the heat
“The temperature’s rising,” Brian Eno sang. Out of the ten tracks on Eno’s debut solo record Here Come the Warm Jets, released in 1974, the third track, “Baby’s on Fire,” has always held me hypnotized. The song’s “plot,” such as it is: an unnamed woman on fire, papped by giggling onlookers, Eno crooning out her plight with a barely contained sneer — and then that guitar solo, three-and-a-half minutes of Robert Fripp freaking the fuck out over the steady cacophony of the song’s two (count ’em, two) chords. Fripp was no stranger to violent and surreal art rock: the opening track of his band King Crimson’s debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, released five years earlier, declaims “innocents raped with / napalm fire” over a set of accelerating free jazz riffs. The temperature in the 1960s and 1970s was no doubt rising, if metaphorically — meteorological data suggests that summers in the United States and Europe were if anything a bit cooler during those years compared to pre-industrial averages — but politically and socially, the heat was on.
“Baby’s on Fire” opens with a pounding, slightly wobbly bass line from John Wetton, another King Crimson alumnus, who was also a member of Roxy Music with Eno. The strength of Wetton’s attack on the string threatens to take the A flat down a semitone, while around it skittering hi hats barely keep the time. From its opening seconds, the song’s coming apart at the seams. Eno’s vocals enter along with the synths, but neither offer any further relief — staccato pulsing drives the pace inexorably forward, the song never quite accelerating but always threatening to. The lyrics are mean. It’s not a particularly erudite characterization but I can’t think of a better word for it. Baby is burning, although she doesn’t seem to mind, as we all “look at her laughing / like a heifer to the slaughter.” The wind picks up, not to snuff the flames but to stoke them. “Lend some assistance / to the object”: what is that assistance? Not relief, but intensity — brighter flames for a better picture.
And the guitar solo. It’s the song’s centerpiece by far, so much so that it threatens (perhaps succeeds) at stealing focus from our burning Baby — or perhaps rather the solo is her, the flames, the photos, the whole mise-en-scene. Fripp claims he had the flu while he recorded it, and it’s true, there’s something sick about it. It rises and falls like a fever. It’s unsettled, unsettling — and Eno’s “guitar treatments” (as the liner notes credit him) only destabilize the matter further. After a minute or so of winding lines, Fripp hunkers down into coiled trills, which Eno echoes off themselves. You can hear a foreshadowing of the musique concrète that would characterize Eno’s next few albums — Discreet Music, Ambient 1, Music for Films — albeit with a violence few tracks on those albums dare to approach.
For a song so thoroughly about image, I’m struck by how much runtime Eno cedes to sonic abstraction. But what is there to be said, in the end, about a person on fire? Eleven years before “Baby’s on Fire,” Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức self-immolated on a street in Saigon in protest of the Catholic South Vietnamese government. American journalist Malcolm Browne’s photograph of Đức’s act won several awards; the Vietnam War would continue for another twelve years. In an interview with the BBC in the mid-1990s, Browne said, “[Đức] had a packet of matches in his lap. He struck one of them and instantly he was enveloped in flame. I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting. And that protected me from the horror of the thing.” Eno’s delivery shares, if not Browne’s horror, then at least the desire for some kind of distance from the act. A thick syrup of snotty irony, layers of electronic manipulation — one way or another, we’re held at arm’s length from Baby, watching her burn.
I’ve spent the week in Washington, DC, where I still live for a bit longer while we complete some renovations on our house in Baltimore. Here, as in much of the country east of the Rockies, the temperature is rising. A heat and humidity wave, caused by a dome of high atmospheric pressure over the Midwest drifting eastward, is going to drive temperatures to dangerous heights this weekend. And the energy in the city matches. Things are burning and it feels like all we can do is watch.
I hope wherever this letter finds you you’re staying cool and safe. No bird report this week; I’ve spent much of it inside on a series of sprints at my workplace. I’ll let Eno play us off: