The Importance of Brian Eno

You’ve probably heard of Brian Eno, though I doubt you can recite his full name (it’s Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno). He’s been in the news recently as a producer of U2’s latest album No Line on the Horizon, and he has famously produced five other U2 albums (including The Joshua Tree), three Talking Heads albums (including Remain in Light), and Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. He’s also collaborated with artists such as David Bowie and Nico, and in the 70s played synth in the band Roxy Music. And he composed the startup sound for Microsoft Windows 95 (using an Apple Macintosh computer).

Quite a resume. Eno has clearly made an imprint on the development of popular music over the last several decades. Yet what I find most interesting about Eno is the way in which he served as a liaison between avant-garde classical music and popular music. Before he produced U2 and Talking Heads, he dug the music of John Cage and La Monte Young, and attended concerts by minimalist masters Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Eno was an avant-garde composer himself. His landmark 1978 Ambient I/Music for Airports led him to be dubbed the father of ambient music. You’ll never hear it on the radio, but Eno’s ambient music is worth a listen, if only to hear traces of future popular music. Here is "Music for Airports 2-1":

Brian Eno - Music for Airports 2-1 (YSI) (filesavr)

Even if you only made it through 15 seconds, you can hear that it sounds a bit like the intro to U2’s "Where the Streets Have No Name." And as electronic music has found its way into the mainstream over the last several years, it has brought with it more traces of Eno’s pioneering ambient work—in the soaring sonic landscape of Merriweather Post Pavilion, or in the swirling synth beats of Cut Copy.

Brian Eno’s chameleon-like ability to fit into both avant-garde and pop culture is remarkable, and he has done music a great service by successfully incorporating the timbres of avant-garde electronic music into the popular realm. Here are a couple of tracks that show a few different sides of Eno. First, “Virginia Plain” from Roxy Music, the track that first brought Eno to fame in 1972. Then, “Crosseyed and Painless” from Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (1980), and, finally U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” from The Joshua Tree (1987).

Roxy Music - Virginia Plain (YSI) (filesavr)
Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless (YSI) (filesavr)
U2 - Where the Streets Have No Name (YSI) (filesavr)