One Body at a Time

He was not being weird at you

The standard account of early Talking Heads is that the singer was doing something clever: art-school irony, a put-on, a nervous affect adopted for effect.

Byrne has written his own account, and it is less flattering and more interesting. Looking back at himself auditioning at CBGB, he describes being as twitchy and Aspergery a stage presence as I was in those days, and then does something almost nobody does about their own early work — he declines to call it either genuine or fake:

That is a better description of most of our public selves than either of the options usually on offer. Not a mask and not an unmediated outpouring — a person operating with the equipment available, in front of people, on purpose, and not entirely sure afterwards which parts were chosen.

Which is why the ordinary reading — he was being weird at you — is the one this rack sets aside. And it is worth saying plainly that Byrne’s own statements about being Autistic are hedged: he wrote that he diagnosed himself with a very mild (I think) form of Asperger’s syndrome, and he has said he never thought of it as a disability. He did not come out. He wrote a sentence with a qualifier in it, and the qualifier did not travel. Zine No. 66 spends a spread on exactly that.

The loop is the point

The urge to move to music is measurable, and it is agreed upon across listeners to a surprising degree.

Petr Janata, Stefan Tomic and Jason Haberman took “groove” — a word musicians use and researchers had mostly avoided — and got it to hold still (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2012). How strongly a passage compels movement turns out to be consistent between people, which means specific auditory features are unusually good at engaging the motor system. They describe the result as a pleasurable drive toward action.

And the feature doing most of that work is repetition. A figure has to come round again before a body can meet it rather than chase it. Prediction needs a period.

So look at how Remain in Light (1980) was actually made. Instruments recorded largely one at a time, each part a short figure held without developing, stacked into looping grooves — drummer Chris Frantz described them as loops performed live. The influence was named openly: Fela Kuti and West African polyrhythm, with Brian Eno producing. The Library of Congress put the record in the National Recording Registry in 2016.

We are not claiming anyone in that studio thought of it as stimming, and the influences are West African before they are anything else — that credit is not ours to relocate. The narrow claim is the one that survives: the technique is sustained repetition of a single small figure, and it produced one of the most physically compelling records anybody has made.

What the suit was for

Before the big suit, there was a list of things the band refused to do — and Byrne wrote the list out.

Early Talking Heads, in his own account: no show-off solos, no rock moves or poses, no pomp, no drama, no rock hair, no rehearsed patter. He announced the song titles, said thank you, and stopped. And the instruction to club lighting people was to turn the lights all on at the beginning and turn them off at the end.

He calls it a performance style defined by negatives, and describes the early band as less a band than an outline for a band — a sketch, the bare elements needed to lay out a song.

Read that as an access strategy, because functionally it is one. Strip out the unpredictable social apparatus of a rock show and what remains is a set of tasks a nervous person can execute. He did not become comfortable on stage. He removed the parts that required him to be.

And then the suit

Byrne was in Japan between tours, looking at Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku; the designer Jürgen Lehl told him drily that everything is bigger on stage. Byrne’s own stated reason for the result is the sentence the companion zine takes its title from — he wanted his head to appear smaller, and the simplest way was to make his body bigger, because music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head.

A costume whose proportions subordinate the head to the body. It is a claim about where understanding happens, worn where everyone can see it.

Stop making sense is a permission slip

The film’s structure is the argument, and you can watch it happen in order.

It opens with one man alone on a bare stage with a boombox, singing a song whose narrator cannot face up to the facts and cannot relax. Then a second musician walks on. Then a third. The set is assembled in front of you by visible crew. By the end the stage is full and the man who could not relax is dancing.

Nobody fixed him. The room filled up.

There is measured work underneath this. Moving in synchrony with somebody changes how you regard them: Michael Hove and Jane Risen found that in-phase coordination with a partner predicted liking (Social Cognition, 2009), and Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath found people who had moved in synchrony cooperated more afterwards, even at personal cost (Psychological Science, 2009).

What it does support is less romantic and more useful: shared timing is a route into a group that does not run through conversation. For a lot of us that is not a curiosity — it is the difference between a room we can be in and one we cannot.

Which is what the title of the film is, once you stop reading it as whimsy. Stop making sense is not an instruction to be nonsense. It is a permission slip. You are not required to arrive legible. The band will start anyway, and the room will fill up around you, and your body will have worked it out well before you can say what it worked out.