Essay by Silvia Albertazzi

View on the Lyrics

Silvia Albertazzi teaches New Literatures in English at the University of Bologna. She has written essays and books about Victorian and contemporary fiction, the fantastic in literature, postmodern and postcolonial narratives. She is also the author of a novel, *Scuola di scrittura*, which was published by Marsilio, Venice, in 1996. A longer Italian version of this essay on David Byrne appeared last year on the magazine *Problemi*, #104.

"Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand." (Paul Auster)

Right from the beginning with the lyrics for Talking heads 77, the first album of the band, David Byrne reproduces the cultural movements, fashions and stereotypes of his times in his songs. For this reason, listening to his albums constitutes a unique experience not only from the musical point of view: it also means revisiting the last two decades of our social and cultural history, with the help of one of the most intelligent and ironic interpreters of our age. In the following pages I will try to give an outline of Byrne's lyrical itinerary up to now.

• Part 1 : The Alienation Effect
• Part 2 : The Rhetoric of Terminality or, Apocalypse Here and Now
• Part 3 : A portrait of a Rock-Star as a Story-Teller
• Part 4 : World Music, World Poetry
• Part 5 : Past the next 'post'

All parts in one go (plain ascii-text)