77: The Book I Read

The melodrama of the opening chords! There's a kind of ominousness that's undercut by the (by now typical, even paradigmatic, but always reflexive) banality of Byrne's "I'm writing about the book I read / I have to sing about the book I read," and maybe it's that ominousness and its undercutting that signals the weird division between the book and the book's eyes. The metaphor of a person as a book is nothing new, but the the figuration is complex. The book is alternately a person, and a person's eyes - if they're the eyes, the synecdoche of the eyes and the whole person is complicated by the metaphorization of the the synecdoche, so that the "book" becomes a second order metaphor.

And the Na Na's are so feel-good in this song, a completely unapologetic idiot-rapture that's actually the pay-off for the subtle harmonic tension that comes before. This tension plays into the sickness Byrne's describing; strange that he qualifies "I'm spinning around" - the dizziness of love - with, "but I feel alright," as if that dizziness were literal rather than metaphorical. Against that line, the music sounds like an impending heart attack, or nausea, a bad kind of love-sick, a literal love-sickness, like the body actually trying to purge itself of love.

Now I'm tempted to say that the Book is actually really ominous - it floats and flits through the song. It's "in your eyes," like a look or a suggestion, and here Byrne sounds accusatory. The Book is inescapable.