Brian Eno’s 1977 Before and After Science.
Funny, it’s been years since I’ve listened to Eno’s Before and After Science and now that a friend and classmate got me rotating it again I’m realizing how possibly funny (even anachronistic) this album is relative to its chronological position in Eno’s discography.
Before and After came out, well, after what can be considered his premiere ambient work, Discreet Music, and a good five or six albums after both the pinnacle (IMHO) of his pop-ambient fusion era–if not his career–Another Green World, and well after his early, post-Roxy Eno-pop-as-only-Eno-can-pop albums like Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
Before and After came out after Eno’s 1975 Evening Star.
OK, I’ve now listened to almost the whole album again and more than ever it’s like a slightly weaker Another Green but wow, I just realized even Evening Star, that indulgent Frippitronic romp, came in between Eno’s pop phase and what would become his mainstay: rock-producing (Devo, U2), ambient-generating (Music For Films, Airports, etc.), alternative collaborating (My Life In, etc.).
So I’m trying to put myself in the position of an early Eno fan, buying up his LPs as they came down the pipe in the late 70s, and what I might think of Before and After based on what I’d been rotating for the past five years. It’s like, you often want to call an artist out when they’re not doing what you think is their job, that hypocritical, paradoxical stance most fans take whereby the artist must both progress beyond their previous work (no rehashing of the tried and true) yet not alienate their fan base and sell out to whatever we define that to be (another, larger fan base; the lowest common pop-chart denominator, etc.).
I once read (I think in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point) that personalities are actually really complex, constantly-evolving and contradictory things despite our tendency to view them as immutable and, should they stray beyond their usual boundaries, attribute such variance to external factors or, worse, that that person is trying to fit in somewhere–or with someone–they don’t belong. I would add that where someone’s personality belongs is often a factor of where others think it belongs.
And so I’m trying, in Eno’s case and perhaps with many other artists I admire (I could equally apply this little essay to Radiohead, Talking Heads, Tool) we can view an artist’s output as a reflection and/or interpretation of his/her personality and any deviation from the norm is yet another facet of that personality.
At the moment I at least find it interesting that Before and After came out when it did. A little bubble, and looking back on his output, a final taste of Eno’s quirk.
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