"View on the lyrics" by Silvia Albertazzi

2. The Rhetoric of Terminality or, Apocalypse Here and Now

One of the most striking features of the so-called Postmodern is an apocalyptic vision of life, a sense of disillusionment and of hopelessness which is to be found especially in the postmodern revisitation of history. Between the Seventies and the Eighties, the idea of the millennium appears more and more frequently in fiction, cinema and poetry. "We are no longer waiting in awe for the last times", the postmodern artists seem to say, "the last times are here, the Apocalypse happens every day". Refusing all reassuring myths of past golden ages, rejecting any possible philosophical, historical or political ideals and models, the postmodern artist looks ironically - but not without fear - at the void, believing that the only possibilities left to humanity are negative and unpleasant, since civilization has already offered its best.

Fear of Music emphasizes this rhetoric of terminality. Here Byrne sings about the contemporary man's displacement and his inability to find a role in a reality which seems only to hurt him. The "infra-ordinary" appears to be full of dangers: paper, animals, the human mind, even the air itself are insidious, while cities are seen as battlefields. In a very postmodern way, the album opens with the musical rendering of a phonetic poem, "Beri Beri Bimba", written in the Twenties by the German poet Hugo Ball, who used to read it aloud dressed as a shaman during Tristan Tzara's Dadaist evenings in Zurich. Together with Brian Eno, Byrne adapts Ball's phonemes to an obsessive African rhythm and changes their title into "I Zimbra", words taken from the first and last stanza of Ball's poem.

While the African atmosphere forecasts Byrne's future interest in World Music, almost all the lyrics of Fear of Music reflect the apocalyptic side of the Postmodern. At the core of the album are the anxiety of dislocation, the fear of living in a multifarious world, the obsession with demythicization and secularisation. In "Mind", Byrne complains about a widespread lack of communication with other people; in "Paper" he comments on a life which is as thin as a sheet of paper and a love story which is itself nothing more than paper. In a climax of anxiety and unsatisfaction, even air can hurt. Living is a continuous shock: the perception of reality is clearly paranoid. There is no possibility of finding some order, of retrieving lost certitudes. It's the triumph of alienation, in a total absence of models and ideals. The displaced man can't find a city to live in: London is only a "small city/ It's dark, dark in the daytime"; in Birmingham "There are a lot of rich people.../ A lot of ghosts in a lot of houses" and in Memphis "Home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks" the river smells like home-cooking. There are no privileged models, no historical memory: Presley and the ancient Greek are equally felt as images from an unknown past. In "Life During Wartime" metropolitan life is described as an endless guerrilla.


Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,/ Packed up and ready to go/ Heard of some gravesides, out by the highway,/ A place where nobody knows/ The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,/ I'm getting used to it now/ Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto,/ I'll lived over this town / This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,/ This ain't no fooling around/ No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,/ I ain't got time for that now/.../ Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?/ Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?/ You oughta know not to stand by the window/ Somebody see you up there/ I got some groceries, some peanut butter,/ To last a couple of days.

This is the space of the so-called "postmodern war", born with and out of the experience of Vietnam. It requires a new language which can express the collapse of any previous form of communication, the paradox of not being able to find a collective form of dialogue. The final stanza of "Life During Wartime" reminds the listener of the stereotype of the runaway couple we often find in the so-called "film noir". Yet the atmosphere of the "end of a party" which pervades the track is typically apocalyptic. The sixties are decidedly over, the seventies are almost gone, too: a difficult decade is opening. There is no more time to joke, to flirt, to dance: the party is over. All we can do is remember it , like the singer of "Memories Can't Wait".
In Byrne's world, the nostalgia for a magical and festive dimension is always counteracted by a sort of disillusionment which deprives myths and dreams of their significance. It is not by chance that in "Heaven" one of the most meaningful myths of religious tradition, Paradise, is seen as a bar where the same party goes on endlessly and a band plays the same song all night long. In a crescendo of indeterminateness and indefinition, Byrne first observes that "Everyone is trying to get to the bar/... called Heaven"; then, he realizes that "It's hard to imagine that nothing at all/ Could be so exciting, could be so much fun"; and eventually he reaches the conclusion that "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens", thus emptying the myth of Heaven of any possible significance.

In Remain in Light, Byrne emphasizes the postmodern aspects of Fear of Music, both at the thematic and at the linguistic levels. The haunted lyrics of the previous album are substituted by collages of quotations taken from the world of the media, excerpts of dialogues in different tones, recordings of documents testifying political scandals. When asked to explain these lyrics, Byrne always answered that they were only attempts at writing songs which, though being without apparent meaning, might establish an emotional approach with his audiences, by way of an accurate choice and juxtaposition of sentences. Consequently, in these lyrics the words of the media or the voices of the people involved in Watergate more than helping us understand the present, create a kind of historical amnesia, a will to forget. Also spatial conceptions are exasperated: in a world where houses are in motion, the only certitude left is doubt. "Once in a Lifetime" starts from the fantastic possibility of finding oneself , suddenly and unexpectedly, in an unknown house, with a strange wife, without knowing how this could have happened. On the one hand, we find again the commonplace situations of the early lyrics; on the other, irrational elements break out disrupting all rules. It is no use trying to resume old habits (suggested by the recurring words, recited as a sort of mantra, "same as it ever was"). At the end, doubt overcomes the individual, until his final admission of a Kafkian guilt. This doubting of the essence of reality reappears in a long list of apparently incongruous words we find in "Crosseyed and Painless": "Facts are simple and facts are straight/ Facts are lazy and facts are late/ Facts all come with points of view/ Facts don't go where you want them to/ Facts just twist the truth around/ Facts are living turned inside out...."

Here words lose meaning by an excess of accumulation. Significant sentences are reduced to mere sounds by being put together without logical connections. While musically Byrne - together with Eno - produces the wonderful project of My Life in The Bush of Ghosts, lyrically he goes towards a rarefaction of meaning which will lead to the obscurity of Speaking in Tongues. In this album Byrne literally tries a postmodern translation of the Pentecostal speaking in different unknown languages. Byrne himself admitted more than once that he didn't understand perfectly well what he was doing. In some interviews at the time he even admitted that some of his choices didn't have any logical meaning, they were meaningful only at an intuitive level. He went on to confess that sometimes he realized what he wanted to say only after he had read some critics' explanations.

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