Talking Heads and the Path to an Autistic Erotics
Seven years after the release of Talking Heads’ first album, in 1984 as he orchestrated a somewhat baffling interview of himself, lead singer David Byrne questions whether or not he writes ‘love songs’. His response deserves to be quoted in full:
‘I try to write about small things: paper, animals, a house. Love is kinda big. I have written a love song, though. In this movie, I sing it to a lamp.’
The bit everyone focuses on in this quote is the last two sentences: the (inaccurate) idea that he had only written a single love song — ‘This Must be the Place’ — married with the absurdity of his singing it to a lamp, seems in many ways a perfect encapsulation of the oddities of his habits in songwriting and performance.
Insofar as the first part of the quote might be noticed at all, it’s really only in the fact that it’s actually a pretty good summary of many of the Heads’ songs’ themes — two of the items on his list are song titles from their 1979 album Fear of Music, and their second album was called More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978). Byrne did, indeed, frequently avoid the discussion of large topics such as love, instead focusing on minutiae (although cynics might note that a not-inconsiderable four (4) songs from the first two Heads albums, More Songs and Talking Heads ’77, have the word ‘love’ in their title).
This doesn’t mean, however, that Byrne never expresses affection, love, or desire. Read in terms of the autism with which Byrne was diagnosed later in life, indeed, Byrne’s very focus on minutiae can be read as part of an effort, spanning, in particular, three songs — ‘Stay Hungry’, ‘The Book I Read’, and ‘This Must Be the Place’ — to create a language and a mode of autistic desire. His lyrics point the way to an autistic erotics.
A remarkable feature of the above quotation is Byrne’s use of listing — a figure which consistently appeared in his writing. ‘The Big Country’, for example, starts with his speaker commenting on what he sees from the window of his airplane: ‘I see the shapes I remember from maps / I see the shorelines, I see the whitecaps; / A baseball diamond’. It’s a habit which speaks to and reflects his notoriously descriptive approach to on-stage patter: the first (and in many ways most definitive) live album produced by the band is simply entitled The Name of this Band is Talking Heads. It opens with Byrne saying: ‘The name of this song is ‘New Feeling’, and that’s what it’s about.’ This listing, an insistent categorisation and attempt at comprehension, is one of the traits which is most obviously autistic about Byrne’s role in the Heads, and it’s manifested in his expressions of desire.
At the end of ‘Stay Hungry’ — an ending which Lucas Fagen, writing in 2018 for Hyperallergic, describes as ‘a tender admission of love’ — Byrne lists a series of objects: ‘Here’s that rhythm again / Here’s my shoulder blade / Here’s that sound I made / Here’s that picture I saved.’. It’s a deeply moving moment, and one which reflects a particularly autistic eroticism — beauty and love here enter as an accumulation of events and traits and features, rooted in the minutiae with which Byrne is obsessed. It is as if Byrne cannot admit — or cannot conceive of — the weight of his affection, but instead can only view it as a set of components which form a whole, an affect, of desire.
‘This Must Be the Place’, too, demonstrates this tendency to itemisation. A song which is too often taken as a particularly (and uncharacteristically) straightforward love song, closer inspection of the lyrics reveals it to be noticeably disjuncted. Each line or pair of lines is quite distinct from those around it, and while there are repeated motifs, most noticeably ‘home’, the lyrics as a whole have little thematic coherence other than being about love. It suggests a circumlocutionary move towards an understanding of love, where cliches are employed to mimic conventional addresses of love — but the impression is only ever imprecise. Byrne’s speaker is attempting to sing himself into certainty that what he is feeling is the same sensation that others speak about. The title of the song itself — an oddly unconfident assertion of love — is also a demonstration of that process: this must be the place, Byrne’s speaker says, because if it isn’t, where is? It reflects an understanding of love as only ever unstably accomplished — and requiring maintenance to survive — and as something which isn’t universally intelligible in the terms in which it is typically understood. Instead, Byrne’s habit of categorisation is once again apparent in the cover image for the single of ‘This Must be the Place’, as well as in the images projected behind the band during the song in the concert movie Stop Making Sense: body parts, taken out of context much like Byrne’s shoulder blade in ‘Stay Hungry’. Byrne’s autistic erotics build affection and desire from its components, not from appreciation of wholeness.
The interpretation and understanding of these components becomes a key form of love and affection for Byrne and the Heads. In ‘The Book I Read’, the speaker figures his desire as ‘the book I read’, and expresses his excitement that his lover ‘wrote the book I read’, which was ‘in [their] eyes’. The object of Byrne’s desire is displaced, firstly from his lover to their eyes, then finally to a book which is ‘in’ their eyes. While Byrne’s bodily focus is maintained to some extent (‘take my shoulders as they touch your arms’), he figures the physical form as something which can be read and interpreted — a text to be figured. Desire is refigured as the act of interpretation; ‘reading’ someone becomes metonymic for loving them. This is a particularly autistic conception of love, as it speaks both to the difficulty for an autistic person of feeling like one truly ‘knows’ someone else and to the sheer delight of feeling that one does. The moment of connection — of knowledge — which Byrne feels in the moment he reads the book in his lover’s eyes is a powerful moment in his autistic erotics.
This is not to say that there is no instability in this conception of love and desire. The displacement he suggests in his description of the location of the book is echoed as he seems not to realise at first that his lover ‘wrote the book I read’. Instead, he says that he’s ‘embarrassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart / When I found out’ this was the case. These lines confuse the apparent identity between the lover and the book, while further suggesting Byrne did not realise that what he fell in love with — or at least desired — was actually his lover. Love becomes a tenuous accomplishment which is never approached head-on, in a similar technique to Byrne’s listing. As well as this, however, we get another glimpse at an autistic erotics which prioritises components, where desire is formed for aspects which are not quite wholes and where one can build an affection for characteristics prior to the character. He focuses, instead of expressing love as a definite accomplishment, on the ways in which it is a work of interpretation which never quite makes sense, but which instead rests on unstable foundations.
At the start of ‘Stay Hungry’, Byrne claims that ‘I think that we can signify our love now’. He only ever approaches his desire and its objects at a tangent, and here is no different — indeed, it is difficult to see how one would realise this particularly opaque set of lyrics constitutes a love song without this line’s presence. It is exactly in keeping with the technique of his autistic erotics that he never truly says ‘I love you’, instead focusing on the disparate signifiers and significations of desire. At the end of both this song and ‘This Must Be the Place’, however, he reaches a moment of confidence in his desire and develops an ability to be fully present. In the final verse of ‘Stay Hungry’, a warm synthesizer seems to support his words as he lists the objects which manifest his desire before, at the very end of the song (at least in the Heads’ 1980 performance of it at the Capitol Theatre, NJ) he presents himself: ‘here I am’. At the end of ‘This Must Be the Place’, tired of overthinking, he asks his audience to ‘hit me on the head’, and, with his backing singers, stands singing wordlessly. In both these moments, however, Byrne reaches a moment of confidence and utter sincerity. Supported by the backing of his band, he sings himself into being fully present with his lover. His autistic erotics may rely on tenuous grounds and may see desire formed in ways which may not be typical of love songs, but his love is no less real for it.
