Act 1
The older you get, the more the lesson of the song resonates.
You think you have things down. Or maybe you aren’t thinking about ‘things’ at all. Maybe you’re simply occupied with the act of existing, caught in the swirling blend of focus and distraction and drift we call life - letting the days go by, indeed. Until one moment you snap into a different state of awareness. You come to. And you think, well, how DID I get here?
It’s disorienting. You feel both alert and confused, as if you’ve just woken up, which in a way you have. Asking the question doesn’t help, in fact it only compounds the problem, because when you cast around, looking this way and that to grasp the twists and turns along the way, there’s no obvious explanation. At least not one that’s simple or significant enough. It all just… happened. You rolled one way then another, said ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to whatever came your way, had periods where you really went for it and others, if you’re honest, where you coasted - perhaps a little longer than you should - and somehow you ended up… here.
So, where is that, exactly? Where is ‘here’?
All kinds of places at once.
Here is the stirring climax of a movie, one with a distinct three-act structure, that manages to thrill without the use of plot. There isn’t even a story.
Here is watching a man perform inside a suit that’s 10 sizes too big for him, a costume that, just like everything else in this movie, is never explained.
Here is the celebratory, sanctifying state - the release - that comes with the penultimate song, a version of Al Green’s Take Me To The River. A re-birth of sorts, water to cleanse your soul - a redemptive ritual in disco-gospel form.
Here, too, is more water: water flowing underground, water at the bottom of the ocean. Endless water, it seems. So much so you can’t help but divine some tributary of meaning from its presence - water as a baptismal force, perhaps. Drop me in the water, the man sings over and over, as if to prove your point. Let the water hold me down, he sings, in the song that makes more sense the older you get. What is the sense of all this water, you wonder, before soon forgetting about it, swept up as you are by the tide of movement and energy playing out on screen. Water dissolving. Water removing.
Here is sat with two friends you persuaded to watch the film with you, friends you thought would like it, but who might also appreciate an escape into its world. You intuited there might be something redemptive about watching this film together. Maybe what water is dissolving, is reality. What it is removing, is stress. Not that you could have put that into words. And you realise now that wouldn’t have been right, not with this film about performance, about connecting without the need for words or explanations, where meaning runs below the surface, like water flowing underground, like the untapped emotion in male conversation. Here, then, is release, in some minor form, your unconscious being taken for a walk, the three of you watching together despite arriving separately, despite arriving from days shaded with various tones of difficulty, having navigated the deadlines and responsibilities and fractiousness of a normal day, to be where you are, which is in the same row of a cinema on a Thursday night, all of you needing this film, none of you able to articulate afterwards how it worked.
You don’t know why you love it like you do.
Act 2
THANK YOU, says the singer, as Act 1 collapses in a spent heap. ANYBODY HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?
You have to laugh.
You have to laugh because there are two possible responses to David Byrne’s invitation, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and you could say either with conviction. Which, if you think about it, doesn’t make any sense.
Like, how could you not have questions? They’ve been accumulating in the half an hour since the singer last spoke to the audience. Back then - “Hi. Got a tape I want to play” - the stage was empty but for him and a boombox. Questions nuzzled up to you as you watched his white Vans walk from a door at the back of the stage, past tape marks that signal where the risers will go - risers which will be rolled into place once the show is already under way - to where a microphone stand was placed, and leaned forward as he performed the film’s first song alone. Questions niggled you as the phrase ‘sidewalk Psycho Killer’ came into your mind - you wondered whether you were describing the singer or this rendition of the song. You wondered whether that matters, so conjoined are the two: the singer’s head seems to jerk the boombox electro beat into life; his brash acoustic guitar sounds as highly strung as he is. Then came your first big ‘huh?’ as the beat and the singer’s movements simultaneously collapsed in on themselves. They broke down in unison - the singer stumbling before gathering himself, the electro beat doing the same. Neither at any point was out of sync with the other. It took a moment to grasp all this is intentional. You thought of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, particularly his entrance scene, when the cane and the limp give way to a fall which in turn is rescued by a forward roll, the whole thing capped by a self-satisfied flourish. At that point you are ALL questions. Who is this guy? Can you trust anything he says or does? How do I work this? It’s like your host wants you to question everything. Even though, or perhaps because, there are no easy answers.
But then again, why would you entertain questions? You’ve rarely seen anything so emphatic. You watched as with each new song an additional band member arrived on stage, expanding the sound and the horizon of the music until it contained… everything. You listened as the songs became strange edifices - thick steadfast grooves that are propulsive and angular and fluid. Your mouth gaped as you realised how essential it all was. It feels plugged in to something joyful and profound, like church. Somewhere during the three-song run from Slippery People to Burning Down The House to Life During Wartime, you felt the distancing gauze that separates band from audience, screen from sound, congregation from spirit, melt away. You are now at the gig. Inside the moment. Wrung out like they are after the surreal aerobic workout of the first act. The music and the noise of the crowd swirls around you. You perceive now on some level that the momentary collapse in Psycho Killer was just the start: everything here is choreographed. It’s not as clinical as when you saw Solange or Kendrick Lamar live, but it’s just as inscrutable and intentional and compelling. The show works to its own unspoken logic and you don’t need to ask what that is. The performers look at one another - occasionally, disinterestedly - but never speak. Their mask doesn’t drop because the performance is for you. All you have to do is get swept up in the undertow.
‘Anybody have any questions?’ Perhaps just the one.
Why have I never done this before?
Act 3
So, you’re decided. This must be the place. But now you’ve arrived, such is the sense of belonging that you wonder if you might have got here sooner. You should have appreciated Talking Heads more than you did - with more ardour, more curiosity, more of yourself. You’ve met people in recent years for whom Stop Making Sense is a real touchstone, something that’s meant a lot to them over the years. They’ve made Talking Heads their band in a way you never did. You feel something approaching, what - envy? Or maybe it’s just the road less travelled floating into view. The corollary to ‘how did I get here?’ is sometimes ‘how come I’m not over there?’.
Still, you miss the idea of it, the times you might have had, the person you might have been, had you taken different paths when younger. Back then - you see it now - you gave yourself too readily to artists who didn’t appreciate you. Not that you regret the time you spent with, say, the Clash or Dexys. They made you who you are. But they were causes. Someone else’s flag to rally to. The younger you always loved causes - you were attracted by the didactic. And by the pose. You wanted your heroes well-read and well-dressed. So you made them of pale skinny men of the past, mainlining from history what was depending on the light a scuzzy kind of glamour or a well-tailored hedonism. Stones, Small Faces, Smiths. Impeccable and dissolute, all of them. Yet you get now that standing in their glare made it hard to see yourself.
Priorities change. Maybe Talking Heads hit harder now because you’re older. Causes feel less important than prompts. You want ideas not badges. Space to think not moves to ape. You still need someone in your corner, but you also want a mystery to solve, and this film and its world is steeped in it: the jerky movements, the not speaking, the non-sequitur staging. It draws you in by pushing you away. Your own prejudice is used against you. That giant suit, for instance. Watching it now, it feels like some bullied kid’s dream sequence - a cartoon slice of wish fulfilment episode called ‘revenge of the square’. You imagine it subsuming every preppy insult and every ill-informed judgement issued by every youngster hooked on insolent waifs until it grows in strength, the bully’s laugh turning to disbelief and finally fear. A weaponised caricature. Is it a nerd? No, it’s Superbyrne. You recall you could have done with that when younger after all.
On some level you glean that it’s this defying of other people’s perceptions that provides the key to Stop Making Sense. Jonathan Demme was inspired to work on the project because, having seen the band play in the late 70s, he couldn’t believe the transformation they’d undergone when he saw them again in 1983. Where once they were inhibited and gawky, rooted to the spot, plaid shirts and sensible trousers, they had become the multiracial many-limbed polyrhythmic event you see on screen. The music had loosened itself and unfurled through working with Eno, and David Byrne grew into his style, owned it rather than hid within it. He worked with a choreographer for the Once In A Lifetime video, and was inspired by the different approaches he saw to performance when visiting Asian cultures. Both experiences prompted him to question the norms he saw every other group adhere to. Why do we pretend to be natural when we’re not? What would happen if he embraced the artificial, the strange?
You read all about this in Byrne’s book, How Music Works. How the band’s outfits in the film were deliberately grey, a uniform that wouldn’t distract from their playing. How the risers were a storage solution as much as dramatic prop - a way to hide all the amplifiers and cables from the audience, thereby untethering the show from the technical reality of most rock shows. How the staging is deliberately ‘presentational’ - stylised, choreographed simply for the sake of it. How the movements you see in the film were organic ideas the band members had evolved over time, so that they felt natural rather than imagined and imposed, the group expressing themselves non-verbally. How Byrne, with Demme’s help, used lighting in original and strange ways, avoiding the rote clichés of the rock show, deploying film lights and standard lamps and even rehearsal-style lighting to make each moment unique. How Byrne himself designed the staging for each song, but without necessarily matching designs to specific songs, so that the different elements of movement and lighting and music, which are normally aligned to create a desired effect, intentionally didn’t all flow from the same place. How Byrne wanted to see what might happen when you put different elements together. How it was intentionally random.
In theatre or film or a novel the joy often comes from working out what the piece is about, and how it communicates that meaning. It’s like piecing together the cognitive bit torrent of ideas, decoding the central idea that informs every aspect of the piece. It’s what Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic called DHM - the Deep Hidden Meaning of a song. They defined a tone or a concept or a mood and made sure every aspect of the recording reflected that thought. In Stop Making Sense, there is no DHM. There are contradictions and juxtaposed elements and the desire to hold an audience’s attention simply by inviting them to consider what it is they are looking at, by giving them something they haven’t seen before. But no DHM. At least if there is one, it is elusive. Or illusive. Or, perhaps we should say, allusive.
Because as you sit here, in all kinds of places at once, watching Stop Making Sense in full for the first time and accompanied by friends you know only because you said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in a particular randomised sequence, experiencing if not yet processing the great eddy of thoughts and ideas that swirl beneath the surface of Talking Heads’ performance, as well as those that swirl within you in response, you realise there is no DHM to it all, other than the one you make. And you realise that it was all there in a quote you saw from David Byrne a few days ago, written social media mantra-style, the kind of thing you can look up and find on Goodreads if you forget it, and it’s in your mind now because it seems to sum up what’s been going on here - the value of allusiveness over a rational mode of experience. It’s a reading of Byrne’s own vision, and perhaps even the world, that underlines the sense in not making sense.
“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe,” said Byrne. “I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”
Poetry is how the world works. Meaning shouldn’t all flow from the same place because the world isn’t logical. It makes sense through the associations and connections we make. The joy of life - the art of it - is found in sifting through the patterns and shapes that trace the emotion and the beauty we find. There is a time of life when we realise this. We become grateful for it. If we’re lucky, we can open ourselves up to this view of the world, see it in places that have not been choreographed for us with intentional randomness. A certain light or the shape of a tree or the grand sweep of a hillside, None requires an explanation to move us. But we do need teachers. Models to follow. Guidance. How to read the world as it shows us its beauty in fleeting glimpses, teases out our unconscious thoughts. As our priorities change, we need help to value poetry over pose.
Stop Making Sense is poetry. It is also, you realise, a form of teaching. It shows you a kind of performance mode that still feels like a radical act today. This is a film that invites you to consider what you’re looking at, rather than to accept it or agree or identify with it. Stop Making Sense doesn’t do representation, and it doesn’t have an agenda. But it is an inclusive experience thanks to its inherent ambiguity. Its theatricality creates the space where meaning can enter.
Only thing is, what it all means is up to you.
Same as it ever was.
So good James. My favourite kind of teaching elicits the answers without asking direct questions, and boy this is a gem of a lesson.
NB See Chris Frantz's open question in the first bars of Burning Down the House; "who gotta match?"
I wanted that massive suit so much when I was 10