“The need to innovate is almost like some weird disease, an unhealthy obsession,” muses David Byrne. “A tree doesn’t feel like it needs to do something new — it just needs to be what it is, and if it does that well, it’s beautiful. But people feel, no, you can’t just be what you are, you have to keep doing it differently. “It’s sick but, well, I’m infected with it, and I might as well admit it.”
David Byrne is an innovator; you knew that, right? From the marvelous art-damaged rock of Talking Heads through his wildly eclectic solo career, he has sought to bring something new to the table, to broaden his own musical palette with new and different combinations of sound and ideas. And while his efforts have occasionally met with mixed results or smarmy critical disdain (“Oh, look, now he’s recording with a choir of aboriginal nose-whistlers. How … interesting.”) Byrne has consistently avoided the kind of self-indulgent alchemy that so often finds “experimental” artists caught between the alienating and the unlistenable. His mad-scientist tendencies are tempered by a finely honed sense of music’s organic nature, and an overriding devotion to the groove: He’s not in charge, the rhythm is.
Byrne’s work, particularly that of his former group, is often portrayed and perceived as “head music” (no pun intended) — cerebral, obtuse, more lab exercise than expression. But such a view takes into account only bits of image and an iconoclastic style, ignoring its rhythmic underpinnings, a predilection toward body-invading beats that have informed everything he’s done. Which begs the question of how a white art-school kid from Back East became so entranced by rhythm in the first place.
“I think it was coming from the north,” says Byrne over the phone. “I was born in Scotland; coming from a northern culture, when you hear those grooves (for the first time) and what they can do to you, you realize that you can … reunite the body with the mind through this kind of stuff. It’s just this revelation.”
Of course, melody and lyric have remained the dominant aspects of Western music for centuries; rhythm has only slowly returned to prominence over the last 70 years or so and still evokes a little primal fear in the depths of countless whitebread souls. It goes much deeper than a simple aversion to dance-floor humiliation. Every beat-based genre to gain widespread attention is initially dismissed as a fad — your older sister sincerely believes that “the whole rap thing” will be over in, like, a couple of weeks. Byrne, whose reverence for the groove is at least partly responsible for keeping his notoriety comfortably left of center, attributes contemporary society’s preoccupation with notes and words to the mindset of society itself.
“It’s easier to write about the words,” he says. “You can quote ’em, you can sort of assume that that’s what the song is about. But often, it’s as much about how it sounds, and that’s a lot harder to write about. So in a sense, I can see why the text is given prominence. But why the melody should be given prominence I don’t know, other than the fact that it’s Western tradition. The Western myth of progress says that we evolved from making “primitive, rhythm-based music,’ and that progress has led us to abandon most of that and make harmonic and melody-based music. The idea is that progress looks to the future, and anything else is looking backwards.”
Not that he’s got anything against a good tune. His latest solo disc, Look Into The Eyeball, is a conscious effort “to have both,” Byrne says. “To have the sensuousness of the strings and rich harmonies, etc., but to also have interesting grooves happening at the same time. To see if they can co-exist.”
The album offers Byrne’s most overtly melodic tracks in recent memory — full, textured arrangements decorating the disparate and daring rhythmic influences fans expect. Where some previous records stopped at weaving sinewy accompaniment around the songs’ solid, groovy backbones, Eyeball fleshes them completely, then dresses them up and sends them out onto the stage. In fact, several of its most engaging moments (“The Revolution,” “Like Humans Do”) call to mind movie musicals of the ’50s, the kind of flicks where comic misunderstandings always seemed to end in romance, or the village turns into a lavish dance routine when the male lead starts to sing.
“(That) certainly jibes with some of the melodies that I was coming up with,” allows Byrne. “Some of the melodies have more to do with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin than they have to do with blues, or the rock ‘n’ roll that’s based on blues. But I think what’s different, what separates them from sounding like old songs, is the grooves are so strong.”
As with many of his albums, the process for Look Into The Eyeball was extremely collaborative. Several arrangers and a plethora of musicians (including percussionist Vinicius Cantuaria, Cafe Tacuba’s NRU and Imani Coppola) contributed to the CD’s realization. When asked if the various interactions provided new creative input, or were simply a means to the end of his vision, Byrne, with whom all of the material originates, confides that it’s a little bit of both:
“Obviously, sometimes they add things that I hadn’t thought of, and that’s the reason for collaborating with them. Of course I sort of have veto power. But if I leave enough openings, then things can happen.”
And whatever happens is always indelibly personalized by his unique balance of brains and beat. Over the course of his career, Byrne’s love of the rhythm has brought eclectic new grooves to countless ears that otherwise may not have heard them. However, he doesn’t see himself as any kind of crusader for the wealth of music largely ignored by popular culture.
“I just kind of follow my own instincts. I don’t like to feel like an educator or a teacher or a pundit or something. I do what I like to do, listen to what I like to listen to. Part of the enjoyment is finding something that you haven’t heard before. Sometimes I’ve kind of stretched the limits of my audience’s patience,” he says and laughs, “but sometimes they’ve enjoyed the stuff I’ve thrown up.”
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2001.
