Liner notes: ‘I Zimbra’ by Talking Heads

‘I Zimbra’ by Talking Heads came up somewhere, somehow as I reflected on community and connectivism. It’s the opening track on 1979’s Fear of Music. The lyrics are an adaptation of Hugo Ball’s dadaist poem ‘Gadji beri bimba’ (c.1917), an example of his ‘verse without words’ that signifies nothing, or signifies in ways that are so radically other to the semantic and hermeneutic norms that there is perhaps no sensible response. The experimental Canadian poet Christian Bök has recorded this beautiful, brutal version of the poem (not for the faint of heart or soft of ear.) But Talking Heads songwriters David Byrne and Brian Eno take it and, incorporating elements of African popular music, remix it into the opening track on 1979’s Fear of Music.

The song resonates firstly because, in a connectivist cMOOC such as e-Learning 3.0, the learning experience becomes one of constructing and traversing networks, not only aggregating connections but remixing them, repurposing them to make newer and ever-transforming connections –– as Talking Heads have done with Hugo Ball’s sounds.

But it resonates doubly because the connectivist learning experience feels still so frustratingly alien and radically otherwise than that to which we have become accustomed through educational models still firmly rooted in twentieth-century Fordism and stretching back as far as the industrial revolution.