Lester Bangs, Village Voice, 8/20/79

David Byrne says "Boo!"

One day someone I love said, "You hit me with your eyes."
When I hear David Byrne's lyrics, I can imagine him saying
the same thing in language just oblique enough to turn the
pain into percussively lapping waters.

These are mutant times, and Talking Heads are the most
human of mutant groups. Byrne has mental institution eyes,
but unlike Patti or R. Hell they don't broadcast danger:
he just looks like some nice nut holidayed from the ward
with a fresh pocket of Thorazine. He and the rest of the
band seem in both their music and physical presence to
combine a sinuous plantlike sway with a hypertense,
mechanical rigidity. They're a marriage of diametrical
opposites--abandon and inhibition, anxiety and ease,
freedom and impingement into paralysis.

I was a little put off by More Songs About Buildings and
Food, not only because I found the music hard to get into
but because I suspected that like old Andy Warhol who kept
lurking around them the Heads or Byrne might actually think
that buildings and food are every bit as significant and
worthy of emotional concern as mere human beings. The stance
seemed deliberately evasive, though modish in the worst way.
Of course I missed the point. From "Love Goes to Building
on Fire" out, Talking Heads are (about) humans who feel
pinned by circumstance, reacting like scarecrows and windmills
to the erosions of experience, registering everything
precisely from a slight distance while the passion is pent,
even boiling...over here, and often finds its only outlet
in the rhythmic undertows. They're also about new feelings
for new social structures: "No Compassion" ("Go talk to your
analyst, isn't that what he's there for?"), "The Girls Want
to Be With the Girls" (why not, especially since most of the
guys are too uptight to play with them), "The Big Country"
(finally somebody said it: there is nothing beyond Jersey;
Jack Kerouac made all that shit up, he was a science-fiction
writer).

Fear of Music provides Heads'/Byrne's most explicit blueprint
yet for survival in the face of paranoias--real or imagined,
makes no difference. It's also the best Heads album yet
because the production is up to or above the quality of
their second, while the songs have a flow that makes it
more immediately accessible. Byrne's a kind of Everyneurotic,
wandering through the world encountering ouch-producers every
step and breath he takes, relaying them back to us filtered
through his sense of humor, his natural musicality, and the
ever sifting-shifting medium that is Brian Eno. Fear of Music
might as well have been called Fear of Everything. Show me an
item extant sentient or otherwise in the world we share and
I'll show you a clinically certified list of reasons why
proximity to said item should be considered risky if not
downright lethal. Under such circumstances, you have every
right to be wrong. McLuhan missed it: we're not a global
village, we're a global outpatient clinic, and the life force
itself is most fully embodied in a frenetically twitching nerve.
But even with that on your side there is one thing you must face:
you have no friends anywhere. Nothing and no one. Also, nature
is perverse. E.g., air and new Heads tune of same title: it's
not just cigarette smoke or auto exhaust or the pollutants
factories chuff out--it's air qua air that's out for your ass.
Because in this most richly diversified of all possible universes,
it just might happen to be the case that air does not like you.

The refusal to face or understand such facts is why we're all
terminally psychotic and no doctor, pill, book or guru holds
the cure. The disease is called life and there is no cure for
that including death (makes fertilizer::contribution of life-
cycle::no good) so ha ha the joke's on you from cradle to crypt.
David Byrne knows all these things; what's more he knows that
"Some people don't know shit about the...air..."

That's the trouble with our society today: people take everything
too damn much for granted. They think the disease is gonna shit
out pills to cure itself. In this album Dr. Byrne examines
various popularly proposed panaceas with dissecting knife and
discards them one by one.

Socialized day-to-day living in this imminent nullkrieg is
outlined in "Life During Wartime": "This ain't no party, this
ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around/This ain't no Mudd
Club, or CBGB, I ain't got time for that now...I got some
groceries, some peanut butter, to last a couple of days/But I
ain't got no speakers, ain't got no headphones, ain't got no
records to play." When there is no firm ground, the only
sensible thing to do is keep on the move, ergo on their third
album the first example of what might qualify as the Heads'
version of "road" songs--the other one is "Cities," most of
which boil down to "A lot of ghosts in a lot of houses," who
just like befuddled birds may "go up north and come back south/
Still got no idea where in the world they are."

"Drugs" is a hilariously solemn recitation of the usual chemical
comicstrips, and "Animals" puts away all those maudlin mabels
like Robinson Jeffers and Euell Gibbons who belabor us with
man's odiousness behaviorwise when stacked up against our
noble ancestors dwelling next door in the wilds or more
properly zoos. But the bottom line is that "They're setting
a bad example." The truth, as Byrne points out, is that
animals, besides having no intelligence beyond brute fear
reflex, are a bunch of smug little bastards who are laughing
at us just because we keep drawing diagrams across a universe
they knew was chaotic in the first place.

Which brings us to David Byrne's basic philosophy of existence:
To feel anxiety is to be blessed by the full wash of life in
its ripest chancre--everything else is wax museums. Having
rejected drugs, animal husbandry, jogging not to mention
breathing itself, towns, cities, and whole continents in
his search for some little nook where he can relax for even
one instant, Byrne finally lays it on the line: "Heaven is
a place where nothing ever happens."

Every state but zero cool emptiness, every place on the map
but Nowheresville, spells anxiety under a wide assortment of
brand names. Once yanked, nerves never forget. You are
going to be driven crazy by all of this, no, wait, you are
crazy because of all this, or maybe just because period, and
you always will be as long as you live. Crazy is simply
your birthright, signifying citizenship in the human race.
Those furshlugginer animals never go crazy. Air doesn't go
crazy. Only you. And that's because, as Misterogers has
been trying to tell you for years, you're a special person.
Isn't it wonderful? Sure. So give up all those silly little
totems you got clenched in your itty mitt: drugs, religions,
politics, family, jobs (well, maybe them you better keep),
even rock'n'roll, because "Electric Guitar" has been bad,
not only guilty of crimes against the state but deserves
to be spanked and put to bed, besides which "the copy sounds
better," as everyone knows.

So what's left? Nothing, and it's not heaven. "Everything
seems to be up in the air at this time," says David. The
implicit answer in all these songs is that, given the
hopelessness of the situation, we should also recognize
how hysterically funny it is. In the Middle Ages the
population of Europe felt so haunted and tainted by the
Devil, so hopelessly damned, that they developed a
predilection, as manifested in the paintings of Bosch,
for taking all this damnation and redemption stuff as a
kind of huge joke, with God, Satan and the demons as
cartoon characters. The closer you get to whatever you're
terrified of, the more it and your dread begin to seem
like old friends, ergo terror decreases. David Byrne
seems to be a sort of dowzer's wand for neuroses and
trauma, and as darkness looms over all of us, he strolls
down its maw, placid, bemused, humming little tunes to
himself. Sometimes I think Fear of Music is one of the
best comedy albums I've ever heard. Which doesn't mean
the fear isn't real. Byrne just reminds you that it's
something you're going to have to live with, so you might
as well get a kick out of it while you can.


Contributed by Steve Czapla