"View on the lyrics" by Silvia Albertazzi

5. Past the next 'post'

Byrne's last two albums show a mature author, quite conscious of his own literary devices. In both the story-teller prevails over the word-juggler. In Uh-Oh, he is still telling stories of a provincial life which is now haunted by uncanny winds of change. The lyrics talk about a father who, having changed sex, asks his adolescent daughter to accept him as a mother; of a man who cannot help thinking only of girls; of people whose greatest satisfaction is window shopping and of others who prefer mysterious walks in the dark. We find again, described with increased irony, two typical features of Byrne's geography: the tiny town full of gossips, and the violent metropolis, where young boys use guns and dress like gangsters. Then, there are new characters, like a Vietnam veteran who, observing the situation of his country, concludes that evolution must have inverted its course and a woman who "on the TV and in the magazines/ ... sees the people she would like to be" and doesn't realize that by so doing she allows herself to be robbed of her dreams, her pride and even her name. Even though most of these stories are told in the first person, it would be wrong to identify their tellers with Byrne himself. Rather than confessional lyrics, these are dramatic monologues and in each of them the poet (the singer) wears a different mask in order to tell the story of a different person. The poetic concept of "persona" (= the identity which the poet assumes in his first person poems) is here adapted by Byrne to the song form, following the personal poetics he had already formulated at the time of Little Creatures, when he affirmed that he wanted to change his poetic identity continuously in order to adapt his words to other people's lives and not only to his own.

It is not surprising then, that his latest album is also the only one whose title is "David Byrne". By giving his name to the whole collection, Byrne not only chooses to talk about himself following the devices of confessional lyrics, he also proclaims his rediscovered personal identity after singing about displacement, fragmentation of the self and dislocation for so many years. Through memory and self-analysis Byrne eventually overcomes the sense of disembodiment, phantomisation and loss of the self which characterised most of his previous production. It is not by chance, that the album is illustrated with enlargements of particulars of Byrne's anatomy: an arm, an ear, the chest, and even X-rays of his teeth and his brain. The author's wish to oppose his sense of the body to every end-of-century alienation and phantomisation permeates all the songs, from the opening memories of "Long Time Ago" to the last track, which has the explicit title "Buck Naked". Here the body is a metaphor of the self. The whole collection can be interpreted as a sort of personal journey towards complete nakedness, starting from memories and dreams - which mark his need to find his own story - and leading to the identification with other people, the awareness that "we are all naked if you turn us inside out".

As in all contemporary autobiographical fiction (see, among others, Peter Handke, Max Frisch, Paul Auster, Michael Ondaatje), past time and narrated space constitute one's self. Talking about oneself is a means not to get lost. Byrne's journey into himself starts from memories. In "A Long Time Ago" he realizes that in other times he kept too much of himself for himself: "And in the land where I grew up/ Into the bosom of technology/ I kept my feelings to myself...". As in Paul Auster's world, here memory is "the space where a thing happens for the second time". Memory can help understand the present ("It's not the ending of the world/ It's only the closing of a discotheque/ I used to go 3 times a week/ That was a long long time ago") and face the future ("In between stations I can hear/ A million possibilities/ It's only the singing of the stars/ That burned out a long long time ago"). The disappearance of events, situations and objects which were familiar in the past does not mean the end of one's world, only the loss of "a sense of infinite possibilities" which, in other years, could give meaning to the passage of time and make things happen.

Byrne's starting point towards absolute nakedness is the awareness of having turned himself into a commodity he has been offering for too long to his audiences: "I'm just an advertisement/ For a version of myself", he confesses in "Angels". And in "A Self-Made Man" he even tries to analyse his role in relation to the world around him, striving to find a meaning behind appearances (quite an unusual move for the prophet of 'stop making sense'!)


My cards are on the table/ I'm gambling ev'rything that I am/ And some of us are hoping/ To end up with a perfect life/ I'll trade you ev'rything that I got/ For the chance to be someone else/ And what you see is what you get/ And what you get is what you choose/ And what I am/ What you see/ Is exactly what I choose to be.

The use of the second person suggests the possibility of identifying the "self-made man" with yet another mask of its author. Actually, the "self-made man" has no identity: he is an invented creature surrounded by the freaks of reality when he decides to face the world. His only chance to survive is to go "Back in the Box", to shut himself off in a dark place where he can avoid daylight and, by refusing to take decisions, can make no mistakes. This seems to be quite a depressing conclusion, but Byrne himself warns his listeners against the risk of taking his words too literally: "You may think I look sad/ But I am just sleeping/ It's my facial expression/ I'm probably dreaming".
Obviously, when the singer takes his mask off, a feeling of bewilderment overwhelms him, together with the fear of losing his identity for good. Yet he badly wants to overcome his fears: "Shake your body till the fear is gone/ Like it was nothing at all". Moreover, what he needs to live better are a few very simple things: "I need a little water in my garden/ I need a little sunlight on my head/ I need someone to cover me with kisses/ When I'm all alone & scared". On the one hand, he wishes to find himself in another person; on the other, he realizes that he must create a link with other people in order to transform his individual search into a collective experience. To describe his personal relationship with a possible "you" Byrne uses a series of metaphors with all possible shades of significance, from commonplace sensibility to nonsensical surrealism, following an ironic crescendo:

""I'm the look upon your face/ The water on your lawn/ The light from distant stars/ The wreckage of a plane/ The space between your teeth/ The itch you cannot scratch/ The mentally unfit/ The pimple on your lip...". On the contrary, to talk about his vision of society and collectivity Byrne returns to the technique of lists and juxtaposed images he used at the time of Fear of Music and Remain in Light: "Saw people in a remote village/ wearing their ..digital watches/ Saw a young Indonesian girl.../ Possessed by the spirit of Mutant Ninja Turtles/ Saw... palatial estates, with crumbling/ decorations... and human furniture/ I saw hairstyles/.../ Saw a skyscraper made out of abandoned car parts/.../ Saw a man on a barstool ... who hadn't/ moved ... in 32 hours..."

As he did more than fifteen years ago, Byrne is still trying to translate into words the way we often see the world: a heap of things scattered around carelessly, always unrelated to one another, linked by the poet only to create images whose meaning (if there is one) lies in the emotional fascination of pure sounds. Yet, while in the early eighties Byrne consciously proposed to 'stop making sense', in the mid-nineties he strives to build a context for the unnameable and the incomprehensible. As a result, life appears as a series of strange (because they are not understandable) rituals (e.g., recurring situations the artist tries to contextualize, seldom successfully). On the road to nowhere, now the naked poet runs after those angels who flew across the sky over Berlin on wings of desire. At the end of the ride, like in the visions of the beat generation, beyond the pearly gates, something happens, eventually, if not in heaven, at least on earth: "The sensuous world - The smell of the sea/ The sweat off their wings - the fruit from the trees/ The angel inside - will meet me tonight/ On wings of desire - I come back alive".



(Silvia Albertazzi)

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