Yet artists are rightly ticklish, in our diagnostic era, at the intrusions of such frameworks on the reception of their creative results. Byrne, from Bicycle Diaries:
The great works of antiquity, the classics, could have been made by nameless (to us) skilled obsessive nutters — many of their personal stories are lost to history. So maybe they could have been complete misfits too — but who cares?
He goes on:
It makes one wonder if Braque and other cubists suffered from migraines and were painting what they actually saw. Would that make a difference?
It might be worth keeping in mind, too, that Asperger’s, and the whole autism “spectrum,” is only a local prevailing condition in the history of human self-understanding. A recent weather pattern, possibly a shape glimpsed in clouds because we need to see one there. We locate so much Asperger’s Syndrome right now everywhere, in our selves and children and our art, at least partly because it gives the relief of a name to one of the unnamable zones in the contemporary relation of our curious, helpless minds to the stuff outside of our minds — to the problem of buildings and food, and of other people. The word “supertaster” describes someone whose tongue can barely stand even the slightest salt, sugar or bitter, whose sensitivity to ordinary things makes him or her averse to that which we all are expected to take for granted. But there are days, passages in human history — Late Capitalism, say — that make supertasters of us all. Or at least it may be that in a world consisting of so much routine super-stimulation, of overwhelming demands and bewildering possibilities, we may recognize ourselves in the description, abruptly and with relief.
Everyone needs to be a victim of something, after all, except for me and my monkey.
The banana-yellow-suited interviewer asks Byrne, menacingly, jabbing his finger, “What do the words of your songs mean to you? I mean, you don’t write love songs, do you?”
Byrne replies, painstakingly, “Uh, I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kind of — big.”
The question, then, is not how Aspergerian David Byrne might be — or whether or not that is even a question worth asking, or appropriate to ask (never mind that he raised it himself), outside of current fads in the history of the Categorical Imperative. The question is what that description might offer as a means for raising the artifact at hand and turning it, prism-like, to cast an altered light. Fear of Music, if you wore it like a mask over your usual head, could be a kind of machine for coping. With its air of list-making rigor, its doomed authority, this collection of songs might have special capacities for sorting the stuff of the world into manageable boxes, like a child’s dinner plate with barriers to keep the peas from the potatoes.
Yet in practice, the album’s coping devices keep falling apart individually, while discrediting one another collectively. Some things that look small from a distance, smaller than “love” — animals, say — may, when approached more closely, turn out difficult to tame. The last three songs continue Side Two’s meditation on the chances for, and risks of, liberation, while staking out increasingly cynical and perverse stances on the topic. The three also form a mini-suite on the theme of the album’s own dissolving authority and control.
Animals
The flayed, jerky guitar and metronomically tense drum and bass all land “on the one” right at the get-go, leaning forward with an air of outright panic. (“Animals” resembles a James Brown track, one of those where the Godfather of Soul and the J.B.’s sound like they’ve been set on fire, like “Hot Pants” or “Super Bad” — well, basically, “Animals” is “Super Bad,” played super badly.) The urgency recalls “I Zimbra,” yet with none of the grace — as if to refute the earlier song’s disembodied utopianism — and no conga polyrhythms to seduce your nervous system up to the song’s speed. (Instead, something seems to be relentlessly scratching, just beneath the threshold of your attention, sounding like a dog at the door of a locked cabinet full of kibble.) “Animals” has been pounding its fist in its palm from the start, even if you don’t at first discern the sound of an aggrieved pant or grunt from a singer desperate to be called to the microphone to lay out his irrational case. When he does, 8 seconds in — “I’m mad, and that’s a fact!” — it is in the manner of an outraged citizen taking over a previously orderly city council session, finding voice for screwball gripes he’s nursed his whole life, and ruining, for the counsel members, a planned evening of agreeably dull rubber-stamping.
You’d think all concerned would sag their foreheads into their hands and ignore this guy, or go into the corridor for a cigarette break, but the band falls in around him instead, one hundred percent persuaded for a change, and utterly adamant in prosecuting the same argument themselves. Which seems to concern, ah, pets. It’s a whole chorus of town kooks. Well, maybe there really is something that needs attending to, though it seems unlikely to be urgent as they claim: how can something so cute and, well, so natural, be an emergency? You just found out — really? The whole presentation’s a bit shrill, hard to take at face value. The haranguing guitar and ticking-time-bomb bass use the musical equivalent of button-pushing words, saying things that sound like “zero-sum game,” “no alternatives,” and “nuclear option.” If these guys sounded half as outraged, let their voices drop into a lower, more persuasive register — or employed a more dialectical argument, giving some credit to the opposing viewpoint — they’d easily be twice as convincing.
The song with which you’re likeliest to flat-out take exception is the song that most agrees with itself.
“Animals”’ unapologetic righteousness is displayed in the narrator’s first utterance: He’s mad (rather than simply either enraged or psychotic) and therefore begging the question of whether he’s got an ear for the double-entendre, or for jokes generally. Doesn’t sound like it. So the song transforms its listener into a reasonable Alice, she who can’t help noticing that the Mad Hatter by definition sits at a table full of animals.
* * *
It’s hard even to begin counting the ways this lyric self-discredits. “Animals think they’re pretty smart” — uh, no. Smart or not, intellectual vanity is beyond their range. Like envisioning the future, regretting the past, or being an intentional asshole, thinking you’re smart is one of the things that defines being human. “Animals want to change my life.” Really? (Maybe the title of this song should be “Projection,” buddy.)
“Made a mistake in the parking lot.” This phrase is a revealing clue as to what’s going on here: “made a mistake” is a would-be domesticator’s term, the utterance of a frustrated potty-trainer. No animal who actually lived on nuts and berries could possibly excrete in any “wrong” place. Really, every inch of paradise (which we paved, in order to put up the parking lot) is a wild animal’s proper toilet. (This point has already been conceded, anyway, by “shit on the ground / see in the dark” — i.e. it’s a basic property of animalhood.) The “mistake,” sir, is yours, to expect the wild kingdom of fauna to honor your foolish rules, the parking lot legislated with painted lines and directional arrows that we’ve made of the world. The retraction of “shit” in favor of the mincing euphemism “made a mistake” is a clue, too. This narrator — clearly an inhabitant of “Cities” — is in an anal-retentive twist, having observed in the animals a freedom easily attained, a freedom taken for granted, that very thing he ought, by the logic of this album’s illogic, to revere and desire. Yet it only seems squalid and threatening, completely divorced from his own experience or possible uses. He wants to believe it mocks him, and offers maliciously bad counsel, for the alternative is a terrifying indifference.
* * *
Taking “Animals” in the least seriously, you risk joining the narrator as the butt of the joke. For once, Fear of Music may have bitten off more, subject-matter-wise, than it can possibly chew — a mystery deeper than mind, cities, memory, or even heaven. Each of those earlier topics is, in its different way, Us, while animals are the True Other. They’re n
ot-mind, and they dwell in not-heaven — i.e. a totally non-conceptual realm. To contemplate them is to stare at the cold blank fact of a universe that needn’t include us and our conflictual self-awareness.
So met, the album’s only option is total self-satire. We’re plunged into Lester Bangs’ “comedy record” now for sure. The primary joke is that of the breakdown of the album’s persuasive methodology (even if this was getting us nowhere in a hurry). Having a tantrum about animals being hairy (true) is as pathetic as insisting they live untroubled lives (debatable, with us around) or care whether they influence yours (patently false). This song fears its narrator is idiotic — or is positive that he is — which is precisely why it hastens to castigate the animals for not getting the joke (more projection). It does this even at risk of contradicting its persistent sulky claims that they like to laugh at people and are making fools of us. Similarly, the song sneers at the wanderings of a crazy dog as a form of indirection, to cover its own crazy-dog wandering, its bald lack of useful direction (even to be hairy might be preferable). In the end, it tries to preempt dismissal with utter candor, pleading: “Go ahead, laugh at me.” We’ll be happy to oblige, both because it’s funny, and to put some distance between ourselves and these erroneous sentiments.
* * *
At the age of nine or ten, before Talking Heads or George Orwell had entered his life, the boy in his room read Albert Payson Terhune’s once-famous novels about noble collies: Lad, A Dog, and His Dog. Then he told his parents he wanted a dog. He specifically asked for a Golden Retriever, but specifically received a Brooklyn street mutt, rescued from an abusive family down the block. “Blue” was half German Shepherd, half something else that the boy’s family always claimed was Weimaraner, though really, who knew? Cued by Terhune, the boy intensely sentimentalized Blue’s intelligence, loyalty, and valor. Blue was “his dog,” though in the end Blue attached himself more completely to that boy’s father, who was the one left to walk the dog, and to pick up his shit.
Thirty-five years later, I’m the father who twice-daily walks the family dog with a plastic bag inverted on my hand. I do it muttering sarcasm at the poor terrier, who may in her Pavlovian way by now require my muttering in order to move her bowels. My wife dislikes how I talk to the dog, my ongoing critique of the terrier’s neuroses and repetition compulsions (things I possess myself, needless to say). I don’t blame my wife — my speeches to the dog are contemptible — but still defend myself by pointing out that the dog doesn’t understand. My wife believes this is an underestimation of the dog. That’s usually the last word until the slavish creature — the dog, that is — commences licking my toes, a nightly ritual.
What I’ve never admitted to my wife, though, is that at some level of my being I’m probably still testing animals to see whether or not they might understand. If I’ve (reluctantly) quit waiting to meet Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows or the walrus from Through The Looking Glass, I haven’t given up entirely being disappointed not to own a Terhune dog. That’s to say, one who judges my moral squalor in a single pitying canine glance, and thus forces me to become a better person. This is the kind of permanent error possible only in a bookish urban childhood. “Animals,” much as I want to dismiss it, freezes this portion of my soul in a snapshot.
* * *
In 1986 artist Ilona Granet began mounting fake street signs in Manhattan, intended to shame wolf-whistling male-chauvinists, reading “Curb Your Animal Instincts.” Would it make better sense taking animals personally if the animals in question were our own bodies, beheld in dismay by our reeling, outraged brains?
“Always bumping into things” — who hasn’t held this grudge against their own limbs at some point? This interpretation puts another spin on the cries of bad advice and setting bad examples, which now may be understood as the outcries of a mind that can’t get a handle on its unruly vehicle. Who’s driving this bus? For the answer, look down, down, down. “Never there when you need them / Never come when you call them” — who was it who said that the clearest proof of God’s mockery of man was a disobedient hard-on? This aligns the song, perhaps, with Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine Blues,” or Randy Newman’s “Gone Dead Train,” or some other thinly veiled allegory of impotence, though the comparison reveals a crucial difference: a train or engine was at least firmly under human command at some point. An animal, less so.
* * *
The (up)tight bounds of the self-enclosed groove in “Animals” operates like a heartbreakingly cruel zoo-exhibit cage. Two-thirds through and it’s refused to allow the song to inch either forwards or backwards. Then, without warning, or any “build,” comes a phase transition, to another, equally constricted, airless, and sensorily deprived musical space, as if the creature has now wedged itself into a drain pipe leading from its wretched habitat, no improvement at all. The aggrieved vocal chanting that comes next puts forth a litany of new accusations. From here, a slow fade. This won’t do, but it has to. We settle for the wholly unsatisfying outro.
This structure links “Animals” to “Memories Can’t Wait,” another song that changes gears two-thirds through, never to return to the earlier mode, even while its lyrics deny the possibility of change. The sonic shift in “Memories,” though, conveys secret possibilities for release. Not here. Animals don’t help, and “Animals” won’t. Halfway through a Side Two that began with the ambitious reach of “Air” and “Heaven,” Fear of Music is vacating its facade of progress.
* * *
Played live (you can hear it on The Name of This Band is Talking Heads), the bitterness of “Animals” is barely sweetenable, but some distance is achieved by expanding “go ahead, laugh at me” from a subliminal last-second mutter to a full-throated chorus. In 1988’s “Nothing but Flowers” — a song, basically, about tearing down the parking lot and putting up a paradise (and then regretting that, too) — the songwriter inserts more daylight between himself and the benighted fulminator of “Animals,” singing, “We used to microwave / Now we just eat nuts and berries / You got it, you got it.”
Is Fear of Music a Paranoid Record?
Like science fiction or Asperger’s, “paranoid” is a label that’s a Rorschach blot. We’ll want to know what it says about you that you even put it forward for consideration, certainly, before we consent to try it on. Do you mean paranoid in a good way? Do you like paranoid art?
Let me go first: while I prefer to believe I’m not certifiably paranoid, I like paranoid art very much. Paranoid art of certain kinds. At least as I understand the term. Which I’ll try to define below. Am I hedged enough to go forward? (Or too hedged to go forward at all?)
Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It’s brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It’s not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what’s out there. It might even be bravery’s opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name “religion.”
For an individual social operator, moving through realms of gossip, through pecking orders and cliques and workplace water-cooler herds, or the even more intimate sphere of requited or unrequited love or friendship, paranoia’s not much more attractive or serviceable: what are they saying about me? How can I infiltrate them and find out? Did I hear what I thought I heard? Was that slight a calculated one? Am I wearing horns? That figure’s a universally comic or pitiable one — the jealous husbands of Shakespeare’s Othello or Preston Sturges Unfaithfully Yours, or the Zo
onoidal narrator of “Animals.”
Paranoia’s companions, the false-opposites of pronoia (the belief that everything is a benign conspiracy, manipulated in your personal favor) and solipsism (the suspicion that you are everything) are marvelously useful to mention here, in as much as they indicate paranoia’s fundamental Achilles’ heel: you, you, you, you great big beautiful doll you — you’re always at the center of the situation. What Copernicus might seem to have long-ago abolished, paranoia and its fellows restore: the observer’s centrality to the scheme he observes.
So what’s the use of paranoid art?
A remark — actually a lyric — comes to bear: “There is a war / Between the ones who say there is a war / And the ones who say that there isn’t.” (It’s from a Leonard Cohen song.) Paranoid art says, basically, there is a war. Between the one who is looking to find something to change your mind, and the mind that doesn’t want to be changed; between the sleepers and those awake, between you and the air and the animals; possibly between heaven and earth. Paranoid art insists on tracking lines (drawn on paper, perhaps): lines of force and influence, force fields of motivation, codes of power. It reinscribes the image of something at stake that others may prefer to obscure. This art traffics in interpretation, and so beckons interpretation on the part of its audience.
Perhaps above all, paranoid art is usefully confused about what is on the inside and what is on the outside of the container. Which is the place the war is to be fought? That’s the essential argument between “Life During Wartime” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Paranoid art is where Copernicus goes to be persistently overthrown, for it has noticed that consciousness is itself a permanent conspiracy theory, and one that is ipso facto correct. I think, therefore I am at the center of this story. Even if I don’t want to be. Even if I’d rather sleep. While paranoia in everyday life asks questions it believes have terrifying answers, paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. For paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.
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