"View on the lyrics" by Silvia Albertazzi

3. A Portrait of the Rock-Star as a Story-Teller

To understand the importance of Postmodernism for David Byrne it's enough to see Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme's film of the 1984 Talking Heads' tour of that name. Starting from the title of both video and tour, we are in the realm of that American Postmodernism which takes everything as a game, a joke (see writers like John Barth or Donald Barthelme). Where everything is meaningless, it is no use looking for any kind of meaning. Byrne suggests the possibility of freeing oneself from the compulsion to interpret and signify which is typical of Western culture. Let's consider, for instance, his famous performance of "Once in a Lifetime". Wearing an enormous coat and a pair of huge tortoise glasses; moving in a goofy way and staring at his audience with wide open eyes, Byrne turns the story told in the song into a variation on the theme of Kafka's "Metamorphosis". The only difference is that, while in Kafka's tale a man wakes up one morning transformed into a huge bug, in Byrne's song the protagonist wakes up to find himself turned into an (apparently) utterly ordinary guy. While Demme's direction underlines Byrne's minimalism, the introduction of Afro-American musicians as guest-stars and the use of slides hint at future developments of Byrne's poetics towards a new socio-ethnic awareness. Until this moment Byrne, like all the greatest American Postmodern artists, used media images to create a kind of historical amnesia; from now on, orality and oral story-telling were to become key-concepts in his lyrics, which appear to be minimal mirrors of the present. The meeting with third world culture is fundamental to promote this passage from "stop making sense" to story-telling. Yet, the discovery of the roots of American popular culture is no less important. Even in a cryptical album like Speaking in Tongues one can find a track like "This Must Be the Place", where Byrne, dealing again with his desire to find a place to live in, identifies his ideal home in a space created by a feeling shared with his loved one. ("Home - is where I want to be/ But I guess I'm already there/ I come home - she lifted up her wings/ Guess this must be the place/.../ I'm just an animal looking for a home/ Share the same space for a minute or two"). "Feet on the ground/ Head in the sky", the dislocated Byrne, himself a migrant from Scotland via Canada, invents a place which is born out of his wish and of his urge to transform his own experience into metaphors and visions. It is not by chance that in this song we find one of Byrne's most captivating images: "Out of all those kinds of people/You got a face with a view". While reminding the audience of the title of a famous novel by E. M. Forster (A Room with a View), Byrne's "face with a view" is a visionary image whose strength can be compared only to the most surreal line of Paul McCartney ("Wearing the face that she keeps in a jug by the door"), which is to be found, of course, in the Beatles' song "Eleanor Rigby".

The theme of the search for a place to live in is linked to that for musical roots. In the first half of the eighties, Byrne started studying white American popular culture with the same commitment with whom he had faced African and Afro-American cultures before. In 1985, with Little Creatures Byrne returns to the song genre, in the wake of North-American folklore and popular music. Even though the critics often consider Little Creatures as a minor incident of "the thinking man's rock star" (this is what they called Byrne at the time), the lyrics of the album show a narrative potentiality for the first time. Especially in two tracks, "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere", taking his distance from his most famous British predecessors, Byrne expresses his own poetics, where typical elements of his previous production (minimalism, surrealism, dislocation and millennium anxiety) are revisited and recreated in a new setting: the American provinces, seen as the epitome of every province and marginality.

In the first song - the story of a girl taking LSD in a suburb of Baltimore - the stress is not on the protagonist's visions, but on her feelings and reactions, seen by an external observer. It's quite interesting to compare the lyrics of "And She Was" with the lines John Lennon wrote for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Lennon describes Lucy's delirious visions : tangerine trees and marmalade skies, cellophane flowers of yellow and green that grow so incredibly high, plasticine porters with mirroring ties, rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies. On the contrary, Byrne relates the Baltimore girl's experience in quite an objective way: "And she was lying in the grass/ And she could hear the highway breathing/ And she could see a nearby factory/ She's making sure she's not dreaming/ See the lights of a neighbor's house/ Now she's starting to rise/ Take a minute to concentrate/ And she opens up her eyes". The accent is on the illusion of flying which the poet can only vaguely perceive from his external viewpoint. He can see a dreary urban periphery (highway and factory are both recurring images in Byrne's poetic universe) and he can understand the girl's wish to escape, to fly away, not only metaphorically. Under the effect of the drug, the girl has the illusion of floating in the universe, in other words, she feels as if she had overcome that sense of displacement characterising so many Byrnian poetic personae. For a moment, she finds her place in the world, her real being, as the verb "was" in italics seems to suggest. Yet, the use of the past tense implies the illusory nature of her precarious feeling of identity, its belonging to a past which is irretrievably lost . In 1967, Lennon invites his audience quite explicitly to share Lucy's vision: "Picture yourself in a boat on a river../Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly/.../ Newspaper taxis appear on the shore/ waiting to take you away..." Obviously, the poetic "you" can be another person (the listener, maybe) as well as a "first person you", that is to say a mask of the poet's self and, lastly, it can even be an impersonal form which the poet uses to generalize the experience of taking drugs. In any case, the poet shows a wish to share this experience with someone, even to introduce someone to it.

On the contrary, in Byrne's song we have a third person description which underlines the distance between the teller (=the singer) and the object of his tale. "And she was drifting through the backyard/ And she was taking off her dress/ And she was moving very slowly/ Rising up above the earth/ Moving into the universe/ Drifting this way and that". We have the same feeling of slow motion, the same idea of flying, of a "magical mystery tour" we find in the Beatles' song. Yet, while Lennon uses suggestive language to create a surreal setting, Byrne prefers minimalist images yet another time. The 'trip' is incomprehensible for an exterior observer, but it is also impossible to relate for those who go on it: "She isn't sure about where she's gone/ No time to think about what to tell them/ No time to think about what she's done". The visionary trip becomes "exterior" even for the girl, who can eventually observe herself as another person, like in a movie. Paradoxically, the feeling left by the song is one of dispersion and loss of the self deriving from an attempt to unite in a single vision one's own fragmentation and marginality to all other realities of dislocation and emargination. The final stanza of Byrne's song seems to underline the two decades which separate Lennon's Lucy from Byrne's school friend: "Joining the world of missing persons/ (and she was)/ Missing enough to feel alright". Nothing is left in the experience of drugs: no more joyous visions, almost childish landscapes, like it was for Lucy; no more bright suns, lively colours, images which seem to come out of a cartoon. Now there's only a desire to disappear, a wish of annihilation, a paradoxical attempt at being by not being any longer.

In "Road to Nowhere" Byrne looks at another myth of the sixties, the road, with irony and disillusionment. The first stanza (omitted in Byrne's solo versions) is highly confessional: "Well, we know where we're goin'/ But we don't know where we've been/ and we know what we're knowin'/ But we can't say what we've seen/ and we're not little children/ and we know what we want/ and the future is certain/ give us time to work it out". Here Byrne speaks for all his generation: people in their early thirties who suddenly realize that their youth is over, their future uncertain and their experiences quite limited. The road of life doesn't lead anywhere, its goal is never attained. Yet the rhythm of the song is merry, as if to suggest the unbearable lightness of incertitude.

Time is still on Byrne's side, perhaps the road to nowhere leads to heaven. While in Kerouac's novel On the Road the main characters feel the urge to go forever, even though they don't know where, Byrne, too, keeps on going without stopping, but he knows that he's going nowhere. Yet on his road to nowhere he feels good, he is no longer upset because he cannot find a place to live in and he realizes that it's better to be forever on the road than to eventually reach a paradise where nothing ever happens. As for the city he is heading to, it appears as imaginary as the towns visited by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, surely one of the best-known and most studied Psotmodern novels in the USA. Byrne's city, which grows in his mind day by day, instead of being a real town is, like Polo's Venice, "the desire of a city".

True Stories, the film directed by Byrne in 1986, is set in another town which seems to come out of Calvino's novel. Virgil, Texas, an imaginary city which is similar to all the actual little towns one can find in the American province, is a town without a real centre, which can be crossed in any direction, like Calvino's "continuous cities". In his film, Byrne turns his minimalist interest for the American province into a series of fragmented narratives, linked one another in a very postmodern way, without a real plot. Visiting Virgil as an objective outsider, Byrne observes every detail of the town and every attitude of its inhabitants with ever increasing curiosity, irony and amazement. The result is one of the most original movies of the Eighties, a mixture of grotesque and paradoxical situations found in popular tabloids, which have been put together to shape an unpredictable collage of sounds and images. "I deal with stuff that's too dumb for people to have bothered to formulate opinions on", Byrne himself confessed about his film. Yet, what strikes the audience in True Stories is precisely the narrator's amazed attitude, his amused way of looking at things without taking part, his being more an accomplice than a judge of what he sees.

In this way, True Stories, a complex mix of different languages and media, surely the most postmodern of Byrne's cultural experiments, turns into a sort of good-bye to the postmodern, for good. Fragmentation, use of quotations, multimediality, and a return to popular culture acquire a new meaning when seen through the narrator's sympathetic eyes. Even minimalism, which seems to be at the very core of Byrne's project, becomes something different: a way of looking at the details of triviality from an unusual perspective. Around the corner of everyday provincial life Byrne catches fantastic elements: Virgil and its inhabitants are 'special' and they celebrate their being 'different' with a queer parade at the end of the movie. The rhetoric of terminality seems to be far away. "For years we have been taught not to like things", Byrne observes, "Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything".

The very title of True Stories reminds one of the art of story-telling, the ability to tell the truth by telling lies. At the end of the movie, observing that only when you forget a thing can you really see it, Byrne seems to suggest new poetics, where the belief that nothing is more real than the things we imagine is linked to an idea we find at the basis of Calvino's Invisible Cities: "you can perceive the true shape of things only in the distance". In his last album with the Talking Heads, Naked, Byrne widens his musical horizon yet again to embrace contemporary American authors (Philip Glass, for instance) together with African percussion. Also in his lyrics he shows a will to deal with new themes. His language is still very colloquial, almost trivial; his technique, still the alienation effect created by putting usual words in an incongruous context, disrupting commonplace sentences and, by doing so, upsetting the audience's expectations. Yet this conscious device of linguistic dislocation does not translate a sense of existential displacement any longer. Postmodern crisis and anti-narrative lyrics are over. After True Stories, the story-teller acquires more importance than either the word juggler of Remain in Light or the shaman of Speaking in Tongues. Let's see, for instance, "Mommy Daddy You and I", where Byrne tells a story of migration and difficult adaptation to the "land of opportunities".


All the way from Baltimore/ We couldn't find a seat/ Conductor says he's sorry for/ The blisters on our feet/ Come-a riding in a bus/ The high and the low/ Mommy, daddy, you and I/ Going on a trip/ And we're not going home /.../ Driving, keep driving/ Driving, driving all night/ Sleeping on my daddy's shoulder/ Drinking from a paper cup/ And I'm wearing my grandfather's clothes/ And they say up North it gets cold.

The road to nowhere leads to the deep north now. The view is depressing, there are no perspectives ("Making changes day by day/ And we still ain't got no plan/ How gonna we make our way/ In this foreign land?"), but still there's a great faith in travelling, in moving and in changing. ("Well, We'll keep driving, keep driving/ Driving with all our might"). The postmodern fear of fragmentation has given way to a positive desire to change; to an energy and a faith in one's own potentialities whose literary equivalent can be found in the works of migrant writers.
At the same time, Byrne starts to deal with more social issues, now with his usual irony, like in "The Democratic Circus", now with unusual verbal and visual violence, like in "Blind", where he talks about a terrorist shot dead "in the name of democracy" to the indifference of his fellow citizens. Anyway, in all cases his messages are not direct, but filtered through metaphors. The value of metaphors is "telling two stories at once", Byrne said to an interviewer. "You're telling a story on a deeper level that may be unconscious, or maybe it's obvious, and then you're telling a story that can be immediately perceived. I think that people intuitively perceive both simultaneously". This is what happens, for instance, in "(Nothing but) Flowers", an amusing joke at the expenses of all would-be ecologists. Actually, the songs deals with the problems of a pair of lovers who, "Like an Adam and an Eve" live in a sort of garden of Eden, but miss all the amenities of metropolitan life. While imagining a utopian world where "The highways and cars/ Were sacrificed for agriculture", Byrne makes fun of all those people who, in a similar context, couldn't help confessing, "I thought that we'd start over/ But I guess I was wrong". The protagonist of the song is introduced in a surreal way as is typical of Byrne the word-juggler: "Years ago/ I was an angry young man/ I'd pretend/ That I was a billboard". Yet this character's nostalgia for all the commonplace trivialities of American consumerism - pizza parlours, soft drinks, dairy products, shopping malls and discount stores - is even more humorous if compared with the Eden-like world he refuses.

Another proof of Byrne's gusto for story-telling is the collection of Talking Heads' videos he edited in 1988, whose very title, Story-telling Giant, emphasizes his will to narrate, to fictionalize. All the videos (which are themselves minimal visual stories) are connected by tales told by ordinary people - memories, dreams, situations told to Byrne's camera by people who, not being necessarily familiar with the Talking Heads, don't comment on the songs, but talk about themselves in an enthusiastic way which reminds one of ancient oral story-telling. By opposing their words to his songs Byrne seems to suggest that mass society can transform orality into textuality just by translating the spoken word into images and sounds, without passing though the medium of the written word, exactly as it happened in primitive cultures.

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