What happens when you lie about hating Talking Heads
Sweaty white collared shirt buttoned up to the tippy-top. Corporate cocaine-sniffing magic. The body, then bodies, jerk forward and back and forward and back as if wound up by keys. Protruding bones of the construction site backdrop turn into black space turn into joyful primary-colored void of dance, of smile, of creation. Music is the process and the in-between. In my bed, on a Monday afternoon, after a marathon of unfulfilling movies which I won’t name here, I am quite possibly the last person on Earth to watch Stop Making Sense.
When I was fifteen, I decided that I hated Talking Heads with the burning passion of a thousand suns. By the time I chose to come out and speak my ‘truth’ in front of my friends, I had heard exactly one of their songs, so this felt only rational (and yes, that song was Psycho Killer, which I had, by the way, only ever heard paired with a rather distasteful edit of My Friend Dahmer). Behind this proclamation there stood a sole reason: I had wanted so desperately to assert my individuality and show that yes, I am a different person than my best friend at the time – a big fan of Talking Heads whose entire music taste I had, of course, lovingly plagiarized (a crime I would not admit to until years later). I was also completely, entirely, painfully fifteen, so maybe there were two reasons, actually.
I had started out by saying that I hated the song (and no, I did not actually hate it), but then the words started spiraling out of my mouth in an especially fifteen-year-old way and what resulted was a half-baked, mumbling, pointless escalation – exactly the kind I have had to learn to suppress my talents for in the years since. A couple of years later, after I had successfully managed to repress it, the whole ordeal came back to haunt me in a rather Biblical fashion: after a flood hit her grandparents' house, my best friend managed to rescue a stack of CDs from her dad's and aunt's teen years and decided to give some to me. Of course, among the usual suspects – a whole lot of Sonic Youth, The Smiths, and something called A Tribute to The Cure (made while The Actual Cure was in the prime of their creation) – there was a slightly muddy, slightly water-damaged copy of Talking Heads: '77. Maybe you'll change your mind about them, my best friend said, and I had the sneaking suspicion that she saw right through the lies or if not, that this was some sort of deserved cosmic-level punishment. I was so mortified that I could not listen to it until this year.
Back in the present, I watch the credits roll. The afternoon is sticky with Dutch June air and I am left hair-standing-up as if it is about to start pouring from the ceiling or from some wet cardboard box above my eyeballs where old friendships go. I am reminded of scabbed-over embarrassments and of dissipation of alliance and of the good ol’ passage of time, of course – these things I also dream about and wake up with crates full of in early afternoons. But mostly, I am reminded of years spent in formal music education, waiting for the day when I would finally become good enough to deserve to feel whatever bewitching, staticky, binding force takes over in live performance (minus the cocaine, I suppose). About how, like faith or meditation or happiness, it had always felt just out of my reach.
A few days into the past, the overhead lights had just blinked back on, and the concert hall erupted into applause and approving squeaks of seat hinges. The orchestra bows and smiles and bows and smiles. A friend recounts to me what she once heard from one of her lecturers. Music is not just the end product, she says, or I guess the lecturer says it, even further back into the past. It is the process and the in-between. Have you noticed how they all breathe together? And I've noticed. I notice it all the time, and I make sure that I always breathe along. In those moments, I approximate the distance between myself and the miracle and often find it to be no miracle at all. This is some kind of Western phenomenon, I conclude, like most other times when I have no other explanation for something – to be allowed to take such a loud breath together, to smile with teeth when you're about to play your favorite part, or not to think about permission at all. This is the process, and it is as obvious, electrifying, and contagious in the twinkling, impersonal red and gold of the Royal concert hall, as it is in the stitched-together compilation of theaters that Stop Making Sense takes place in, and in every smokey, windowless venue where someone has cared about creating something.
Once the old ladies have settled into their cushioned seats, leaflet on lap, or once the lights have gone dim and the smoke machines have begun spewing thick flavored air into my mouth, or three hours into the party, once the humid cloud of sweat has pressed together above the intricate limb tangle seen bird’s-eye, I watch people carefully. In front of me, eyes squeezed shut when the orchestra roars in, or a brow furrowed with every drumbeat, or a hand hovering over buttons and knobs like an Ouija board. All around me, a twitch and then an upturned corner of a wrinkly mouth, or fingers balancing beer on the very edge of the stage, or a tangle untangling as three or four arms reach for the ceiling. With enough love and wet boxes in the attic to save, every space turns into black space turns into joyful primary-colored void of dance, of smile, of creation. I imagine this is what it is like to attend Mass and actually believe it, or to process your grief in the movies, or to witness a minor and plausibly deniable miracle. I guess the moral of the story is: if your friend tells you they hate Talking Heads, you should know that they are lying.
