FEATURE ARTICLE
Post-Modern Byrne
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 7, 1997) -- Try to imagine what life would be like without David Byrne. Right. It's impossible. In one form or another, Byrne has seemingly always been with us, and always will be. He is as essential to our late-20th century, post-modern, media-hyped culture as he is to our own image of ourselves, reflecting back to us what and who we are, refracting the sounds and images that define us in his various works in music, photography, video, film and conceptual art.
Since his groundbreaking work with the punk/new-wave band Talking Heads, Byrne has been our avatar of irony, the monkey on the back of pop culture, our 21st-century Renaissance man. He is at once the essence of art-school chic, a denizen of the downtown avant-garde, and a modern-day folklorist, searching the world for new and exciting sounds and styles to showcase on his personal imprint, Luaka Bop, home to the likes of Zap Mama vocalese, Cornershop raga-punk, and Geggy Tah nonsense-rock.
We rely on Byrne himself, however, to soak up the dizzying array of conflicting and contrasting messages pumped out by a world-culture in overdrive, and to process them into a coherent whole, skewed, of course, by his own alienated viewpoint as American, Not American (he was born in Scotland and lived in Canada until he was 7).
The result has perhaps never been as compellingly suggestive or resonant while at the same time being gleefully and shamelessly catchy as on "Feelings' (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros.), Byrne's latest solo album, and to these ears his most successful to date. As Byrne himself describes it, "There's a subconscious cut-and-paste going in our heads that doesn't seem strange at all. It seems like the most natural thing in the world. It's the way we live now. It's certainly what things look like, and increasingly what they sound like."
"Feelings" is just that -- a complete and utter soundtrack to life in the late-'90s, slouching toward the millenium. State-of-the-art drums n' bass crash up against Latin big-bands, string quartets glide over electronic rhythms, and above it all the unmistakable voice of Byrne likening America herself to a slutty supermodel.
Byrne calls it "a schizo version of the inside of my head." Who knew that inside Byrne's head was that elusive bridge to the 21st century?
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David Byrne is at the National Music Foundation's Berkshire Performing Arts Theatre on Friday, Aug. 8, at 8. Call 413-637-1800 for more info.[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 7, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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