u/Suspicious-Yogurt480

There certainly must’ve been something in the air in 1980 to do with Afrobeats, polyrhythmic music, and wild, soaring guitar solos played over them. Anyone familiar with Talking Heads Remain in Light will hear Adrian Belew’s wild playing on The Great Curve (and Listening Wind) for example, and you might even be forgiven for thinking that it sounds something like it’s aping RF’s guitar solos on Bowie’s Scary Monsters of the same year. But let’s not forget also that Adrian had played on Lodger as well. At any rate, my speculation is, does Adrian take this Afrobeat polyrhythmic influence he’s picked up in the air to this new outfit with KC, saying hey we’ve got some really cool things going on in the world of polyrhythms, unusual expressive percussion, some great following to play over fundamental groove music, etc. Does anyone believe there could be a connection here that Adrian took some of these ideas and carried them forward to work on them with Levin and Bruford, and here is where RF sees an opportunity to turn it into some demented exercise of working out 19/20 time signatures etc?
This is sheer speculation of course, I have no idea if this theory has any merit. Has anyone else wondered if there’s a connection between what was happening in this sequence of albums among these artists in this circle of embracing Afrobeat and polyrhythmic styles from 1979 to 1981?

TL; DR
Glasheen all but trashes ‘helps’ on FW like Campbell’s Skeleton Key because she alleges they keep readers from reading FW itself.

Adeline Glasheen’s tireless diversion-turned-career in crashing the Ivory Tower and building her own legacy within FW scholarship is impressive enough (her academic credentials stop at MA in English), and no one denies she was an organized and insightful private scholar, the likes of which are sadly diminishing among the ‘Learnéd lay readership.’ Besides which she enviously kept up correspondence with a wide array of fellow travelers from Thornton Wilder to Hugh Kenner, and her correspondence with the latter have now been published for those interested.
These prefatory observations are to contextualize an interesting observation she makes in the introduction to the FW Third Census, already acknowledging the indispensable nature of Hart’s concordance, here directed at Campbell’s Skeleton Key: she all but laments the fact that works like that, among other works of ‘decoding’ or summarising (as far as could even be done) do a disservice to the reading public, because, perhaps not unlike Cliff’s, Spark’s, or Monarch’s, NOTES keep the reader away from engaging with the text itself. IOW, those turning to Campbell for a ‘synopsis’ have now (she says in so many words ) accepted this to be the way forward without the work of engaging with FW directly. Added to this is that they (readers of Campbell) are also getting Campbell’s tendentious (my word, not hers) approach to isolating certain themes and motifs that fit into his larger vision of how μύθος (mythos in the broadest sense) actually fit together and ‘function’ synchronically, concepts which have met their share of criticism in and outside of academia.
The open question is, does Glasheen make a valid point and should works like JC’s Skeleton Key be jettisoned by those looking for something other than ‘one arbitrary reading decided upon by Joseph Campbell’ at the expense of a text that specifically encourages holding multivalency of meaning?
As far removed I am from the academy at this point it’s hard to shake its argot, so I hope this summary hasn’t been as muddled
as I fear it might be.

Was listening to the soundtrack again recently, and I was thinking about how downbeat this story concludes, like a reality check on multiple levels. In his commentary on the original DVD, Richard O’Brien talks about how a production of the Brecht play the Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui had been an influence on his take of the themes visited here at the time of the musical’s composition in the early 1970s. in a nutshell this is Brecht’s 1941 play which is an allegory about the rise of Hitler through corruption and violence, how forces of fascistic control sought to suppress freedom on all levels. Of course the Nazi’s designation of any works of art or literature labeled ‘decadent’ and censored is easily brought to mind in the context of a musical that is at once meant to describe sexual liberation, especially that which would be considered deviant or illicit.
So when in the Reprise we hear “Darkness has conquered Brad and Janet”, not long after the paean to Super Heroes, a bittersweet ode of disillusionment, is O’Brien suggesting that this is what’s in store for those struggling to live in sexual freedom, that the forces of Darkness in the form of societal and political oppression will conquer (for now) those looking to express themselves with abandon, or is it a cautionary tale that “excess” is a trap of decadence that is always doomed to fail? Which seems to me both ironic and fairly downbeat in the context of this musical especially. Lost in time, space, and meaning.

Though one is also tempted to go the route of the ‘ineffable,’ what led me to this word was perusing work called Dictionary of Untranslatables: a Philosophical Lexicon edited by Barbara Cassin.
There is something of a buried joke here, however, in having a term for something for which we have no term.