"View on the lyrics" by Silvia Albertazzi

1. The Alienation Effect

In a world where people have problems/ In a world where decisions are a way of life/ Other people's problems, they overwhelm my mind/ Compassion is a virtue, but I don't have the time/.../ You take my compassion and put it as far as it goes/ My interest level's dropping, my interest level's dropping/ I won't listen anymore/ What are you, in love with your problems?/ I think you've taken it a little too far/ There's nothing cool about having a problem/ Don't expect me to explain your indecision/ Go talk to your analyst, isn't' that what he's paid for? ("No Compassion")

With these lines, written in the second half of the seventies, Byrne ironizes on the urge to communicate, to talk and to express one's feelings which seems to characterize that period. At the same time, he identifies himself for the first time with the prototype of the "young man suffering from a syndrome of sacrifice", which will find a naive visualization on the cover of the album Little Creatures, where he is painted in the act of carrying the world on his shoulders. This belief in being called to save the world - together with the continuous complaining about the hardness of this task - appears to be common to many of his contemporaries: people who, being too young to have taken part in the social upheavals of '68, now are haunted and fascinated by the deeds of their elders. The displaced characters who appear in Byrne's lyrics at this early stage of his career are often living on the verge of a nervous breakdown because of their inability to adapt themselves to everyday life.
The danger of schizophrenia and fragmentation of the self is always very great for those who are not able to establish normal relationships with other people, let alone to communicate with them. Therefore, it is not surprising that the young Byrne's most famous poetic 'persona' is a "Psycho Killer" who, according to his author, derives directly from Norman Bates, the protagonist of Hitchcock's movie Psycho. In "Psycho Killer", a song which was probably written in 1974 or 75, but was recorded only in 1977, we can find an attempt at translating the experience of fragmentation of the self into words. The absolute incapability of the killer to cope with reality is suggested by the recurrence of a question in a foreign language, whose answer is only an inarticulate leit-motif . Other sentences in broken French try to reveal the crime committed by the killer , while his neurosis is apparent in lines like : "I hate people when they're not polite" and "When I've nothing to say, my lips are sealed/ Say something once, why say it again?". In this way, the typical Postmodern attempt to abolish the borders between literary genres and media appears in the lyrics of a song, together with the search for a language which can express the dislocation and fragmentation which characterize the late twentieth century. This will to eliminate any possible barrier between the arts was to become one of the most distinctive features of Byrne's production. On the other hand, his way of singing and performing seems to be strongly reminiscent of Brecht's epic theatre. More than being anti-fictional, like many Postmodern artists, Byrne is representative, like Brecht. His characters, his situations are not individualized: they are represented. While his gestures never try to reproduce reality, his behaviour never attempts to create a form of empathy, of solidarity with his audience (see, again, "No compassion").

It is not by chance that the second album of the Talking Heads is called More Songs About Buildings and Food, even if in the lyrics we can find very few buildings and even less food. Food and Buildings stand for everyday life: they are mentioned so vaguely because what really interests Byrne, more than the ordinary elements of commonplace reality (=l'ordinaire"), is that "quiet life of things" which the French writer Georges Perec called the "infra-ordinary" (="l'infra-ordinaire"). Here, as in Brecht's world, music interprets the texts, taking part, while the singer becomes a sort of speaker whose private feelings must remain unknown. It's the so-called "alienation effect", which is obtained mainly through a way of singing always slightly out of key, out of time or deliberately off-beat, and a way of performing which could be defined at once as nervous, asymmetric and uncoordinated. Like a Brechtian actor, wearing the mask of the alienated modern man Byrne 'shows' his texts rather than singing them, until he finally looks at the same aspects of society from completely different points of view. Consequently, while in 77 we can find a song like "Don't You Worry About the Government", where he comments enthusiastically on the American way of life from a viewpoint which is completely different from his own, in More Songs ... we have "The Big Country", where the same reality is rejected with loathing. It's worth while having a look at the two songs:


1) I see the clouds that move across the sky/ I see the wind that moves the clouds away/ It moves the clouds over by the building/ I pick the building that I want to live in/ I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods/ I see the pine cones that fall by the highway/ That's the highway that goes to the building/ That's the building that I'm going to live in /.../ I see the states across this big nation/ I see the laws made in Washington DC./ I think of the ones I consider my favorites/ I think of the people that are working for me/ Some civil servants are just like my loved ones/ They work so hard, and they try to be strong/ I'm lucky guy to live in my building/ They all need buildings to help them along". ("Don't Worry About the Government")

2) I see the shapes/ I remember from maps/ I see the shoreline/ I see the whitecaps/ A baseball diamond, nice weather down there/ I see the school and the houses where the kids are/ Places to park by the fac'tries and buildings/ Restaurants and bars for later in the evening/ Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas/ And I have learned how these things work together/ I see the parkway that passes through them all/ And I have learned how to look at these things and say/ I wouldn't live there if you paid me/ I couldn't live like that, no siree!" ("The Big Country")


Starting from an objective description of the American province, Byrne reaches opposite ironic conclusions. In the first track, he wears the mask of the satisfied average middle-class American man; in the second, he looks at the same world through the eyes of a rebel. Both lyrics start from the same kind of objective description - Byrne himself confessed that at the time he was inspired by Alain Robbe-Grillet and his ecole du regard. Yet the two songs achieve very different conclusions by shifting perspectives. Adopting opposite points of views, Byrne prevents his audiences from any identification with his poetic 'personae', while refusing them the comfort of a totalizing, universal vision of reality.

< previous page
> next page