The Autistic Charm of 80’s New Wave
Around a week ago after discovering that Danny Elfman had mentioned in an interview a few years back that he was “sure” he was likely autistic, I posted a tweet joking “In the 80s you couldn’t get diagnosed as autistic, you had to become a new wave frontman and figure it out from there.” Subsequently, to my shock, the tweet blew up, and my replies were flooded with both the names of different new wave frontmen who fit the bill (mostly David Byrne), and more importantly to me, fans of the genre personally resonating with it, some even realizing that that was why they had always loved the genre in the first place. Indeed, it seems as though for many new wave fans, the autism goes both ways.
After seeing people’s responses, I began to think a lot about the autistic appeal of new wave and the men who were the forefathers of it. As an autistic person myself I have always gravitated to the genre, and before I even knew about frontmen like David Byrne’s openness regarding their ASD, I always felt a kinship to their often bizarre and socially awkward personalities, and felt comforted by the fact that these types of qualities would not always result in being ostracized but could be celebrated and even respected.
Now in true autistic fashion, I would like to info-dump on three of the biggest names in new wave history who not only made their mark in the genre at the peak of its success, but altered the history of music as we know it forever through their contributions to the art form. Artists like David Byrne, Gary Numan and Danny Elfman show that what made new wave cool wasn’t just the music, but the neurodiversity behind it.
DAVID BYRNE
Perhaps the most legendary figure in all of new wave, it is hard to put into words the sheer magnitude of both David Byrne’s accomplishments and influence on modern music as a whole. Through the sheer success of Talking Heads alone, Byrne has practically become the poster child for the new wave genre itself, not just musically but through representing the genre’s stereotypically eccentric characteristics. And while some of his new wave contemporaries would perform this exaggerated neurotic caricature themselves, for David Byrne it was never really just an act.
Watching Byrne in interviews, particularly in his Talking Heads days, is like watching someone pass an autism test with flying colours right in front of you. Avoiding eye contact, fidgeting in his seat, trailing off, barely speaking, going on long tangents, focusing on minute “unimportant” details instead of the larger picture in conversations— he checks all the boxes. This is on full display during Talking Heads’ 1979 appearance on American Bandstand, where after Byrne nervously stumbles through answering Dick Clark’s questions, Clark jokingly asks “Is he always this enthusiastic?” to bassist Tina Weymouth, who grins while replying “I guess he’s organically shy.”
Years before Byrne even considered himself to be autistic, it seemed as though those around him had decided for him, either through his introversion being the butt of a joke made at his expense or through others seemingly diagnosing him themselves based on his stage persona. In the early seventies when Byrne and future Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz were in a short-lived band called “The Artistics”, Frantz made the joke that due to Byrne and their guitarist David Anderson (who, according to David Byrne was “even less socially adept” than he was), they should rename their band “The Autistics”. In his memoir Remain in Love, Frantz would go on to remark that Byrne was “awkward, and, with what we know now, on the high functioning end of the spectrum”. Perhaps the most shocking comments arose from Pauline Kael in her 1984 film review of Stop Making Sense, where she, along with implying that Byrne was not a human being, describes the frontman as having a “withdrawn, disembodied sci-fi quality”, and that “though there’s something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun.”
David Byrne, despite lacking the terminology for his condition at the time, had seemingly always been hyperaware of his otherness, especially as Talking Heads grew in popularity. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1986, Byrne mused,
“A lot of the things I’ve read about myself stress how odd I am, or how much I am like a visitor from another planet. That’s an odd thing to read about yourself. It must be a really odd thing for your parents to read about you.”
While Byrne attributes part of his curious otherworldly nature to his Scottish immigrant upbringing (commenting in a Generation 80 interview that his family “always saw things as foreigners, and I think they kind of taught me to see things that way as well”), it is evident now that what was most responsible for his alienated persona was his personal struggles with masking, reading social cues, and his focus on different and oftentimes more “mundane” or “tiny” details compared to other people.
All throughout his career David Byrne has always been asking questions and trying to make sense of the world around him, most famously immortalized in Talking Heads’ 1980 hit Once in a Lifetime, with Byrne drenched in sweat while nervously shrieking questions such as “How do I work this?” and “My God, what have I done?” With our knowledge now of Byrne’s autism, songs such as this are re-contextualized and work to externalize Byrne’s internal battle with masking in neurotypical society. In an interview with Robin Young prior to American Utopia’s debut on Broadway, Byrne noted this observant quality in himself, admitting that on a regular basis he would find himself asking himself things like “Am I supposed to do that? Is that what people do?” In the stage production itself Byrne approaches this concept head-on, as two of his fellow musicians help him to move like a person on stage while he asks himself questions out loud such as “Should I be doing that? Are they looking at me? Are they like me?” Should I go over and talk to them? Huh! Maybe not!”
Many other songs penned by Byrne take on other meanings when analyzed through this neurodivergent lens. The lines “I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax/Don’t touch me I’m a real live wire” in “Psycho Killer” begins to sound like a classic tale of autistic burnout, while the lyrics of “Everybody’s Coming To My House” sounds like a man exhausted with social interaction, eager to be alone again and to unmask.
But not everything to do with David Byrne’s autism revelation has been doom and gloom, far from it. Byrne has embraced his autistic identity and has gone so far as to call it his “superpower”, due to his ability to hyperfocus on his artistic projects and the fact that through the art of performance he could communicate with others in a way more comfortable for him. “It seemed not only a way to ‘speak’ in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation”, Byrne explains in his book How Music Works. He now even leans into his idiosyncratic personality, acknowledging that he has a “‘anthropologist from Mars’ view of human relationships.”
Byrne’s three main film projects over the span of his career showcase his growing acceptance of his autistic identity and increasing comfortability with himself and the outside world. 1984’s Stop Making Sense depicts a restless jittery David Byrne in near constant movement and hyperawareness. 1986’s True Stories depicts a more relaxed but incredibly curious Byrne, a stranger in town who is mystified and in a perpetual state of wonderment by the people and places he encounters. By 2020’s American Utopia, David Byrne understands that he doesn’t have to understand, or try to fit in, and instead champions diversity and urges everyone (including himself) to be better. Expressed beautifully by the man himself, “We all don’t have to be the same”.
GARY NUMAN
In the history of electronic music, very few names hold as much significance as Gary Numan’s. A trailblazer in the synthesizer revolution in the late 1970s, Numan is considered by many to be one of the pioneers of synth-pop, and has been immensely influential to many of his successors in the genre. Despite his devoted “Numanoids” being with him since the beginning, he was not met with similarly open arms by critics initially, with an early NME review noting that “Visually, Gary Numan is as successful as you would expect a robot to be.” Given the prevailing stereotype that those on the autistic spectrum are cold and emotionless, it is hardly surprising that such comparisons were made about Numan, however it was exactly his android-esque persona and his embracement of the socially unconventional, both in his music and in his androgynous and neuroatypical identity, that would result in his artistry being celebrated for decades to come.
As a teenager Numan struggled in school, with his disruptive temperament leading to expulsion multiple times throughout his academic career and in his parents sending him to a child psychiatrist. From this meeting Numan was prescribed Valium and Nardil, and it was suggested that he may have Aspergers, however he was never officially diagnosed due to his parents’ dismay that his autism may have been the result of their parenting. Life continued on uninterrupted, and according to Numan, “I thought no more about it, except for the vague awareness that I was different somehow”.
Without any formal confirmation or treatment for his ASD, Numan felt as though he was simply a fundamentally “unlikeable” person, and that that was the reason why it was difficult for him to form and maintain friendships. “I wasn’t a total loner”, the synth-pop star insisted in an interview for 5 News, “I was very much happy with my own company. I wasn’t a clubby drinky person at all. I used to sit at home mostly and dream about my future and work towards that in my own head.”
In recent years, particularly after publicly announcing his autism self-diagnosis, Numan has become far more vocal regarding the symptoms he experiences and his extreme discomfort in face-to-face conversations. One of the symptoms the artist experiences he describes as being “weird number fixations”, involving things such as tapping his fingers a set number of times. Socially, Numan struggles the most with reading body language, eye contact, and conversing with strangers. In the same interview with 5 News, Numan perfectly encapsulates the mental minefield of small-talk many autistic people experience, lamenting:
“I last a minute, two minutes in a conversation with somebody that I don’t really know and then I just run out, and I find the whole thing stressful and panicky and I’m dreading the next thing because I know that I’ve run out of questions now, I know that I should ask somebody what they do for a living. I can’t do eye contact so all the time I’m talking to people I’m counting. I would look in their eyes for three seconds, I won’t look in there longer than five seconds. I’m always looking away when I’m counting, still do that all time. So just having a conversation is quite tiring in a way because you’re doing math all the time and it’s just so unnatural to me.”
A deep fascination with technology and a sense of isolation and disconnect from others is represented in a wide variety of songs in Numan’s discography, and make perfect sense given the musician’s identity as an autistic individual. The Pleasure Principle, Numan’s debut solo album, perhaps exemplifies this concept most, with songs such as “Observer” coming from the perspective of an outsider not participating in the world around him, “Metal” depicting an android’s desire to become human (to become “normal”, to adopt socially acceptable traits), and most significantly, the lyrics of his biggest commercial hit “Cars”, wherein the narrator feels “safest of all” locked away and secluded alone in his car, once again separated from the outside world.
Much like David Byrne, Gary Numan initially relied on his stage persona in order to fight through his intense social anxiety. “The alter-ego was a way to get through performing”, he told Independent in 2015, “It was a way of me hiding a very fragile and shy personality. I created a disembodied self.” Numan no longer relies on this persona, and has slowly begun to improve in social settings and in recognizing certain behaviours within himself. He credits much of this positive change to his wife Gemma O’Neil’s support.
“I do meet and greets now everyday. I’m talking to twenty, thirty people everyday. I couldn’t have dreamed of doing that a few years ago, it was the most horrific idea in the world for me to talk to strangers, I couldn’t do it.”
Numan too views his autistic identity as a “neurodiverse superpower” and actually pities neurotypical people for not experiencing the gifts the condition brings, such as attention to detail and drive.
“In my way of thinking it just means we’re incredibly focused, but it’s considered to be obsession, you know, where everything is just that for a while. Well I think that’s a brilliant thing to have. If you’re doing music for a career you need to be incredibly focused and know exactly where you’re going and let absolutely nothing swerve you.”
Given that Numan is still successfully touring the world at age 64 and is still receiving accolades for his legendary career, such as receiving the Ivor Novella Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors in 2017, it appears as though Numan was right; that the advantages far outweigh the negatives and that being autistic is a rare gift that few are lucky to have. While Gary Numan may be more comfortable working with computers than people, this does not negate his words from his 1980s record Telekon: “Remember I am human, Remember I feel just like you.”
DANNY ELFMAN
If you have watched a film in the past 30 odd years, chances are you’re well familiar with Danny Elfman’s work. With over a hundred film scores under his belt, Elfman is regarded as one of the most prolific and prominent film composers in cinematic history. From big budget Hollywood blockbusters, cult classics such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and famously creating the theme song for The Simpsons, the man has done it all. Unlike his colleagues, Elfman was never classically trained as a composer, and instead came from the world of new wave in one of the genre’s most originally demented acts, the ska-infused insanity known as Oingo Boingo. While Oingo Boingo’s music unfortunately never breached the mainstream quite like other new wave bands at the time, they amassed a large loyal following of Oi-boys and Oi-girls, and to this day have one of the most proudly neurodiverse fanbases of any new wave band. This neurodiversity however likely expands beyond just a large group of fans and includes their idol himself.
Much like Oingo Boingo, Danny Elfman is uniquely different from his new wave contemporaries, particularly when contrasted with the other frontmen previously discussed in this article. For one, Elfman in no way fits into the traditionally nervous and well-put-together nerdy new wave persona present in frontmen like David Byrne, nor the more cold and mechanical mold of figures like Gary Numan. Instead, Elfman is something else entirely, a loud, wild and disheveled bat out of hell, with a sort of manic evil energy and seemingly larger-than life confidence of a sadistic circus ring-leader. As well, compared to Byrne and Numan, Danny Elfman has never officially identified as being autistic, but rather has suggested that he very well could be, amongst a myriad of other potential disorders. While discussing his most recent album Big Mess with Variety, Elfman expressed,
“You know, I’m very extreme. I’ve never been officially diagnosed as OCD or hyperactive or dyslexic or autistic, but I’m sure I’m all of these things to some degree, were I tested like we do our kids now.”
This comment was made in relation to the fact that Elfman was unaware of what was happening musically in the seventies due to his obsession with early 20th century composers as well as jazz and vaudeville performers like Cab Calloway (Elfman would later cover one Calloway’s most famous tracks in his brother Richard Elfman’s 1980 film The Forbidden Zone). Elfman’s music-related hyperfocus was further discussed on the podcast WTF with Mark Maron, where after once again reiterating his belief that he has ADHD, the composer stated that music was the only thing he could ever truly focus on as a young man, stressing, “If I was into a thing, I could really really stick with that”. Later on in this discussion, Elfman admits to his inability to read music despite his attempts at taking lessons, concluding with “I really began to feel, and I still feel, that I’ve got a brain kink. Like something in there has always been off.”
While Elfman has admitted that the majority of Oingo Boingo’s songs were written from the perspective of different characters and therefore do not necessarily reflect his own views or experiences, the track “On the Outside” from Boingo’s debut album Only a Lad appears to be a shockingly earnest exception. Delving into feelings of alienation and ostracization from those around the singer, the track has an almost autobiographical quality given Elfman’s personal story. “I never could sit still, I never was too hip” sounds strikingly similar to the way Elfman previously described the coolness-imbalance in his past high school relationship with legendary Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon, reflecting “She was always cool — and I don’t mean ‘trying to be cool.’ The kind you’re born with and other people try to imitate. I was the opposite — a hyperactive OCD geek.” The lines “I never was a punk (…) I never even tried, counter-culture passed me right by” relate back to Elfman’s previously mentioned hyperfixation with music pre-1940, once telling LA Weekly “I didn’t listen to any punk in the 70’s. I lived in 1938 in my mind”. Even one of the song’s opening lines “They say I’m just a clown” could easily be interpreted as relating back to Elfman’s Mystic Knights days, where the troupe often dawned clown makeup during performances.
All of this is to say that the wallowing in feeling disconnected from others in “On The Outside” was likely personal to Elfman, and therefore adds credence to Danny Elfman’s belief that he is neuroatypical. The second chorus especially could easily be interpreted as Elfman masking his neurodivergent behaviour in order to blend in and be accepted by his peers, singing, “I’m just an alien through and through, tryin’ to make believe I’m you, tryin’ to fit, just a stranger on the outside looking in”.
Regardless of whether or not Danny Elfman personally identifies as being autistic, it is clear that the musical mastermind is far from being neurotypical, and is more than fine with the idea of being one of us. Elfman is a refreshing departure from what is classically considered to be the archetypical neurotic new wave frontman, showcasing that stereotypes regarding neurodivergent individuals fail to encompass the multifaceted and wide array of experiences in our community, as well as the differing types of artistic expression therein. Elfman relishes in his strangeness, and proudly sticks it in your face as much as possible.
Byrne, Numan and Elfman all have referenced their ability to hyperfocus as being an advantage in their lives, and while I do not mean to dismiss this conclusion, I want to emphasize that being autistic is valuable outside of our means to be productive in capitalist society. All three of these men have made an undeniable stamp on the history of music and culture at large through their creativity: Danny Elfman’s film scores are near-universally recognizable, Gary Numan helped popularize an instrument that is used in almost every mainstream record today, and David Byrne was a part of one of the most influential and critically acclaimed bands of an entire decade, whose influence can still be felt today. Outside of commerical success, these men have accomplished what they have personally struggled with the most: to connect with others through their art.
Growing up, I always knew that there was something different about me, indescribable but impossible to hide. Kids at school were happy to point out my social ineptitude through their bullying and even at home my parents did not seem to know what to make of me, my intense obsessions, meltdowns, and my lifelong struggle with making friends. Already an only child, I spent (and still spend) most of my time with myself than with anyone else, and it was in this solitude where I discovered the wonders of eighties new wave. Besides being great tunes to stim to, there was just something about the people behind the music that I related to, though I could never quite put my finger on why. It just felt as though I was finally seeing me. It was an incredible feeling to learn that I always had been.
References
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