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From: wfi@unc.UUCP (William F. Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Re: What is David Byrne doing?
Message-ID: <288@unc.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 25-May-85 17:57:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.288
Posted: Sat May 25 17:57:13 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 27-May-85 02:52:05 EDT
References: <mtx5b.1420>
Reply-To: wfi@unc.UUCP (William F. Ingogly)
Organization: CS Dept., U. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lines: 46
Summary: 


> >	Whenever I have seen The Talking Heads performing 'Once in a
> > Lifetime', David Byrne makes a chopping motion along his right forearm
> > with his left hand. Is this geture supposed to be significant of something?
> > Where did he get it?

In one version I've seen of this video, there's a shot in the
background of some sort of ceremony going on (possibly Voudon), and a
woman in the ceremony is making the same kind of gesture. The shaking
motion he makes is taken from the tremors people in Voudon ceremonies
go through when they're being possessed by a god.

> My question, along these lines, is, what is the significance (if any) of
> him hitting himself on the forehead during the first set of Same-as-it-
> ever-was's, viz.

Bear in mind that the name of the Talking Heads' movie is "Stop Making
Sense." One of the techniques the surrealist painters used earlier in
the century was to take an everyday object and strip it of all its
ordinary associations and meanings (hence, the painting of a pipe that
was labelled "Ce n'est pas un pipe," or "This isn't a pipe"). In a
literature class on contemporary poetry I took as an undergraduate, we
studied a poem called "Fear" by the contemporary poet W. S. Merwin;
it's a free-verse meditation on fear that is mostly unconnected images
about fear that occasionally start coming together and making sense.
Whenever this happens, Merwin introduces the phrase "a ring a ring a
ring" to break the flow of sense. It's as though the poetic voice
approaches the source of all fear then backs away at the last moment
by spouting nonsense. Hence, making sense is in some way a source of
danger.

It seems to me that all Byrne's gestures, the hitting of the forehead,
the shaking, the arm chopping, achieve the same effect, of in some way
stopping the sense of what he's doing and stopping the process of
interpretation on the part of the viewer. He's choosing gestures that
have nothing to do with the 'sense' of the music but have a great deal
to do with ceremonies whose sense is hidden from the typical viewer of
a Talking Heads video or concert. I suspect he's forcing the attention
to the music itself. Note also that the most recent Talking Heads
album was titled "Speaking In Tongues," another indication of Byrne's
concern with the subversion of language and 'ordinary' lyrics as a
method of communication. The lyrics on that album seem to originate in
a sort of free association; it wouldn't surprise me if Talking Heads'
next album's lyrics consisted entirely of nonsense syllables.

                              -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly