Self-isolating with a stubborn throat cold (omicron?), burning the midnight oil to meet a big quarterly deadline, striving to perfect just the right tempo & rhythm to trick beta software into behaving and not automatically deleting my hours of tedious yet necessary labor, I discovered by chance the secret to synchronizing the pace of my body & mind to the software’s arcane beat: stream this album loudly & persistently through my headphones.
That quirky, funk-heavy, Eno-mastered sound fused the anxious determination of my present to some long-forgotten moment of my pre-adolescent past, dredged up from the subconscious like some massive molten flotilla of fluorescent star material from the dark cosmic seas.
But in reality the Talking Heads had been making a steady ascent through my dumb ethos-memory over some time now, interrupting my doldrums with brilliantly timed cameo appearances. There was that frenetic machine-gun riff of “Life During Wartime,” overheard from the windows of a passing car in the parking lot of my local grocery store in the middle of 2020. In an instant, that song became my pandemic anthem, actualizing the loopy, ominous, anarchic feeling I felt when I first listened to it at age 13.
Why is it only now that I realize the iconic connection this band made between disco, post-punk, New Wave, concept art, and Parliament-Funkadelic? But perhaps this ignorance uniquely befits my singular relationship with this band, which is unlike my relationship with any other aesthetic group or movement. I knew I was meant to love this band before I ever heard a note of their music.
Actually, love is not quite the right word to describe the feeling I have. Love implies some kind of ego-regard here, a subject-object relation of admiration and pleasure. Whereas this band really represents something far more vital & essential to me, something that melts away the boundaries of the me and puts me in the midst of an object-object relation suspended over the limits of time & space.
Put in another way, the music of the Talking Heads is and was like an entire epoch and ethos that I knew I was bound to someday inhabit. Their songs were like the shape of art to come and someday, when I could finally begin to understand their music and what they were all about (cue still-image cut-in of a Chris Marker protagonist), what I would be witnessing was the moment of my own future.
As I was saying, this TH retrospective had been showing up long before my deadline-driven dance with software. There was, for example, the day-long drive to Central Oregon up the Interstate 5, with Fear of Music cued on infinite loop from my phone library. I’d never before listened to this album all the through as foreground music, and now, against a backdrop of rivers, mountains, haystacks, and fruit orchards flying by at 80 mph, I was finally hearing the genius of these songs in all their puckish, post-art-school glory.
See if you can fit it on the paper
See if you can get it on the paper
See if you can fit it on the paper
See if you can get it on the paper
Like TH, Adrian Piper is another NYC artist-intellectual of the same generation who knows a lot about funky dancing and the limits of what can be fitted and gotten on paper. A few weekends ago, I spent the final 10 minutes of an exhibition that was about to close standing alone in a taut gallery, enclosed within the dimly lit chiaroscuro of Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma, letting myself be covertly yet firmly assaulted by the confrontational soundtrack of Piper’s own recorded voice. That impeccably intelligent, educated, measured, pointed, persistent, reasonable voice — the voice of institutional reason & authority put on as a form of cultural, political drag, tugging away at the embarrassing wrinkles and loose stitches of our racial discomfort.
Sez Wikipedia: “In fluid dynamics, the drag coefficient (commonly denoted as: 
My own surface area growing up was at times vacuously attenuated and ahistorically West Coast. Those East Coast avant-garde braniacs were like beings from another planet as far as I was concerned. How could I ever invent things and star-hop the way they did? How could I ever model myself after them?
Did Piper ever meet the members of TH personally or crash one of their shows at Mudd Club or CBGB? Hard to know, yet still I place their snapshots next to one another in the ramshackle scrapbook pantheon of my mind: radical creators who nonetheless cultivated a conservative approach to personal style, the slightly nerdy, ever-so-strange art kids from next door.
These people taught me about the importance of having a killer instinct.
That live version of “Psycho Killer” prominently features Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s drum and bass rhythm work, which brings me to the other way that TH serves as an archetypal model: the narrative of the band’s interpersonal dynamics and eventual breakup. This is the story of the art-collective romance, the clash of personalities and ambitions, whether a band can maintain a relationship of poly-love through all its ups and downs, whether it can weather the personal changes as its members age from their 20s to their 30s and beyond.
This is the narrative which divides the band into the David Byrne camp (or for a spell the Byrne-Eno camp) and the Weymouth-Frantz camp, with Jerry Harrison dangling off to the side there as a separate free agent. Weymouth and Frantz are one of the most notable and long-lived couples in rock history, with Frantz being possibly the most devoted, supportive, and authentically feminist partner who ever existed. During TH’s trial separation in the early 1980s, Frantz and Weymouth formed Tom Tom Club, the joyously female-first, pleasure-centered project that spawned the hugely influential & oft-sampled “Genius of Love.” The song’s success reinforced Tina Weymouth’s position as David Byrne’s chief rival for star attention, and the friction is evident on Weymouth’s face as Byrne pronounces her name almost beneath his breath as the final band member at the end of Stop Making Sense.
It’s probably an oversimplification to cast Weymouth & Frantz as champions of collaborative loyalty in contrast to Byrne’s ego-based strivings, but at the same time it’s sure hard not to do exactly that. Nowadays Byrne is celebrated as an autistic-spectrum hero, and rightly so. He has successfully channeled his superpowers to do great things, even by the standards of an era populated by neurodiverse frontmen, and certainly he is largely responsible for TH’s genius lyric sensibility and tone, what my friend A once called “the post-authentic sincere.” Yet like co-conspirator Eno, Byrne has also exhibited few qualms about claiming to be the sole creator of works that were in fact collective achievements. The archetypal diva frontman running off to solo fame and recasting his collaborators as a backup band. Which calls to mind this blogger’s perennial ambivalence towards the general myth (and delusional grandeur) of the auteur.
DARK LITERATURE 