David Byrne's resemblance to Anthony Perkins would be remarkable even if he hadn't called attention to it by entitling a song "Psycho Killer." Onstage, his head lurching to a rhythm his rigid body doesn't recognize, Byrne is a dead ringer for Perkins' Norman Bates: clean-cut, boyish (his songs are full of boys and girls but bereft of men and women) and batty. Movie critic Robin Wood's comment on Alfred Hitchcock's horror classic, Psycho, applies equally well to the music of Byrne's band, Talking Heads: "It is part of the essence of the film to make us feel the continuity between the normal and the abnormal: between the compulsive behavior of Marion [Crane] and the psychotic behavior
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of Norman Bates." Or, as Tony Perkins tells Janet Leigh shortly before slaughtering her in the shower: "We're all in our private trap."
For Talking Heads, the trap is the Cartesian disjunction between mind and body, and rarely–if e'er–the twain shall meet. Byrne's own head is distanced from his body by a long elastic neck, and he sings as if he were being strangled by a tightly knotted tie (from Brooks Brothers, no doubt). His high-pitched voice seems to emanate entirely from his straining vocal chords, not at all from his diaphragm. Quite literally, Byrne is a Talking Head. And his group's compulsively rocking beat–martial yet nervous, halfway between a goose step and St. Vitus' dance–is exciting, but seldom sexy and never cathartic. Though rock & roll usually celebrates release, Talking Heads dramatizes repression. If they're an anomaly, they're also one of the very best as well as most interesting American rock bands performing and recording today.
Byrne's lyrics obsessively juxtapose the irreconcilable, nonnegotiable demands of the head and the heart. In "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town," on Talking Heads: 77, the group's first album, he piped:
Jet pilot gone out of control
Ship captain run aground
Stockbroker make a bad investment
When love has come to town.
Where, where is my common sense?
How did I get in a jam like this?
On More Songs about Buildings and Food, David Byrne sings the word feelingssssss with a puppy's yelp that turns into a snaky hiss. Even the ostensibly jubilant "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" hurtles to an abrupt coitus interruptus: "But first, show me what you can do!" If, in one song, Byrne chides the girls for ignoring the boys ("Girls, they're getting into abstract analysis"), in most of the others, Byrne himself seems frantically to be staving off amorous involvement: "I've got to get to work now" (the traditional male equivalent of "Not tonight, honey–I've got a headache"). Indeed, the word work recurs throughout the record as the singer both pushes and parodies the Protestant ethic. (Not since the Four Freshmen has there been a group as Protestant and downright pr
