Ken Emerson, Rolling Stone, 10/19/78

Talking Heads: Preppie but Potent

David Byrne: Man in a gray flannel straitjacket

David Byrne’s resemblance to Anthony Perkins would
be remarkable even if he hadn’t called attention to
it by entitling a song "Psycho Killer." Onstage,
his head lurching to a rhythm his rigid body doesn’t
recognize, Byrne is a dead ringer for Perkins’ Norman
Bates: clean-cut, boyish (his songs are full of
boys and girls but bereft of men and women) and
batty. Movie critic Robin Wood’s comment on Alfred
Hitchcock’s horror classic, Psycho, applies equally
well to the music of Byrne’s band, Talking Heads:
"It is part of the essence of the film to make us
feel the continuity between the normal and the
abnormal: between the compulsive behavior of Marion
[Crane] and the psychotic behavior of Norman Bates."
Or, as Tony Perkins tells Janet Leigh shortly before
slaughtering her in the shower: "We’re all in our
private trap."

For Talking Heads, the trap is the Cartesian
disjunction between mind and body, and rarely--if
ever--the twain shall meet. Byrne’s own head is
distanced from his body by a long elastic neck,
and he sings as if he were being strangled by a
tightly knotted tie (from Brooks Brothers, no doubt).
His high-pitched voice seems to emanate entirely
from his straining vocal chords, not at all from
his diaphragm. Quite literally, Byrne is a Talking
Head. And his group’s compulsively rocking beat--
martial yet nervous, halfway between a goose step
and St. Vitus’ dance--is exciting, but seldom sexy
and never cathartic. Though rock & roll usually
celebrates release, Talking Heads dramatizes
repression. If they’re an anomaly, they’re also
one of the very best as well as most interesting
American rock bands performing and recording today.

Byrne’s lyrics obsessively juxtapose the
irreconcilable, nonnegotiable demands of the head
and the heart. In "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,"
on Talking Heads: ’77, the group’s first album,
he piped:

Jet pilot gone out of control
Ship captain run aground
Stockbroker make a bad investment
When love has come to town.
Where, where is my common sense?
How did I get in a jam like this?

On More Songs about Buildings and Food, David Byrne
sings the word feelingssssss with a puppy’s yelp that
turns into a snake’s hiss. Even the ostensibly
jubilant "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" hurtles
to an abrupt coitus interruptus: "But first, show
me what you can do!" If, in one song, Byrne chides
the girls for ignoring the boys ("Girls, they’re
getting into abstract analysis"), in most of the
others, Byrne himself seems frantically to be
staving off amorous involvement: "I’ve got to get
to work now" (the traditional male equivalent of
"Not tonight, honey--I’ve got a headache"). Indeed,
the word work recurs throughout the record as the
singer both pushes and parodies the Protestant ethic.
(Not since the Four Freshmen has there been a group
as Protestant and downright preppie as Talking Heads.)
Love wreaks havoc on the rational, workaday world,
and David Byrne’s comic cold shoulder recalls the
more strenuous resistance of Joni Mitchell, so many
of whose songs have expressed a similar fear that
love will deflect her artistic career.

Love and work, of course, is what Freud said all
of us need, but on More Songs about Buildings and
Food, Byrne appears able to imagine the proper
equilibrium only in "Found a Job," wherein a bickering
couple’s relationship improves while collaborating
on television scripts. He sings about this improvement
with considerable sarcasm, though, and elsewhere on
the LP, love and logic are at loggerheads. The
tension between the two, like the similar tension
Bryan Ferry creates between sentimentality and
sophistication, is excruciating, and when it snaps
in the album’s final song, "The Big Country" (a title
taken from a line in Ferry’s "Prairie Rose"), Byrne
is bounced into the void. Flying over the United
States, he looks down with regret and revulsion at
life below. "I wouldn’t live there if you paid me."
Yet, at the same time, he’s "tired of traveling" and
wants "to be somewhere." Like a hjijacked airplane
that no nation will permit to land, the singer seems
doomed to fly until his fuel is exhausted and he
plummets to a fiery death.

Sound gloomy? Well it would be if Byrne didn’t
see hilarity in tight-assed hysteria and laugh
at his Puritan pratfalls. Or if coproducer Brian
Eno, once Bryan Ferry’s colleague in Roxy Music,
hadn’t crammed so much humor and energy into each
song. The cerebral, brittle sound of Talking
Heads: ’77 has been fleshed out with supple
synthesizer fills, and Chris Frantz’ drums and
the synthesized percussion leap boldly out of
the mix. Almost every cut has a percussive
gimmick--handclaps, clattering rim shots, a
heavily echoed backbeat--that rivets the attention,
punctuating the melody or hammering home the words.

These arrangements bustle without sounding cluttered.
Whenever the agitated jangle of guitars starts to
"The Girls Want to Be with the Girls" shuttles back
and forth between the staccato attack of a mid-Sixties
garage band and the playful lilt of a nursery rhyme.
"Stay Hungry" manages to meld James Brown, the early
Beatles ("Things We Said Today") and a "progressive"-
rock synthesizer. The eclecticism of More Songs about
Buildings and Food--its witty distillations of disco
and reggae rhythms, its reconciliation of "art" and
punk rock--is masterful. The music represents a
triumph over diversity, while the words spell out
defeat by disparities between mind and body, head
and heart.

This, presumably, is why Talking Heads make music--
and superb music at that. Because talk is cheap.