Music Writing by Carson Arnold
DAVID BYRNE: GROWN BACKWARDS AIN'T NO DISCO (IT'S TANGO)
(photo by Chris Buck; courtesy of Sackso Co)
A friend of mine recently moved to Manhattan where he told me he saw David Byrne walking down the street one day. "He's gone gray like so much around here. Keep wondering if that David Berman lyric is accurate: 'Punk rock died when the first kid said/Punk's not dead, punk's not dead.'"
You can't help but sing this today. And hey, I thought everyone knew Byrne was just REM's Michael Stipe with a John Sayles mask on!...Well, actually no, but I imagine that would at least save his solo-craft from hovering into what my friend was referring to. Not that Byrne is punk-- like Devo, he's more artized, a career at acting "blank," and with the Talking Heads shaped a whole vanity satire which became both iconic and an irony. Figuratively, he stands perhaps as one of the weirder things in punk-rock occurrences: The day it realized that it too had to grow up like its authorities-- and continue the next lifetime questioning (literally) how to be famous without conforming against its formative hey-day, whose lyrics are adopted by so many young-uns as joint wisdom (Radiohead)-- was when everyone bought Stop Making Sense...And broke up with their garage band.
But let's not talk about the past. Old rockers and nostalgic fans alike have compromised some of the most lethal doses known to recorded sound-- just clear a room with Lou Reed's Ecstasy or even Dylan, who at this point seems tentative to release anything "political" for he'd face the consequence of touring it until eternity (undermining his myth). I admire Byrne. I don't trust him, but like Brian Eno, I'll be interested in what he's pushing. Despite, according to the Heads, being cited as an egocentric/Robbie Robertson figure of great difficulty, his contributions to Brazilian music (however "yuppie" it may sound amid its conga bliss) and help at Sessions at West 54th, earn my attention. And all with his voice (see clone Nick Cave): like a toy soldier low on batteries, robotically staggering across the carpet, somehow still chanting its mechanical, factory-made phrases and perhaps showing its first signs of sensitivity as it inches towards the wall.
I say this because Byrne is easy to poke at. An "artiste." After the Heads, a vibe. Never become a vibe, or join one, unless you're willing to buy Grown Backwards.
Okay, okay, the album's got its moments, regardless if he sounds more like Ringo Starr than anything else (and nobody did it better than Ringo). "Glass, Concrete & Stone" is tender and less self-conscious, but you'll have to insert a few more coins to realize that the latter half of the record goes cruise-control on ethnic ambience & Peter Gabriel toneship (though Byrne, for once, seems to have fallen in love with himself and the idea). It's his most artistic to date (Nonesuch) and is the record you'd imagine him to jive after the Enoboration in My Life With Ghosts. Notably, he's hired the Austin Tosca (six-piece orchestra) to coast his fragment lyrics like Jacques Brel and bosa-nova muzak for New York Language poets. Singing two opera arias-- La Traviata's "Un Di Felice," "Au Fond du Temple Saint" (Rufus Wainwright ain't no Maria Callas but he'll do)-- and abolishing all Talking Head electricities with cross-cultural quartet/drum harmonies, e.g. Laurie Anderson, he even squeezes room to write down a few dreams on the inside jacket:
Either I have misplaced my laptop coming out, or maybe I left it by a tree while loading the car, or I left it there when entering the house and I never actually brought it in-- I now realize it's missing, and of course, it's my life...
You hear that, Warhol? A lap-top. He's drawn to the subconscious; "Civilization" remarks how life is (only) knives & forks, i.e. sex in Freudism, and i.e. how do you figure that? (I challenge it with a dream of mine last night: "Listening to doo-wop with Phil Spector/Sonic Youth walks in & we talk about the desert/Soon I'm in a casino with hookers & my Grandmother won't speak to me.") It reminds me of the Booker T./Baroque trumpets in "Empire":
In national elections/In songs raised on high/With stirring emotions/As tears fill our eyes/In democratic fever/For national defense/I am a mountain (3x)/Like birds upon a fence...
Ah, I knew I'd see that bridge over troubled water again. If I didn't connect these lyrics to the artdom it seeks to adhere, I'd confuse it for an anthem off the CMT channel.
But you're gonna get these sounds from New York, and Byrne, needless to say, is New York. Post-9/11 reverie, voyeuristic city regalia, writers block, and press the pound-key for cliches. Give or take the sweet airs on "Tiny Apocalypse" or "The Man Who Loved Beer," the album borders on lounge show tunes ("Glad") for people who've watched Annie Hall way too many times (a film where no one actually seems to "work," but rather skip through the city in intellectual fetishes). Finally, the sincerest song, "She Only Sleeps," where we're familiarized with one aspect of Byrne, as a man (I think, he's afraid of narcissism), is about a girl who'll only sleep with him after all this lustful buzz is over.
Some adjustments. This ain't really about Grown Backwards. In fact, musically (classically), the album's a triumph (in a pop-art/Henri Mancini sense). I guess this is more about Byrne's personality (according to a photographer friend of mine, Tina Weymouth calls him by his full name, and that he didn't approve of her dressed onstage.) I'm pretty certain there's a concept behind it. And that's why I'm reviewing it. One: being I have, like any of us, the Talking Heads rotating through my mind distilling any reaction what solo-Byrne is, and two, how he seems to have intentionally carved his persona into a sedate neurosis where anything he sings, the music will automatically be successful, for it's centered around Bryne's overall absence in reality. Get in line.
Maybe he's just too normal of a guy. Maybe that's the point. Or maybe I'd like to hear an album that doesn't have to rely on blending a thousand hemispheres into a melting-pot where we spend more time classifying it than listening. Grown Backwards sounds nice. I like the arrangements. I just think Byrne needs a little blood. Donations? This guy is serious. But he's square. A vibe. Uh-ho. And if I think about it anymore, our "punk-rock" hair dye might start to gray. I don't want that. Even if it's inevitable. And that's what it's all about.
--Carson Arnold - June 30st, 2004