1975: Another Green World, Brian Eno
By A.C. Howard
It’s hard to write about music that you think is about gender dysphoria; especially if the person who made that music never came out as trans. It feels presumptuous, or like you’re talking about someone’s business out of turn. But Brian Eno’s music was the soundtrack to my most intense moments of gender dysphoria, and it’s hard for me to think that those pop records could be about anything else.
With Eno, you have this person who gets involved with Roxy Music and stands out like a sore thumb against the masculinity of the rest of the band. On the inside jacket of their eponymous debut album, Eno is walking a different walk, with a fur vest, a painted nail and a flair for electronics. When he leaves the band, he doesn’t stray too far from the pop song as a form, but he does draw something uniquely him from it. His solo pop material is triumphant, quirky, and frequently discordant. Eno explored the pop song format with a blue eye shadow and a twist of lemon, giving listeners a lot to love.
His record Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) is perfection; unique and strange, with tongue in cheek vocals. When Eno starts making a pop song, the first ingredient he reaches for is catchy. I started listening to Taking Tiger Mountain during my senior year of college. I knew a bit about Eno by then - as a freshman, “I’ll Come Running,” was one of my favorite songs, but I didn’t dive in more deeply at the time. It wasn’t until later, when I was running with a crowd who listened to a lot of CAN, that his music became the soundtrack to a time and place. Almost everyone who I was close with at that time has come out of the closet now. Queerness silently filled the cracks in those relationships. Me and my best friend would listen to “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” and dance around their hip apartment on Wednesdays, when neither of us had class. I played “The Great Pretender,” for a married guy who I was sleeping with, and then never saw him again. I was dreading the end of school, unsure of what would become of me when I was thrust into a new context. I had a foreboding feeling that I was about to lose everything.
Right out of college I lived alone in a small town in coastal Maine, in a bachelor pad one bedroom where I hung all my Brian Eno records up on the living room wall as decoration. Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain, and Another Green World, a round and perfect trilogy. In that little apartment, I waited out the 2020 lockdown and came out as queer, to myself and everyone else. I enjoyed a few months in the sunshine before starting the hard work of getting to know myself. In the process I found language for my transness, found stories and writers I loved, and destroyed my closest relationships. The mold that I had for my life was not working for me, and to explore something new, I had to change my relationship to my gender: the form that had kept me together for years.
I recently had a Brian Eno craving for the first time in a while, and my attention shifted towards Another Green World; an album that finds someone struggling against a familiar form, in search of a new kind of expression. The record starts with a jolting introduction, “Sky Saw,” a warmup
for all the different ideas at play in the album: looping, percussive, and warped sounds, with lyrics that fold themselves gracefully into the arrangement. “Over Fire Island,” opens up some space - lets us explore this new type of music that Brian is interested in. Then, jumbled clockwork gracefully j-curves into the Blue August Moon of “Saint Elmo’s Fire.” Later, the gentle, hopeful, and spacious “The Big Ship,” prologues into my old favorite, “I’ll Come Running.” The two songs are mirrors of each other - Eno trying the new thing, and then trying to fit it into the old mold.
Another Green World is a famously interesting part of Eno’s creative development; he had already made an ambient record, Discreet Music, with Robert Fripp. Afterward, he would try the pop form again on Before and After Science, considered by many to be a skippable entry in his catalog. But on Green World, he grapples between the two expressions/two-minute songs, lyrics sometimes, but with atmosphere and experimentation as a priority. In the attempt to help these two forms live together, he creates a beautiful place for contemplation.
In these pop songs that Brian is constructing, I can’t help but hear him trying to cram huge ideas into a form that people might understand. Making his music legible and recognizable to the people who loved the way he was, while trying to show them the person you’re interested in becoming. It reminds me of the times when I was trying to push myself out of a gender that wasn’t really doing it for me.
Eno moved from glam rock star to musical mad scientist, hanging up his blue eye shadow in favor of a sensible pair of glasses. He’s an uncredited backup singer on lots of pop work these days, still using a voice that he lovingly describes as thin. I heard an interview where he awkwardly side steps questions about when he used to wear women’s clothes.
Lately I am most drawn to his song “Golden Hours.” The plooping, percussive synths propelling a character forward, somehow, through still feeling time, with the clack of a typewriter reminding us that weeks are passing. “I can’t see the lines/I used to think I could read between.” For me, this song contains the thesis question at the center of the record. Who am I, and where am I going?
BIO: A.C. Howard is a writer and zinemaker who lives in Maine with their leopard gecko, Nero.