77: No Compassion

"Be a little more selfish, it could do you some good": it sound like a homespun Andy Warhol aphorism, a little chunk of anti-moralism in a poison broth.

((MORE VERBOSITY AFTER PAPER WRITING SEASON))

77: Who Is It?

Traipsing from brilliant to banal and back again, from the elusive non-space of identity's pre-dawn and back to you, "Who Is It?" is slight, but a sea-change. Ok, maybe not slight, but brief. It's a game of peek-a-boo where Byrne is the baby and we find out a) it's your face behind the hands, and b) his love is dangerous.

Who is it? You. What is it? An owl.

You're an owl.

77: Happy Day

There's that word again: "nice." "I feel nice inside / And now it's summer again."

I find songs like this stranger even that the back end of Remain in Light or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, if only because it's notably not compelling. Airy, solid, simple and simplistic. The familiar oscillations between identity and performance are hear, but batted around indifferently. Although I'll go out on a limb and say that the lines "I believe that I was / Born with the things that I know" are hyper-problematic, especially given the virtual fixation on performance and construction. Unfortunately, I can't push through the layers of boredom.

77: Tentative Decisions

Chris Frantz, drummer, dreamer, was born into a military family. The march and shuffle only backs up the thematic concerns of the rest of the music - austerity and discipline, confusion and tentativeness blend here and bliss out in the final piano breakdown - this is before they're able to call a naive melody by its name.

Via the magic of nachtraglichkeit, you can hear the "Confused, confused" as confessional rather than descriptive - the piano breakdown is the sound of a band giving into the unabashed pleasure of consonance, a move they would rarely make again until Little Creatures. Consonance places identity in question. The confusion is the identity crisis that comes along with the liminal space of sexual possibility, and you can hear a bare striving in Byrne's voice, tense against the military drums. The problem is viral - the problem is given over, it's infectious or a disease. Think about the dis-ease, think about the nervousness of Byrne's "confused."

This song, like any other, is about fucking.

77: New Feeling

The opening clarity blurs as it moves forward, smears itself across the time it occupies. Tina Weymouth's bass is the great mirror - the guitar lines double and Weymouth's bass doubles back and surges. (If there is such a thing as a great rock bass player, surely it is she.) This double-figuration swings back at the lyrics and their striving towards the wholeness of irreducible simplicity: "It's not yesterday anymore" is ultra-literal, but depends on the shared illusion of objective time. This is, I think, another concern that resonates all the way through the TH catalog - the lie that makes absolute certainty and irreducible simplicity possible. The exposure of this lie can only happen through its statement in the barest possible terms.

"Why have we kept out own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking." - Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

D & G make me think as well: there is, of course, pleasure in giving yourself over to the lie, to the illusion, to the manner of speaking. The manner of speaking becomes a mannerism, a way of affecting humanness, or a way of exploiting the humanness of others in order to get what you want - "I wish I could meet everyone / Bring them up to my room / Meet them all over again." The pleasure of a first meeting reflected upon from the future is "nice," it is comforting, in a sad way - this is what I imagine it would be like to commit suicide with an overdose of painkillers - because this is what speaking ultimately is.

77: Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town

Talking Heads always pose a threat, even at their most innocuous. Especially at their most innocuous. Love is always the destroyer, everyday duties and routines are what get destroyed. I like how David Byrne spits out "believe" because it sounds like a little bird squeaking, "Beat me" - this, I opine, is no coincidence. Listen to the Talking Heads: you experience a convergence of the adorable and the threatening - Byrne's adorableness is always a vehicle for danger, and it's only when he sounds most threatening that he also sounds sincere. Belief is a beating, or rather, to believe is to ask to be beaten - the two are one and the same.

What is it to love the Talking Heads, then? Does it welcome danger, destruction? Will I miss work tomorrow? Will the stock market crash?

William James teaches us that there is no escaping belief. Talking Heads write false manuals for living, instruction booklets designed to sabotage anyone dumb enough to take their advice. You cannot believe them - you must believe that you don't. You believe that you don't, yet you don't win. You just get beaten another way.