BOHANNON: “Gittin’ Off” (Gittin’ Off LP, Dakar, 1975)TALKING HEADS: “Stay Hungry” (More Songs about Buildings and Food LP, Sire, 1978)

I “I’m going to predict,” Hua said, as we strolled down College Avenue, squinting against the warm April sunset, “that dinner will involve a stew. Or some kind of bean. Maybe lentils.” He’d loosened the knot of his tie; I carried a bottle of wine in the crook of my arm. Across the street, our colleagues’ pollen-dusted, Obama-stickered Saabs and Subarus filled driveways, an art historian weeded a bed of tulips, and a Victorianist’s kids colored sidewalk squares with pastel chalk. On this side, vintage ten-speeds were chained to rotting porches, and beer bottles cluttered the lawns of dank rental houses. A bearded kid pedaled past us on a creaking bike—one hand gripping the handlebars, the other a paper cup of coffee.Two graduating seniors—our former students—had invited us to dinner. They’d booked Dirty Projectors, Cause Co-Motion, Mika Miko, High Places, and a bunch of other then-up-and-coming bands for packed shows in their off-campus living room as well as for the basement bar in the student center. Their snappy e-mail messages included reports such as this one: “I’m obligated to tell you that you missed an awesome outdoor show last night. Lau Nau and Teeth Mountain were transcendent…under a full moon atop Sunset Lake.…” Or this: “I’m going to New York this weekend…to see these excellent SF groovers named Tussle. Two drummers, keys, and bass—really on a shaggy Kraut tip.” Their stances and pronouncements seemed simultaneously sarcastic and earnest, and often, ultimately, indecipherable—which was probably the intent.They served us a chickpea curry, so Hua was right on both counts; they offered us some of their own homemade pickles from a jar they fetched from their basement. A moth fell from the ceiling onto Hua’s plate; he plucked it out and kept eating. These two students reminded Hua and me of ourselves at their age—brimming with wacky ideas, way too invested in obscure music. When we imagined them outside of class, they read either architecture theory books or grimy inherited copies of Please Kill Me while listening to Gang Gang Dance LPs. Still, despite their reputations as hipsters’ hipsters on campus, they professed to hate indie bands and the indie scene, though they played in a two-drummers-with-tape-loops “project.” As we ate our curry, one of them admitted his current musical affections: late-period Fleetwood Mac, and the Police. “I’m really into ’80s production values right now,” he told us.When the floating signifier “indie”—an invented-as-it-happened DIY model that once indicated an oppositional stance to “corporate rock”—appears as a genre option in iTunes, and when most of Apple’s millions of customers understand that term as it pertains to sound and style rather than economics, it’s impossible to blame students for seeking cool elsewhere. Cool often involves obscurity, impenetrability—the initiate’s secret dialect and knowledge, both safe from popular appeal because of the time and effort put into acquiring them; the records pressed only in minuscule quantities for those in the know. But once everything was born again online, few corners of pop culture remained obscure, and cool became merely a matter of knowing which search terms to input. Irony’s always sufficed as a safe refuge when you feel your subculture’s overrun, but when irony-as-subculture itself becomes overrun, I guess you head for “Gypsy” and “Little Lies” and “Synchronicity II.” Since the mid-1990s, if not earlier, indie music has been mainstreamed and commodified in all the usual ways—to sell us itself as product as well as whatever junk it accompanies—but also in its transformation from music you once would’ve played to piss off your mom to gentle background noise your mom hears at Starbucks or Gap and decides she likes, even though it’s a little quirky. The music of indie bands like Scratch Acid cannot sell lattés, but the music of indie bands like Vampire Weekend can.Somehow our dinner conversation about the Police and ’80s studio techniques turned into a pop quiz, and though I once enjoyed those first two Police records just fine and, like everyone in the ’80s, was traumatized by “Every Breath You Take,” I somehow failed to correctly answer my student’s questions: I transposed the two LPs “Driven to Tears” and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” came from, or something crucial like that. The next part of the interrogation—Hua had rolled up his shirtsleeves and stolen a cigarette from the pack on the table, and grinned at me through a haze of smoke—concerned my favorite Talking Heads record.“Probably More Songs about Buildings and Food,” I answered.“Josh! That’s so rockist. What about Remain in Light?”“It’s a really great record,” I said.“You’re too into guitars. It’s all about the groove,” my student said, and now I had no idea how many layers there were to his sarcasm.I’d once given this student a CD-R featuring bands like Bubblegum Splash!, the Shop Assistants, Brilliant Corners, and the Pooh Sticks after he said “I hate that C-86 shit,” and, ever since, music had been our proving ground. Now he defended noise-gated drums and glossy synth overdubs as a protest against the indie trope of intentionally scuzzy recordings. The questions ended when Hua and I couldn’t identify the producers of certain ’80s LPs he deemed exceptional. We’d enjoyed the meal and the company, but, as we stepped into the suddenly chilly night, Hua turned to me and sighed, “Man. I didn’t learn everything I needed to be cool from Wikipedia.”“It felt like they prepped for us with flash cards,” I admitted.Cool, of course, requires apparent effortlessness, the disguising of one’s sources and influences, and as much as we like to pretend it’s innate, no one’s been cool in a vacuum: as a performed critique of social norms, cool demands an audience. I left Hua at his place, then kept walking home, thinking of David Byrne’s murmured lyrics in “Houses in Motion,” from Remain in Light, about the effort and study and ambition involved in becoming cool: “For a long time I felt / without style and grace / Wearing shoes with no socks / in cold weather / I knew my heart / was in the right place / I knew I’d be able / to do these things…” No, Hua and I didn’t learn cool from hyperlinks and MP3 blogs—though, had those options existed back in the day, I’m sure we would have relied on them—but we still learned cool.My student thought More Songs about Buildings and Food was a rock record, but the second half of “Stay Hungry” offers an epic disco shuffle that, had the band sustained it for another five minutes, would’ve choked dancefloors as easily as that year’s other CBGBs-gone-disco hybrid, “Heart of Glass.” Does anything on the busier, syncopated Remain in Light “groove” this much? Not to my ears. “I’m Not in Love” has its own stomper moments, though it’s wound too tightly to say it grooves. “Warning Sign” borrows its rhythms and its tape effects from dub reggae. And the album’s best-known song, “Take Me to the River,” is an Al Green cover. The bass-, keyboard-, and drum-driven funk so overwhelms the twitchy guitar on these tracks that I wondered whether my student even knew the record, or if he was making his argument based on something he’d gleaned online. IIBefore Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth messed around with congas in Nassau, before Brian Eno and David Byrne got lost in the Bush of Ghosts, before Talking Heads decided to cut a record inspired by Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac, before Jerry Harrison hired Bernie Worrell, Nona Hendryx, and Busta Jones to lend some plausibility to the band’s new direction, before David Byrne tried his hand at rapping, someone in the band clearly fell hard for Hamilton Bohannon’s records.Bohannon played drums with a pre-superstar Jimi Hendrix, joined the young Stevie Wonder’s band, arranged a number of Motown’s hits, then started his own group in early-’70s Detroit and released six disco-struck funk LPs for Dakar between 1973 and 1976 before signing with Mercury and turning exclusively to disco. “No one has taken ‘groove’ as literally as Bohannon,” according to Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, which names him “Motown’s greatest rhythm mechanic.” When my friends Jed and Claire first played Bohannon for me, I was gobsmacked by how precisely his records sounded like Talking Heads, despite appearing earlier—the intro to 1976’s “Dance Your Ass Off” and the intro to 1975’s “Feel Good at Midnight,” with their repeating guitar riffs and jerky rhythms, might as well have come from Fear of Music or More Songs about Buildings and Food. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz later encoded this debt in their band Tom Tom Club’s elaborately allusive “Genius of Love”—itself now an endlessly sampled cultural touchstone—but Bohannon remains an overlooked figure. The best songs on his mid-’70s LPs—such as the massive “Gittin’ Off”—all have the same nervous urgency of the early Talking Heads, the same heavy pulse, the same popping basslines, the same scratchy, bent-string guitar licks: the main distinctions are the disco violins in some of Bohannon’s songs, and the timbre of his voice compared to Byrne’s—though Bohannon’s voice anticipates Byrne’s earnestness, if not his lyrical obscurity. It’s impossible to listen to these records and not hear the ways Talking Heads lifted bits of them.Such pilfering forms the foundation of rock music: white musicians repurposing African-American blues for white audiences is foremost among the genre’s complex origins. Talking Heads’ appropriations of Bohannon during the late ’70s didn’t sanitize the music so much as defamiliarize it by displacing it into the context of deliberately uptight, ironic, “witty,” white art school grads. And, with cool, context is key. Bohannon’s music connotes something entirely different when he sings “Make a lotta noise, make a whole lotta noise!” or “I’m tryin’ to get to the floor / I gotta let myself go” than when, accompanying much the same sounds, David Byrne sputters “Look over there! …A dry ice factory / A good place to get some thinking done.”The postures of cool always involve some violence—at least, when those postures strip a cultural artifact of the cultural influences that produced it, when they modify that artifact to suit other aspirations (as, e.g., Bruce Springsteen learned when President Reagan tried to benefit from “Born in the U.S.A.” during his 1984 re-election campaign). Talking Heads made some great records by marrying a faux-naïve worldview to faux-naïve funk; still, I see their five-or-so-year trajectory from the studied eccentricities of their ’77 LP to the studied new wave Afro-funk of 1980’s Remain in Light as Borgesian. In Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known piece, “Borges and I,” the first person narrator (in the James E. Irby translation) describes the terrors both of fame’s public persona and the known, bounded set of tastes we often construe as “identity,” and his attempts to escape them: as those tastes are usurped by (and attributed to) “the one called Borges,” the narrator must “imagine other things,” until eventually his “life is a flight and [he] lose[s] everything and everything belongs to oblivion.”Our varied senses of cool engineer the willed construction of our public personae, personae in flight from what we see as mass tastes—because pop music belongs to everyone, and to oblivion, but we want to see ourselves as unique individuals. Cool can’t suffer much competition in the form of widespread admiration—which leads the narrator of “Borges and I” to abandon such reasonable pleasures as “the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson” because Borges shares them “in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor” (what a poseur!), and which leads my former students to pretend—or, who knows, to believe—that they like schlocky easy-listening pop. Cool derives from an emotional detachment, and we often need such a defense mechanism when even the farthest reaches of the pop-cultural multiverse have been colonized, when our tastes are data-mined and marketed back to us by corporations, and when asserting our individuality requires imaginative gyrations. Like cool, pop music cannot exist in a vacuum; endlessly referential, from the level of the riff to the level of the rip-off, pop depends on our familiarities with its basic forms, and our willingness to see the slightest distinctions as meaningful. That said, there is a meaningful distinction in the slight differences between Bohannon’s groove (“The Groove I Feel,” side one, Dance Your Ass Off LP) and Talking Heads’ groove (“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around”): I’d call it self-consciousness.____ Joshua Harmon's The Annotated Mix-Tape will be published next year by Dzanc Books. Other essays from the book appear in Best Music Writing 2012, The Believer, New England Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere. He is also the author of two books of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie and Scape; a novel, Quinnehtukqut; and a collection of short fiction, History of Cold Seasons, also forthcoming from Dzanc.