeing a compilation of found objects in something that resembled a narrative structure. But in Dylan’s case, good is never good enough. Essential viewing if you are a Dylan fan, but ultimately, a museum artifact, where Dylan’s infinity of talent is definitely not on trial.

Scorsese’s follow-up, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,”  is not really much different, though, ironically, one of the very few things left out in this tragical history tour was the impact of Harrison’s long creative and personal association with Dylan. The Beatles Creation Myth is front and center here, and as a duly authorized by the Harrison estate project, the archive material takes the viewer on a ride through the highlights. But only in the back seat. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are both interviewed at length on both Harrison and the journey they took together, but they offer few new insights. Ringo Starr lets down his guard only once, when he remembers his last encounter with his dying comrade, but that guard is soon posted again, and the show goes on. Knowing the forensic details of a magic trick does not do that trick any favors, and there’s little magic to be found in the first half of this film.

The second half of the film that deals with George coping with that ever-so-awful burden of huge fame and unlimited wealth drags on longer than the interminable jams that rounded out Sides 5 and 6 of the vinyl of “All Things Must Pass,” and while Harrison emerges as the hero of his own life, we ultimately agree with him that there were compelling reasons why his private life should have stayed private.

Sometimes, as I am sure Scorsese knows, bootlegs reveal far more than official releases, and the weight of being an “Authorized Release” somehow diminishes the end result. Scorsese doesn’t put much of his own skin in the game, and acts less as a director here than a detached observer, and that detachment prevents us from connecting with a story that defined a cultural renaissance. One longs to see Scorsese on fire, beating the creative process into submission in the way that Nick Nolte’s abstract painter bashed out a canvas to Dylan’s 1974 apocalyptic version of “Like a Rolling Stone” in the underrated anthology “New York Stories.” It takes one to know one, and in “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” as in his other musical hagiographies, Scorsese seems almost embarrassed to confront genius on his own terms, in that secret language he’s privileged to share with his subjects.

A much scruffier and ultimately more revealing insight into the Beatles Creation Myth comes from the 2009 “Nowhere Boy.” This movie is set entirely in those moments when a strange kind of human alchemy transpired, in the grimy laboratory of Liverpool. No attempt is made to explain how the magic happened, but the viewer gets the distinct sense “why.” It’s ironic that one of the most insightful glimpses into the real George Harrison in “Living in the Material World” comes from a long excerpt from “A Hard Day’s Night,” where George stumbles into an advertising focus group, and returns the cynical condescension he is given with a far more withering detachment. The fact that this scene is wholly fictional does not diminish its insight – and the same thing can be said for “Nowhere Boy.”

Based on a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird, the film was endorsed and informed at extreme arm’s length by Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, and is far better for their lack of involvement. Lennon is inhabited, not played, by Aaron Johnson, and at no time does Johnson’s performance descend into mere impression. Johnson just “is” – and within a few moments of his first on-screen appearance, you are transported back to 1955, and present at the creation. Primal rock ‘n’ roll fills the air, and a rough beast slouches on its way to be born, and Johnson’s Lennon puts a face on that creature. The film’s director, Sam Taylor-Wood, married the much younger Aaron Johnson after she completed the movie, and her primal attraction does seem justified.

All the bases are covered. The eternal fights with Aunt Mimi, played with prim precision by Kristin Scott Thomas. The strange, almost sexual attraction between Lennon and his uninhibited mother, Julia. And of course, the legendary 1957 first meeting with Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Paul McCartney. Entire books have been written about this July day at a school fair, where the world turned on its axis. As a card-carrying Beatlemaniac, with a mail-order degree in advanced Moptopology, I noticed that “Nowhere Boy” got all of the details just exactly right, down to the checkered shirt that Lennon wore on that meeting day, and even a brief glimpse of the photographer who took the now iconic picture that is the only record of that day when the world turned inside out. George Harrison’s later back-of-a-bus passage into legend is also documented adroitly, though here, as was sadly the case in the life of the Beatles, Harrison plays a supporting role.

But in ways that no authorized documentary can hope to attain, “Nowhere Boy” gets the human dimensions of the Beatles myth just right. The shimmering brilliance, tragic vulnerability and occasional brutality of Lennon comes through, and the telepathic connection that bound the Beatles together somehow extends to the viewer. Even if huge dramatic licenses are taken, they are not abused. The John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy” is often referred to as a “dick” by his peers – but in this film, the wavering line between “dick” and “genius” is navigated with a drunken precision.

Stanley Kubrick once said that “sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the ‘think’ of it, as in the ‘feel’ of it.” “Nowhere Boy” has that feel, and that touch, and brings us as close as we are likely to get to “feeling” the reality behind the myth.

Pussy Riot’s now famous performance of Punk Prayer in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow’s Kremlin, which earned them the personal ire of both the Orthodox Church’s patriarchate and Vladimir Putin himself, was a call for the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and exorcise Putin. Other feminist and anti-authoritarian performances included disrupting a fashion show by taking over a catwalk, performing unpermitted in a posh boutique, and playing a song called “Freedom to Protest — Death to Prisons” on the roof of a building in a Moscow prison complex to jailed anti-Putin protesters.

Last week a “Party Riot Bus” circled Moscow blasting punk rock and stopping for news conferences and performances calling for the release of the imprisoned band members. Riot grrrl matriarch Kathleen Hannah released a video pledging her support to the band, telling her fans she would “see you out in the streets.” A concert in Tallinn, Estonia, to support the band drew several notable politicians, including President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

On the flip side, counterprotesters have attacked supporters in Moscow, focusing on removing the masks of female supporters. An anti-Pussy Riot rally was held the same day is Krasnodar, drawing an estimated 10,000 calling for a “moral revival” in the “fatherland.”

The band has derived their success — and scorn — by turning contemporary punk culture on its head. Where punk was once relegated to musky basements, squats and other shabby makeshift venues, Pussy Riot makes all public spaces — the streets, the metro, the church — their stage. While punk bands play for punks, Pussy Riot plays for commuters, police  and clergy. While punk bands seek fame with glamorous pseudonyms and outlandish rock star antics, Pussy Riot is masked. While punk bands engage in nihilistic lyricism, Pussy Riot’s songs are direct attacks on the confines of their authoritarian state and patriarchy. Since punk fell from the pop charts in the early ’80s, it has been sent on a quest to define and sustain its own identity, creating punk houses, venues, record stores and community centers, resulting in the introverted and self-obsessed situation of the sub-genre today. Pussy Riot does precisely the opposite.

It is fitting, then, that one conservative Russian website translated Pussy Riot to “Uprising of the Uterus.” What was once scandalized, forbidden, subaltern, rises from its rightful caste hidden and below and speaks in the very locations of its oppressing power. Who are these women, these punks, to perform, to pray, to protest in sacred locales? To desecrate is one of punk’s existential tasks. The smashing of sacred relics conjures society’s most archaic reactions: in this case, imprisonment, public shaming, flogging, concerns of Satanism, witchcraft, hysteria.

Punk has needed a Pussy Riot for so long. In many ways, it is the literal projection of the riot grrrl movement, which employed satire and third-wave theatrics to intervene in the traditionally macho and misogynist punk scene. It succeeded in creating a new type of punk — the grrl — but, until now, it had never successfully caused a riot.

Through the 2000s, bands have unsuccessfully attempted to wreck cultural terror. There was San Diego’s the Locust, who wore masks and bodysuits similar to Pussy Riot, played noisy and aggressive punk, but were not actually anonymous, nor were their lyrics directly political. The band shocked a lot of punks and sold a lot of records, but had very little cultural impact outside their genre. Black metal-heads became enamored with the “Cultural Terrorist Manifesto,” which also has had seemingly no effect. In 30 years, punk had perfected only gestures.

Perhaps part of the reason punk has begun to lash out so effectively in the former Soviet Union is the nature of the extreme oppression in Russian society. I spoke to Moscow anti-fascist Kostya about the dual dangers to the Russian anarchopunk — the right wing and the State:

I came up with the scene when it was possible to organize a strictly antifascist show, and you could be sure that only the right people will visit it. But still there was a danger of being attacked by Nazis before or after the show. Today it continues, but the situation is even worse. First of all, nobody fights with the fists, you’re more likely to be stabbed or shot with a traumatic gun. Secondly, and what is worse, there is strong oppression from the state and police. The situation in Russia isn’t stable, that’s why the government tries to control all the young people who can be dangerous today or in the future. They always try to put the same number of Nazis and anarchists in prison.

Kostya tells me Russia has its own anti-activist police force, called the “Department of Fighting Extremism.” Along with the threat of right-wingers burning down political squats or punk venues, the result has been a neutralized public face for the punk scene. All radical politics have been forced underground. It is no surprise, then, to see it return masked.

In 1977 the Ramones toured America like an Armed Struggle cadre of cultural terrorists, all dressed alike, playing the simplest and loudest music yet formulated. They not only invented punk that year, but they planted it everywhere they went. Punk’s success was its virility; reproducing with such ease that soon there were Ramones at every corner of the globe.

Reacting to increasingly technical progressive rock, the Ramones liberated the guitar to the world. Pussy Riot has taken this communization a step farther. To be a “member” of Pussy Riot, you don’t need to be able to play guitar or even to know the original band. As one member, Garadzha, told the newspaper Moskvkie Novosti: “In principle anyone can join.” You don’t even need to sing very well, she continues. “It’s punk, you just scream a lot.”

What would be the shape of punk outside the confines of the world of rock music? If Pussy Riot is any indication, it appears at scenes of intense banality or oppression. They have appeared on the catwalk, on top of a prison and of course at the altar. They sound something in between a streetpunk band (Blatz’s Fuk Shit Up is the first thing to come to mind) and an battle-worn activist giving an impassioned speech through a megaphone. The precarity of their performances gives a new spin to the typical speedy bursts of punk — the songs need to be so short because they could be apprehended any second.

Everything about the band is similarly practical. The rawness of their sound reflects the semi-improvised site-specific nature of the songs. Their masks obscure their identities from police detection. Their bombastic performance (use of fire, flares and the iconic punch-dancing) makes up for the lack of amplification. While other novel punk bands form their own stylized front against the limits of society, society’s limits seems to have fully formed Pussy Riot.

Perhaps antagonistic counterculture, once self-ghettoized within the margins of society, is beginning to coalesce into a new political form, one that transcends both its anti-social roots and the populism that activism too often demands. The Occupy movement is the most obvious example, but disruptive feminist and queer situations similar to those created by Pussy Riot have occurred in the United States over the last several years. The radical queer group Bash Back! disrupted service at a Lansing, Mich., megachurch, making out on the pulpit and dropping pro-queer flyers. Repetitive comments by law enforcement official that rape is a result of women’s attire lead to massive anti-rape and sex-positive “Slut Walk” protests last year. With a new right-wing offensive against women escalating to the withholding of contraception and forced transvaginal ultrasounds, the coalition between the church and authoritarianism is as relevant in the United States as in Russia. Could time be ripe, then, for some of the aforementioned agitators to arrange a Pussy Riot U.S. tour?

The New Inquiry is an online journal of social and cultural criticism. Every month,TNI releases a subscription-based magazine for $2, available for download in both PDF and e-reader formats. The New Inquiry Magazine, No.3: “Arguing the Web” (April, 2012) is available now! Support TNI and subscribe for $2 here.

Aside from their requisite forward-blown Bieber hair, everything about One Direction has existed since boy band time immemorial. The inoffensively pleasant sound. The carefree beach-themed videos. The roster of four or five just-distinctive-enough guys to assure vehement lunchroom battles over who qualifies as the cute one. None of that’s an accident. The boy band generally does not form organically in somebody’s garage, born of the fire inside a handful of comrades to rock the hell out.

Sure, sometimes, the group may consist of classmates, like Philly’s Boyz II Men, or siblings, like Hanson, the Jonas Brothers, the Osmonds, or the Jackson 5. But more often, the boy band is a calculated venture, designed expressly to capitalize on the nascent hormonal drives of young females. It originates when someone answers a casting call or forms a business plan. The Monkees began with an idea for a TV show about a Beatles-like quartet. Menudo managed to keep rolling for two decades thanks to an ever-changing roster of fresh boy meat brought in when the veterans aged out. The Backstreet Boys came together via a newspaper ad in Orlando, America’s cradle of theme parks and make-believe. And One Direction formed when a bunch of U.K. “X Factor” competitors pooled their resources.

To be in a boy band is to enjoy a precarious kind of fame. The adulation and the sales success are usually as fleeting as the cusp of adolescence itself. Boys become men. Even Boyz II Men become men. Sometimes, those boys go on to become a Ricky Martin or Justin Timberlake, with a thriving, mature career. Sometimes, they coast for years on their youthful moment of fame, like Bobby Brown or Nick Lachey. And sometimes, they just wind up being that guy from Color Me Badd. Yet when you’re armed with good looks, good hair and a few remedial moves, it must be a sweet ride for however long it lasts. Just this Thursday, Big Time Rush boastfully declared themselves the “Best Boy Band of All Time,” a claim that the now-lurching-toward-middle-age 98 Degrees will have to challenge when they reunite for a tour this summer.

Someday, those sweet kids from One Direction, the ones whose “What Makes You Beautiful” homage to hair-flipping is currently pushing you to climb the walls faster than the song can climb the charts, will have thinning hair and beer guts. They’ll do an oldies tour for their die-hard devotees. And by then, their older and settled former fans will understand why their moms still shout “That’s my jam!” when New Edition comes on the radio, or their grandmothers cried the day Davy Jones died. It’s because you never forget your first love. And for a lot of girls, it’s clear who that person was. It was the cute one.

What’s wrong with me?

Like many music connoisseurs whose tastes were forged in the ‘90s, I’ve long admired Built to Spill, the rare rock band that’s spent its entire career basking in the adulation of critics and fans. The New York Times once compared singer/guitarist/founder Doug Martsch to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. The band’s devotion is deserved. Even as its members settle comfortably into middle age, Built to Spill remains emblematic of a certain post-adolescent longing. Their sound is catchy, twisty and inventive, and their lyrics burst with wit and humanity. There’s every reason to like them if you like complex arrangements and blistering solos. (And if you don’t, who needs you?)

What I wonder, though, is why my devotion evolved into full-bore obsession. I mean: 406 times. Am I suffering from some psychological malady? Some neurological tic? Perhaps that sounds hysterical, but my family tree has borne a veritable bushel of obsessive, compulsive, biologically quirky fruit. And my need to listen to this band upward of three times a day approaches a kind of addictive behavior: I’ve blown off deadlines to listen to them, I’ve violated FAA takeoff regulations to listen to them, I’ve irritated my spouse and become physically uncomfortable when I can’t listen to them. It worries me. One night on my evening commute back to the Bronx, I tried to go cold turkey without the song. I lasted six subway stops before I fell off the wagon. (I imagine people at my funeral: “How’d she die?” “Built to Spill overdose,” they’ll say.) So, will I really be listening only to “Perfect From Now On” … from now on? And if so, why?

I pick up Dr. Daniel J. Levitin’s fascinating book, “This Is Your Brain on Music,” in which he describes the phenomenon of “earworms,” or songs that stick in your head. Built to Spill is stuck in my head, for sure; the difference between me and the case studies Levitin describes is that I’m OK with it – as opposed to the helpless frustration others feel when they can’t stop singing, say, the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started.” Still, the earworm theory seems applicable. “Our best explanation,” Levitin writes, “is that the neural circuits representing a song get stuck in ‘playback mode’ … it is rarely an entire song that gets stuck, but rather a piece.”

It’s true that I often turn to this album because some brief moment of it is drilling through my mind. In “Randy Described Eternity,” I can hear the opening with its clean, quiet guitar, which peals out two alternating notes in a cadence reminiscent of a car alarm. I can hear another guitar entering, descending mournfully and then repeating, like the melody is crumbling and rebuilding itself. Most of Built to Spill’s albums are composed of disparate chunks like these, expertly stitched together.

Levitin also confirms a relationship between earworms and obsessive-compulsive disorder: “In some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects,” he writes. To shed some light on the OCD question, I make my way to that most trusted of diagnostic tools: the Internet quiz. Am I plagued with the fear that I might accidentally harm my family members? No. Do I have excessive religious thoughts? No. Do I worry that I might be infected with a disease? Well, just OCD. After six questionnaires — including the industry standard Yale-Brown (Y-BOCS) Obsessive Compulsive Scale — give me a relatively clean bill of health, I finally relax.

If my fixation isn’t neurological, maybe it’s psychological. This record makes me feel so much — joy, pain, amusement, nostalgia for a bygone time. Perhaps this last one is key. Built to Spill’s recent albums are fantastic, but I’ve chosen to fixate on one that sounds distinctly like the ‘90s, a time before the specter of terrorism, when TV’s only reality show aimed to teach people tolerance (I refer, of course, to “The Real World”). Maybe this is happening because I’m about to turn 30; there’s nothing like a milestone birthday to send one into a thumb-sucking state of regression. Maybe it’s significant that May 2011, the month this insanity began, was the same month I published my first novel, an anxiety-provoking time. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Adulthood is often terrifying, and “Perfect From Now On” is a cozy escape to my teenage years, when I would lie in bed with a Discman and listen to this band through foam headphones, Doug Martsch’s voice in my ear like he was speaking solely to me.

Trying to identify the root of my behavior, there is one more source I have in mind. So one night, while wandering Built to Spill’s rather unkempt website, I dash off an interview request. I didn’t really think it would work. When a nice woman from Warner Bros. emails to arrange the call, I’m beset with cold sweats. I have no idea what to ask. Or what I hope to accomplish. But then I finally hear his voice on the call, actually talking to me alone: Doug Martsch.

“I am fucking loving this,” he says, once I’ve explained my situation. “What is it you’re listening to?”

When I tell him, his voice deflates. Wrong answer, I guess. I ask which record is his favorite.

“The last two are listenable,” he says. “The earlier stuff I can’t deal with.”

“Wow.”

“It’s just not my cup of tea. I listened to ‘Perfect From Now On’ a few years ago and couldn’t get through it. The singing is too precious.”

“So when I said I love that record, did you judge me?”

“Of course,” he jokes. “I thought you had really bad taste.” He’s so nice and down-to-earth, I forget to be nervous. “You know, I have no idea what you hear when you put on a Built to Spill record. I have no idea how you relate to it, what it means to you, what it sounds like at all.”

“When you like something,” I ask, “do you like it obsessively?”

“Not really,” he says. “My method is to savor things. If I’m obsessed with a song, I’ll put it away. And then I’ll be like, Oh, that’ll be nice when my iPod chooses that song.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea to meet your idols?” I ask.

“If you like normal people,” he says.

“Have you ever had a memorable experience meeting a fan?”

“Not really,” he says. “Most Built to Spill fans aren’t all that rabid. Except you. If I ever get that question again, you’ll be the answer.”

After we hang up, I email him my address, since he’s offered to send recordings of his old punk outfit, the Treepeople, and the covers record he and some friends made under the name Boise Cover Band, “so you never have to listen to anything else again,” he says. I take the subway home, and as usual, pull out my iPod and press play in the same spot. Not even Martsch’s own distaste for his album is enough to sour my devotion to it.

A week later, a package arrives. Along with the two CDs, there’s a note that begins, “Hope I didn’t tease you too much,” and ends, “♥ Doug.” (Reader, I framed it.) My husband and I play Treepeople and experience an echo of the not unpleasant psychic agita that punk rock inspired in us in high school, when we came by our angst more honestly. The album is fresh and immediate. Then we try Boise Cover Band’s “Unoriginal Artists,” a collection of obscure R&B, spacey ballads, and such classics as the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang” and Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” all rendered with care and consistency in tender Martsch-ese. But there’s a moment during the song “I Love You More” when Martsch goes into panty-dropping doo-wop mode — “My pretty baby,” he wails, “my little darlin’…” — that makes me audibly gasp. This is swoon music. I feel the same vertiginous sensation I experienced the first time I ate a soft shell crab, or saw a Coen brothers film, or met my husband — an “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” feeling.

Weeks pass. I don’t touch “Perfect From Now On.” The play count for “Unoriginal Artists” is 76 (though ask me again in an hour), but it seems something has shaken me from my mania. A friend recommends St. Vincent, and I give her a listen; a bookstore where I’m shopping plays Hall and Oates, and I get deep into it; one morning I revisit Animal Collective’s “Strawberry Jam” and feel like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years.

Then again, “Unoriginal Artists” is playing as I type, as it has been for most of the day. I listened to Treepeople in the car last Saturday and bought their other albums. I also bought (and adore) Martsch’s solo album, “Now You Know.” When I learned recently that Built to Spill would be touring again after a hiatus, I scrambled to buy tickets; when I read that they’d likely release an album this year or next, I leapt for joy.

I’ve abandoned the worry that there’s something wrong with my brain or my psyche. As best as I can figure, the absurd adage that we each have a soul mate is actually true — except not about people, just music. Maybe I’m just lucky enough to have found the songs that are the most in tune with who I am and what I want to feel and they happen to come from the same artist. However monogamous my musical taste has become, maybe the lesson here is simply that — to invoke the title of another of Doug Martsch’s fine records — there’s nothing wrong with love.

The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) –  from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of  “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.

What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?

In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.

I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.

In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?

Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history  —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.

But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.

Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.

I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.

I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.

In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.

I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime”  is pretty good too. [laughs]

Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?

It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.

What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.

How did you start?

I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.

I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”

There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.

Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?

I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.

In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.

You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?

How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.

I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.

Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.

Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.

In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?

They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.