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A review by aleffert
Brian Eno's Another Green World by Geeta Dayal
4.0
This is a little book about Brian Eno's album Another Green World.
I didn't really know much about Brian Eno before picking this up except that he was kind of legendary, and involved in a whole bunch of things, most notably to me, working with the Talking Heads. I picked this book up because when the author was a college student I took a class she taught for local high school students titled "Intellectual Hodgepodge." The main topics I remember were rock music and neuroscience. I have a very vivid memory of an explanation of how SSRIs (like prozac) work and watching some REM videos. I forget exactly how I stumbled on this, but sometimes I'll see her byline somewhere like Wired and think, that is pretty cool.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I didn't give a crap about this album until I picked up this book. Before I actually sat down and read it, I listened to the album a number of times and I was pleasantly surprised. I have a lot of trouble listening to stuff that's too ambient, but there were enough vocal tracks that I never felt lost and the whole thing is a pretty enjoyable and textured experience.
Having read this book, I don't feel like I learned anything deeply insightful about the album. It actually spends relatively little time on the album itself and more on Eno's working style and the stuff he produced around the album on both sides, positioning it as a sort of transitional work. Transitional in a foundational way, not in a wishy washy way. But reading about Eno's process was super interesting, his general sense of playfulness and exploration and the weird things he would do in that direction, like the time he was working with David Bowie and brought in characters for everyone in the band to play from the perspective of. Or the oblique strategies cards, which I was previously vaguely familiar with.
I didn't really know much about Brian Eno before picking this up except that he was kind of legendary, and involved in a whole bunch of things, most notably to me, working with the Talking Heads. I picked this book up because when the author was a college student I took a class she taught for local high school students titled "Intellectual Hodgepodge." The main topics I remember were rock music and neuroscience. I have a very vivid memory of an explanation of how SSRIs (like prozac) work and watching some REM videos. I forget exactly how I stumbled on this, but sometimes I'll see her byline somewhere like Wired and think, that is pretty cool.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I didn't give a crap about this album until I picked up this book. Before I actually sat down and read it, I listened to the album a number of times and I was pleasantly surprised. I have a lot of trouble listening to stuff that's too ambient, but there were enough vocal tracks that I never felt lost and the whole thing is a pretty enjoyable and textured experience.
Having read this book, I don't feel like I learned anything deeply insightful about the album. It actually spends relatively little time on the album itself and more on Eno's working style and the stuff he produced around the album on both sides, positioning it as a sort of transitional work. Transitional in a foundational way, not in a wishy washy way. But reading about Eno's process was super interesting, his general sense of playfulness and exploration and the weird things he would do in that direction, like the time he was working with David Bowie and brought in characters for everyone in the band to play from the perspective of. Or the oblique strategies cards, which I was previously vaguely familiar with.