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.

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.