Talking Heads - An Apologia for Postmodern Neurosis

And you may ask yourself

What is that beautiful house?

And you may ask yourself

Where does that highway go?

And you may ask yourself

Am I right?…Am I wrong?

And you may tell yourself

MY GOD!… WHAT HAVE I DONE?

The parody of the average man

In the time elapsed between the dying-off of the last survivors of love & peace and the outbreak of an irreversible punk pestilence - yet with continuity into a post-punk that would play at swapping the order of factors on already-worn templates - genius is nerd.

Anything, so long as it shines with an identity that doesn't wallow in hallowed déjà-vu.

So what use is the pre-yuppie regulation uniform, if not to provoke, to attract, and then to repel - with a cynical, ironic kick in the backside - the very object of its debunking massacre?

The importance of being able to think, and to subject to the scrutiny of a sharp reason, an imagination that knows itself; the mimicry of an unwittingly robotic age; the sociology of post-modern man acted out with masterful neurosis; the body as actor in collective delirium; the melting pot stirred up and raised to the rank of a dignified cultural container; the (innate) anticipation of a movement destined to inflate all the tensions of a decade and beyond.

The story of Talking Heads, that is, the reductio ad unum of every cerebral ambition within the creative process.

Expelled from the Rhode Island School of Design and the CBGB's zoo

David Byrne is a Scottish-born child, born in 1952 and destined for mobility.

But that mobility, which ended with a move to Maryland at the age of eight, would become a pretext turned to his own advantage.

Creative thought, spreading from the top of a head eager to communicate all the way down to the hands, leads him in 1970 to the Rhode Island School of Design, which, while on one hand proving too restrictive a container for a conceptual inspiration bordering on self-reference, on the other lays the groundwork for his future, personal dimension. At Rhode Island, David meets Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, companions in a surreal interpretation of art and the artist, both shaped by a military upbringing, both musicians with some experience playing in cover bands or even church groups.

After impressing the school's admissions board with a performance of rather elusive logic, in which a piano underscored the act of shaving off beard and hair while a showgirl kept holding up placards written in Russian, David decides to leave the Institute and choose the street as the sole stage for his performance.

Until 1972, it's a drifting around the States, broken up by a brief return to Maryland, where the stay is made more bearable by forming, with Marc Kehoe, a character picked up off the street, the Bizadi, a chameleon-like cover band capable of reproducing, with equal nerve, both Frank Sinatra and Lou Reed.

In the summer of '72, once the Bizadi break up, David decides to go back to Rhode Island, to reunite with Chris and Tina, keeping up with them a patient relationship that, once both graduate two years later, will lead to the three of them moving to New York, where in 1975 yet another Byrne-esque quirk of fate will be born under the name Talking Heads.

Like new, antiseptic aliens on an extreme, diseased planet, the Talking Heads, in their original trio of Byrne on guitar, Weymouth on bass, Frantz on drums, don't flinch at playing that CBGB'S steeped in the moods of Patti Smith in orgasmic ecstasy during her live show, rattled by the fury of the Reed-ian werewolf, reduced to a dark-room for old and new, impromptu rock hustlers in search of urgent heroin or coveted glory, alongside ravenous new recruits named Richard Hell and Deborah Harry.

David Byrne's double-jointed limbs don't stop short in front of the CBGB'S crew's suspicion, Tina keeps playing bass with the icy, ironic femininity that will become one of her trademarks, and Chris does his job while keeping the unshakeable smile of a serene Govinda.

The modest run-in period serves, more than anything else, to grasp the need for one more piece to complete the experiment on postmodern neurosis.

Jerry Harrison, ex-Modern Lovers, after watching a Talking Heads concert in Boston, is so taken with it that he wants to join the band as keyboardist and guitarist; the wish takes shape and materializes in the 1977 single "Love Goes To Building Fire".

The next step is the UK tour with the Ramones, from which, as ever able to slip into the dragon's skin without giving any offense, they emerge with an album, Talking Heads: 1977.

The record, driven by an insight quicker and sharper than anyone else's, lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding punk: "politically correct", one might think on a hasty, gut-level listen, a million miles from its genetic nihilism. In reality, the lyrical approach is cynically ironic, merciless and hypercritical toward every aspect, tic and reflex of postmodern society, a grotesque aberration of a conservative past and a present that is at once anarchic and free-market, disorienting human beings, thrown into an enormous race toward the fulfillment of a Self that, through endless economic, political and social devouring, starts losing itself in chaos to the point of becoming unaware of its own actions.

And "Psycho Killer", opened by a dark, increasingly hammering bassline, becomes, with its deranged chorus “Psycho Killer/ Qu’est-ce que c’est/ fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better/ Run run run run run run run away”, a kind of manifesto of the intellectual cynicism that will run through the output of many other brilliant minds of the new wave: from the pseudo-idiocy of Devo to the fake carefree spirit of the B-52's, from the torpor of Pere Ubu to the icily cultured observation of Tuxedomoon, right down to today's punk-funk, which shamelessly draws its very identity from it.

But Talking Heads: 1977, opening in an apparently harmless way, with a Jonathan Richman-like touch ("Uh-oh, Love Comes To Town"), airing relatable quirks over a deranged chorus straight out of a parade of toy soldiers ("Tentative Decisions"), starts exposing a tendency toward obsession even before "Psycho Killer", with the repeated question "Who is it?". And the irony, confident in its own knowledge, can even afford to attack official culture, mocked with a final "Na na na na na… na na na na na na na" ("The Book I Read"), before staging the nerd's revenge in "Pulled Up", a hilarious episode of personal megalomania.

The impact on the underground circuit is so strong that it earns them the main stage at CBGB'S, shared with Blondie, Television, the Dead Boys, and the Ramones themselves, now peers rather than role models.

Byrne's is an utterly peculiar figure, able to win over even kids, thanks to a look that's anything but fashionable, a curiously gangly physique du role, a set of jittery, tense movements, and a gaze able to focus pure astonishment at human madness and, in a split-second shift, reproduce that same madness within a single outward identity. The typical bearing of a dangerous patient suffering from multiple personality disorder and, at the same time, of the psychiatrist who knows and confidently anticipates his next move.

Morphology of hallucination: the encounter with Brian Eno

None of this escapes the sharp eye of a collector of genius like Brian Eno, who the following year, during the UK tour, all but co-opts the band, reading between the lines its potential for the future of music to come, going on to produce their next album More Songs About Buildings And Food.

Byrne's bizarre, visionary personality finds, in the Eno-esque intuition that followed the very early landmark of "Before And After Science", a stimulating order for the free flow of influences, fascinations, metropolitan, archetypal, planetary images.

On More Songs About Buildings And Food, there's an immediate sense of a cheekiness that, on the debut, had seemed to remain timidly in the shadows, as a first step toward total liberation from the celebration of the alienated nerd, who here becomes an ambitious explorer of human paradoxes.

If the opener is a festive, if somewhat naive, love-song ("Thank You For Sending Me An Angel"), the next step is a caustically r'n'b intro, pervaded by spasms of germinal possession ("With Our Love"). Weymouth's bass is grandly lunar, accompanying Byrne's guitar jabs and hallucinated declaiming on "The Girls Want To Be With The Girls", while, on a thin line between autobiographical parody and twisted apologia, the bass-driven ride of "Artists Only" opens with: “I’m painting, I’m painting again/ I’m painting, I’m painting again/ I’m cleaning, I’m cleaning again/ I’m cleaning, I’m cleaning my brain” and closes like this: “I don’t have to prove… that I am creative!/ I dont’ have to prove… that I am creative!/ All my pictures are confused/ And now I’m going to take me to you”. And then, finally, the spark that drove it straight into the charts: a listlessly sobbing version of "Take Me To The River" smothers Al Green's original, setting the stage for the long, psychedelic sprawl of "The Big Country", furtively sunny.

More Songs About Buildings And Food immediately becomes an international album, finding listeners and attention even in Australia, and all of this is promptly turned to their advantage and superbly celebrated on the third, pivotal Talking Heads record, Fear Of Music, a title which, as the oracle Brian Eno put it, only David Bowie, himself fascinated by Talking Heads, could have come up with.

Indeed, the origin of Fear Of Music, which, as Byrne himself would later state, takes its name from a form of music-induced epilepsy that materializes whenever music is heard, seems rather bizarre, if it was truly inspired by Byrne's odd behavior in the recording studio. Eno compared him to a parent obsessed with household cleanliness, vacuum in hand, whistling some idiotic little tune as if nothing were happening, a kind of music meant to be made through the walls of the home, as he would later explain more precisely.

On Fear of Music, nudged along by Eno's drive toward the universal, Talking Heads' future obsession with world music and the syncopated pulse of African tradition begins to take shape.

In this context, "I Zimbra", a tribute to Hugo Ball's Dadaism, is the perfect statement of intent, and it seems like an astonishing feat of imagination to place David Byrne's cold, cerebral figure, the very emblem of metropolitan alienation, in exotic, primitive settings — a nonsense within the nonsense that nevertheless works and generates real tension.

Indeed, Fear Of Music is the record that marks the turning point toward a spleen closer to new wave aesthetics: grim, acidic, visionary, nihilistic, claustrophobic and steeped in post-modern paranoia, which starts from the self and arrives at an unspeakable bewilderment before the sheer inscrutability of every mass-produced automatism — something it tries to resolve with drastic measures, as the refrain "I Need Something To Change Your Mind" ("Mind") makes clear.

A furiously amphetamine-fuelled dance track kicks off the tour of the world's metropolises in just over four minutes: it's the schizophrenic punk-funk syncopation of "Cities", destined for a hyperactive dancefloor.

And the pairing of "Air" and "Heaven" is perhaps the album's most diabolical peak, thanks to sounds that move from anxiously measured to dissolving into candid affirmation ("Some people say not to worry about the air/ Some people never had experience with air…"), stretching out into a personal, elongated vision of paradise as a place of wearying, eternal return of utterly earthly habits ("Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens/ Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens"). The thread left hanging in "I Zimbra" picks back up in a tribalism echoing the experiments of The Pop Group on "Animals", complete with guttural sounds woven into percussive carpets reworked with an electronic touch.

Finally, there's the loss of meaning in the odyssey of an electric guitar that comes alive and rebels ("Someone controls electric guitar"), on "Electric Guitar", and the acidly lysergic pulse of "Drugs".

The futuristic paranoia that Fear Of Music feeds on captivates and unsettles both critics and audiences alike, to the point that the live shows following the album's release come to be defined as a genuine danceable psychodrama, while David Byrne rises to his definitive status as a cerebral, glacial, dehumanized artist — a sort of stoic anatomist of post-modern society, capable of both fascinating and unsettling his audience at once.

Perhaps the awareness of a success that had become global, almost endured rather than willed, muddies the waters a little: in 1979, out of a temporary crisis within the band, My Life In A Bush Of Ghosts was born, an extraordinary record by David Byrne and Brian Eno that wouldn't actually be released until 1981, and which, in truth, did nothing but scatter clues toward the next step, once again with Eno as the deus ex machina.

Remain In Light acidly throws the apple of discord into the plastic world of the '80s, with a David Byrne at the peak of his confidence, schizophrenic and remarkably skilled at displaying a personality that seems almost Dionysiacally multiple, as the many live performances prove: the neurotic white-collar worker, the nihilist robot, the average man baffled by the most perverse socio-cultural mechanisms, the battered mannequin, the anthropologist devoted to the descriptive study of an indescribable human race, the mind now pulsing with a life of its own, observing a body convulsively out of control, as in the afro-wave dance of "Crosseyed And Painless", which dissolves into the frenzy of an amphetamine-charged, anxiety-inducing vocal over the frantic drumming of pagan ecstasy in an African village celebrating every god ("The Great Curve").

With the force of a shuttle arriving to civilize the land of indolent humans, comes the grotesque depiction of pseudo-thinking beings, by now so entangled in the breakneck mechanism of social decerebration that there's no escaping it: the answer to “And you may ask yourself/ What is that beautiful house?/ And you may ask yourself/ Where does that highway go?/ And you may ask yourself/ Am I right?… Am I wrong?/ And you may tell yourself/ MY GOD!…WHAT HAVE I DONE?” is this autistic repetition of "Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…" ("Once In A Lifetime").

After a joint of truly potent weed, everything expands by a few millimeters in the measured spatio-temporal synchrony of that subtle, wicked tension called "Houses In Motion", which leads with masterful skill toward the finale, passing through the tension-release of "Seen And Not Seen", echoing the immediately preceding experience with Eno, and the muffled, grainy slow-motion of "Listening Wind", right up to the dreamlike closing track, slowly paced by minimal drum touches, over which, in perfect interlock, settle a distant, martial voice/echo and some ambient/Eno-style effects of pure genius.

In 1982, while the iron was still red-hot, the first official Talking Heads live album came out — a record that, like a genuine manifesto complete with a statement of intent, was titled The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, a summa of the first four albums.

At the same time, Brian Eno dissolved the collaboration and the band members began their solo careers, with David Byrne — ever the chameleon-like artist — embracing film scoring, composing "The Catherine Wheel" for an experimental ballet by choreographer Twyla Tharp.

The '80s: the mainstream drift

Having moved past this apparent standstill, 1983 saw the release, once again under the Talking Heads name, of Speaking In Tongues, a sort of "back to the future" record, marked by a rewind to the days of 77 and More Songs About Buildings And Food, while at the same time anticipating a good deal of the spleen à-la Gang Of Four, corrected with an even more self-aware underlying neurosis, now essential to the sound.

Opened by "Burning Down The House", a psycho-funk hit used and abused even in very recent times with equally sharp instinct by Tiga, the album keeps pursuing this kind of new, apparent calm right afterward, with "Making Flippy Floppy", dominated by the bass and rattled by Byrne's almost insolent vocal delivery, which turns into a sullen smirk on "Swamp".

It all dilutes into a cunning game that, starting from the intro's mutual chase between bass and drums, slides straight onto the dancefloor, layering on top a vocal echoed by black-music choruses ("Slippery People"), with the unheard-of brazenness of someone certain they've already seduced you; drawing on the plastic-pop tendencies of the year, it even anticipates certain present-day electro shapes in the nervous sighing that opens the excellent little-robot floor-filler "Pull Up The Roots".

The operation, less brilliant than the empyrean heights reached with Remain in Light, still manages not to compromise its own dignity too much, closing with the measured "This Must Be The Place".

As if to inflate the now-enormous emotional bubble of an already well-established fanbase, in 1984 an audio-visual operation was carried out that deserves to be kept in a golden case in any self-respecting "museum of post-modern music": released simultaneously as album and video, directed by the visionary Jonathan Demme, was Stop Making Sense. If the album is astonishing, unfolding a frenzied crescendo of old and new gems — from the almost entirely acoustic version of "Psycho Killer", to the tribal delirium of "Crosseyed And Painless", passing through the correction of near-electro acidity with soul choruses, the unsettling spoken part followed by the grotesque threat of the chorus of "Swamp", the masterful embodiment of a man regimented and hollowed out by the frenzy of society in "Once In A Lifetime" — the film portrays a David Byrne who seems to almost completely shed his own identity, throwing himself into the crowd of a varied, shifting humanity, like an anthropologist who, gutted of his own emotions in order to better grasp other cultures, during yet another act of participant observation, through the sharing of vital energy, rediscovers his lost emotional potential by mocking, alongside the "savages" in question, the pseudo-evolved society of which he had, until that moment, been an integral part.

This shared sensibility is confirmed by the extraordinary rapport between Talking Heads and the Black musicians on stage, through a gradual expansion of the line-up from song to song, until sound and image fuse perfectly, with each performer dynamically alternating between instrument and choreography in perfect spatio-temporal sync. The result is one of the finest music films ever made, capable of stirring great curiosity among industry insiders, all left wondering about Byrne's real identity — a schizophrenic marionette on stage, yet a calm, measured presence in speech and posture off it. Through concise, laconic answers, Byrne would admit to the difference between what happens on and off stage, explaining how certain deliberate disguises, certain seemingly uncontrolled postures, certain tics and nervous fits were, in fact, functional to a way of expressing, through musical action, his personal perception of a contradictory and alienating system.

This growing self-awareness brings greater confidence and pushes the band toward sunnier, more naive territories of paradoxical directness, even as the imaginative fabric, true to the band's trademark, remains fruitfully visionary throughout. 1985 brought Little Creatures, a concept album that, starting right from the artwork — a sort of Talking Heads in Wonderland — comes across as odd, surreal and direct, far removed from the ancestral yet simultaneously cerebral energy of Remain In Light, even though, here too, there's no shortage of moments that, like spontaneous flashbacks, let a tense, sharply perceptive mindset resurface ("Give Me My Back Name"), a subtly cynical spirit ("The Lady Don't Mind"), and an emphasis on the twilight of a socio-cultural system run by television-men ("Television Man"). But beyond the inevitable nods to the fundamental guidelines of Byrne-esque themes, the band seems to be having fun experimenting with a form of communication and provocation that moves from the initial playroom of Jerry Harrison's keyboards ("And She Was") to the playful misunderstanding rendered by a catchy chorus ("Perfect World"), all the way to staging the surreal parade of little toy soldiers caught in their own hallucinations on "Road To Nowhere".

In 1986, Byrne, fascinated by his filmmaking experience with Demme during the Stop Making Sense days, decided to make a film and attach its own soundtrack to it — True Stories — thereby creating a double operation: on one hand the film, naturally eccentric and visionary, rich in socio-cultural ideas tied to the story of a small Texas town grappling with the celebration of its 150th anniversary, within which — almost as the epilogue of a natural historical-anthropological evolution — is woven a reflection on love, in a thoroughly sui generis form, among the employees of an electronics factory. On the other hand, the record: perhaps the most heterogeneous effort in the Talking Heads catalogue. Opened by a punk guitar blast with Byrne's snarling vocal on top ("Love For Sale"), and bypassing the superfluous "Hey Now", a sort of Hawaiian welcome complete with flower garlands for pseudo-civilized mass-men freshly disembarked from a cruise ship, we arrive at the antithetical pairing of "Papa Legba" — a brazen rekindling of the world-music experimentation that had, in the meantime, also fascinated and nearly pushed Liquid Liquid toward emulation — and "Wild Wild Life", an anthem to the longing for a wild existence, a form of liberation from the social and material chains of the present, in a chorus that would likewise become the object of cover versions (“Here on this mountaintop/ Woahoho/ I got some wild, wild life/ I got some new to tell/ ya/ Woahoho / About some wild, wild life/ Here comes the doctor in charge/ Woahoho/ She’s got some wild, wild life/ Ain’t that the way you like it?/ Ho, ha!/ Living wild, wild life”).

Toward the end, the record closes with a ballad saved by the skin of its teeth by a graceful piano interlude, which even manages to shrink the centripetal force of Byrne's voice ("Dream Operator"), before regaining its dignity with the more syncopated, more acidic version of "Wild Wild Life".

What will remain of Talking Heads, who had by then splintered into a series of parallel projects (David Byrne's solo career, Tina Weymouth's Tom Tom Club, alongside The Heads with her husband Frantz), will be a string of reissues and compilations, which will keep appearing on a steady schedule, as if driven by some pedagogical mission to educate every new generation of neophytes in rock history.

The last album released under the Talking Heads name was, in 1988, the murky Naked, which, almost grasping at straws from old punk-funk, despite being recorded with an ensemble of international musicians, falls disastrously into irrelevance, sliding into tropicalisms that exist for their own sake ("Mr. Jones"), saved only by the alienating effect of Byrne's vocal delivery ("Ruby Dear") and, in the second half (noticeably sharper than the first), by a few more anguished post-punk detours ("The Facts of Life", "Big Daddy", "Cool Water").

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