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By Root 524 0

makes it more immediately accessible. Byrne's a kind of Every-neurotic, wandering through the world encountering ouch-producers every step and breath he takes, relaying them back to us filtered through his sense of humor, his natural musicality, and the ever sifting-shifting medium that is Brian Eno. Fear of Music might as well have been called Fear of Everything. Show me an item extant sentient or otherwise in the world we share and I’ll show you a clinically certified list of reasons why proximity to said item should be considered risky if not downright lethal. Under such circumstances, you have every right to be wrong. McLuhan missed it: we’re not a global village, we’re a global OUTPATIENT CLINIC, and the life force itself is most fully embodied in a frenetically twitching nerve. But even with that on your side there is one thing you must face: YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS ANYWHERE. Nothing and no one. Also, NATURE IS PERVERSE. E.g., air and new Heads tune of same title: it's not just cigarette smoke or auto exhaust or the pollutants factories chuff out—it's air qua air that's out for your ass. Because in this most richly diversified of all possible universes, it just might happen to be the case that AIR DOES NOT LIKE YOU.

The refusal to face or understand such facts is why we’re all terminally psychotic and no doctor, pill, book, or guru holds the cure. The disease is called life and there is no cure for that including death (makes fertilizer::continuation of life-cycle::no good) so ha ha the joke's on you from cradle to crypt. David Byrne knows all these things; what's more he knows that “Some people don’t know shit about the … AIR…”

That's the trouble with our society today: people take everything too damn much for granted. They think the disease is gonna shit out pills to cure itself. In this album Dr. Byrne examines various popularly proposed panaceas with dissecting knife and discards them one by one.

Socialized day-to-day living in this imminent nullkrieg is outlined in “Life During Wartime”: “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around/This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB, I ain’t got time for that now.” When there is no firm ground, the only sensible thing to do is keep on the move, ergo finally, on their third album, this song becomes the first example of what might qualify as the Heads’ version of “road” songs—the other one is “Cities”—most of which boil down to “A lot of ghosts in a lot of houses,” who just like befuddled birds may “go up north and come back south/Still got no idea where in the world they are.”

“Drugs” is a hilariously solemn recitation of the usual chemical comicstrips, and “Animals” puts away all those maudlin mabels like Robinson Jeffers and Euell Gibbons who belabor us with man's odi-ousness behaviorwise when stacked up against our noble ancestors dwelling next door in the wilds or more properly zoos. But the bottom line is that “They’re setting a bad example.” The truth, as Byrne points out, is that animals, besides having no intelligence beyond brute fear reflex, are a bunch of smug little bastards who are laughing at us just because we keep drawing diagrams across a universe they knew was chaotic in the first place.

Which brings us to David Byrne's basic philosophy of existence: To feel anxiety is to be blessed by the full wash of life in its ripest chancre— everything else is wax museums. Having rejected drugs, animal husbandry, jogging not to mention breathing itself, towns, cities, and whole continents in his search for some little nook where he can relax for even one instant, Byrne finally lays it on the line: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Every state but zero cool emptiness, every place on the map but Nowheresville, spells anxiety under a wide assortment of brand names. Once yanked, nerves never forget. You are going to be driven crazy by all of this, no, wait, you ARE crazy BECAUSE of all this, or maybe JUST BECAUSE PERIOD, and you always will be as long as you live. Crazy is simply your birthright, signifying citizenship in the human race.