Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [53]
To maintain stardom as a function of non-empathetic distance, to keep them wanting more even as you toss the dirt of your contempt in their faces or just turn your back like Miles Davis did for most of his career… well, this is no easy trick to pull off. It takes an extremely complex personality and one who is also a master of shifting masks and disguises, the complete chameleon (Dylan, Bowie). Either that or the innate ability to project something menacing and dangerous, however spurious this impression may be, that keeps them at bay (Lou Reed). Most artists of any type just don’t have it.
Debbie, to me, is transparently a nice girl, not insipid like some but hardly redolent of danger. Who among our celebrity/folk-heroes is redolent of danger anymore? They’re all a bunch of bland-outs. That seems to be what people want. Maybe, in fact, that very craving accounts for more of Blondie's’ popularity than we might have previously suspected.
Let it never be forgotten that until Patti Smith slashed through the barriers like a henbane banshee in 1975, rock was almost exclusively a male-supremacist world. Most of the early Sixties girl groups were too ethnic, too Eastern seaboard streetgang-vibed for the kind of mass crossover appeal Debbie's achieved. Janis Joplin was too pathetic, a freak for the freaks. Grace Slick prefers her vast storehouse of private jokes and has gone out of her way to be unglamorous. Patti's still too jungle for TV Guide. So that leaves one person, the woman whose fate it is to end up getting called the “Queen of Punk.”
from the book Blondie, 1980
David Byrne Says
“Boo!”
One day someone I love said, “You hit me with your eyes.” When I hear David Byrne's lyrics, I can imagine him saying the same thing in language just oblique enough to turn the pain into per-cussively lapping waters.
These are mutant times, and Talking Heads are the most human of mutant groups. Byrne has mental institution eyes, but unlike Patti or R. Hell they don’t broadcast danger: he just looks like some nice nut holidayed from the ward with a fresh pocket of Thorazine. He and the rest of the band seem in both their music and physical presence to combine a sinuous plantlike sway with a hypertense, mechanical rigidity. They’re a marriage of diametrical opposites—abandon and inhibition, anxiety and ease, freedom and impingement into paralysis.
I was a little put off by More Songs About Buildings and Food, not only because I found the music hard to get into but because I suspected that like old Andy Warhol who kept lurking around them the Heads or Byrne might actually think that buildings and food are every bit as significant and worthy of emotional concern as mere human beings. The stance seemed deliberately evasive, modish in the worst way. Of course I missed the point. From “Love Goes to Building on Fire” out, Talking Heads are (about) humans who feel pinned by circumstance, reacting like scarecrows and windmills to the erosions of experience, registering everything precisely from a slight distance while the passion is pent, even boiling … over here, and often finds its only outlet in the rhythmic undertows. They’re also about new feelings for new social structures: “No Compassion” (“Go talk to your analyst, isn’t that what he's there for?”), “The Girls Want to Be With the Girls” (why not, especially since most of the guys are too uptight to play with them), “The Big Country” (finally somebody said it: there is nothing beyond Jersey; Jack Kerouac made all that shit up, he was a science-fiction writer).
Fear of Music provides Heads’/Byrne's most explicit blueprint yet for survival in the face of paranoias—real or imagined, makes no difference. It's also the best Heads album yet because the production is up to or above the quality of their second, while the songs have a flow that