"View on the lyrics" by Silvia Albertazzi

4. World Music, World Poetry

Byrne's interest for African culture leads him from Afro-American rhythms to Afro- Brazilian spirituality (to whom he devoted a documentary film called Ile Aye) and sounds, which are at the core of his solo pop album, Rei Momo. The critics tend to dismiss Rei Momo either as yet another white musician's attempt at conquering the music market with a multicultural project or as a sophisticated musician's surrender to pop and dance music. In other words, while Byrne realizes that rock has "reached saturation point" and soon people from the Third World "will assert their own culture, or take elements of rock or pop or whatever and put it into their own stuff", the critics cannot forgive him for leaving the Talking Heads to put together a "Latin-tinged selection" where "his educated, self- conscious, impossibly white voice [...] sounds amusingly ill at ease against the fluid, bubbling music". "Rei Momo" is the king of Carnival: consequently, the lyrics in this album depict a Carnival world, a world upside down where once a year you can literally be "struck by lightnin'" walking through the streets of New York. Singing alternately in English, Portuguese and Spanish, Byrne tells of a distorted world of people crazy for love and then paints a Carnival parade of weird masks - policemen controlling the dreams of mankind, office cowboys, the Mona Lisa and the invisible man, the Tattoo Rose and Noah, all marching through the wilderness, following a puppet-king who is mimicking tv people.

In Rei Momo Byrne sings about the Carnival world and its abolition of barriers and distinctions through a series of outlandish metaphors and surreal similes. It has been observed that "in the midst of the party, he can still stop making sense, unearthing absurd lyrical gems". Lines like "I walk like a building/ I never get wet/ I'm looking at ladies/ I'm talking like men" and metaphors like "Like a pizza in the rain/ No one wants to take you home" show a will to overcome even rhetorical and semantic barriers. Here Byrne plays with lies to deconstruct the Western world in order to build a new magical fictional reality.: "It's a beautiful world and a beautiful dream/ And you know I don't care if things are not what they seem/ Making up stories that you know aren't true/ But you know it's all right 'cause I know it too".

Revisiting a theme he had already dealt with in some Talking Heads hits like "Found a Job" and "Television Man", the relationship between television and the man in the street, in "Make Believe Mambo" Byrne faces his subject from an utterly original point of view. "I thought rather than criticising that, I'd encourage it", he explained, "see what kind of strange mutated behaviour results. Rather than trying to give some stupid advice like a guidance counsellor: "You must be yourself", or whatever. Take the opposite path. Be someone else". This is the climax of the Carnival spirit: "He can be a macho man/ Now he's a game show host/ One minute hilarious comedian/ Now he's an undercover cop/ Oh - let the poor boy dream/ Oh - livin' make believe /.../ I can be you and you can be me/ In my mundo, todo el mundo/ Ev'ryone's happy, and ev'ryone's free".

Commenting on True Stories, Byrne wrote: "Movie making is a trick. Song writing is a trick. If a song is done really well, the trick works. If not, people can see through it right away". And another time he said: "I don't think there's anything wrong with seeing the figure manipulating the puppets [...] But when you constantly have the sense that you're the puppet and this thing is dragging you along, it's an unpleasant feeling". Consequently, a humorous parody of current and identifiable situations now substitutes the typical postmodern humourless parody deriving from a feeling of political and cognitive impotence. At the same time, the awareness that art glories in the realisation of its functional role in social life takes the place of the postmodern concept that art suffers from the realisation of its marginality.

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