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Rating: The wheel? Nobody knows... The light bulb? Edison... The theory of relativity? Einstein... Modern psychoanalysis? Sigmund Freud... The printing press? Gutenberg... The first man on the moon? Armstrong... Modern sonic contamination? Brian Eno and David Byrne! An exaggeration? I don't think so.
Background: it's 1981 and I'm in my favorite record store, asking the clerk, a former hippie, what's recently come out that’s interesting (yes, unlike now when you can just type into Google...). Besides Bob Marley’s "Uprising", he pulls out from under the counter this vinyl with a spectral cover that looks like the manifesto of a neo-Dada movement. I turn it over and over in my hands, and looking at the names, I get ready to spend my 3500 lire of allowance, turmoil and doubts swirling in my mind. Eno, the ambient guru, with Byrne, the rhythm genius?! Would it be a waste? (There were no samples back then...).
The first 30 seconds of the needle on the black plastic was enough for me to realize that "something was happening." Those 30 seconds held the moments that changed "my" perception of music! It was something big that even I couldn't explain; I suddenly felt the world had begun to accelerate and move at a different rhythm, and everything I'd listened to before not only seemed "old" and outdated but, for better or worse, would never be the same again.
A record that came from the future and foretold its changes: syncopated rhythms and Arabic chants recorded and mixed together, strange 3/4 compositions with ancestral melodies contrasting with electronic singing, often scratched or remounted "out of sync" on multiple levels... I mean: what on earth was happening? Electronics meeting spirituality?! Where were the "songs"? What was this strange mix of electronics, world music, trance, and experimentation? Where did these two come from and, above all: WHERE HAD THEY BEEN BEFORE? I flipped the cover looking in vain for the few liner notes, hoping for an explanation, a caption, but... nothing, just a few technical lines and nothing more. But how: they're making a cultural revolution and say nothing? no declaration, no manifesto or anything?!
So, little by little, this album took over my room, my universe, slowly and inexorably: the "new world" advanced and was contaminating my ears, my way of enjoying music, my approach to the future and finally, a few months after my 18th birthday, I understood.
I understood that the world was moving towards the contamination of genres, in the arts, in painting, in literature, and precisely in music... this album gave me a cultural "click" and from then on, I better understood, and in some respects slightly ahead of time, that the art of crossover, remix, the fusion of genres would be the true cornerstone of the coming decades.
Epilogue: in the years to come, new genres and new bands would emerge but, in my small way, I understood that the core, the first atom, in short, everything had started from this album. No musical work was ever so prophetic. No album was ever so enlightening.
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