Blackouts, murder, and David Byrne’s most defining lyric in 1977
A sudden siren bursts the eerie silence in New York City like a hairpin pricking a balloon.
A blackout has plunged the sprawling metropolis into darkness for the last 25 hours. Amid a sweltering heatwave, a lightning strike on a dilapidated power grid has left eight million people without electricity. Looting and rioting run rampant as fires burn from arson attacks and electrical faults.
Amid the frenzied commotion, 1,616 stores are damaged, 1,307 fires rage, and 3,776 arrests are made. But the most notable criminal is still at large as the so-called Summer of Sam burns towards its grisly conclusion.
David Berkowitz has been prowling the streets for almost exactly a year. The deranged postal worker has killed six, wounded seven others, and infected an entire populous with a streak of fear. New York is renowned for its resilience, but since 1969, the city “has lost one payroll job in every six”, violent crimes have skyrocketed, and the only thing that money couldn’t buy in the City of Dreams was poverty. Things felt perilously close to the end for the whole enterprise.
David Byrne is strutting around the Lower East Side in a pair of espadrilles, contemplating this coming coda, trying to make sense of it all. But in the end, it remains utterly senseless fa fafa fa fafa fafa fa fa. The rotten dilapidation and murderous emblems of decline seem macabre and mystical even to those pointing to the benign neglect of Richard Nixon as the viral source of the sickness.
However, despite the strangeness of the manic meshuga, borne from the poverty and unrest, the feeling is far more lucid. And in his own peculiar way, Byrne decided to focus on that feeling. Even in these early days, he always thought pop music should concern itself with emotion and atmosphere above all else.
That philosophy became central to ‘Psycho Killer’. The song was not an attempt to document the violence unfolding around Byrne and his fledgling band, or even a bid to diagnose the sickness. Instead, the song looks to absorb the atmosphere of a city in crisis.
“I don’t get too hung up on the words,” the Talking Heads man told Playboy. “The sounds of the words have as much meaning as their literal sense.”
Byrne’s voice became a cutting instrument in an arrangement geared towards gripping the listener by the lapels and shaking loose and emotional response like a second-hand Skoda racing over a cattle-grid. The stuttering repetitions, fractured delivery, and the sudden shifts in language come together to create the impression of a mind coming apart.
In this regard, there is almost something sinisterly fitting about the French that creeps into the band’s debut single. The feeling is knowable even in its absurdity, but the meaning remains foreign. So, ‘Psycho Killer’ says it all with its title and its tone, the parts beyond your linguistic grasp elucidate the chasm of understanding, like a pair of binoculars gazing deeper into a sea of thick fog.
It wasn’t that Byrne undermined the importance of words. “Intelligent lyrics and rock ‘n’ roll don’t have to be antithetical,” he asserted. “Even simple rock ‘n’ roll has that kind of intellectual awareness, or maybe just smarts.” But Byrne knew that it shouldn’t over-explain. And that’s reflected in his own fracturous prose from the start.
He might have been more hung up on the melody and mood of ‘Psycho Killer’, but that was pretty much the point. He had begun the song before Berkowitz had even started his sickening spree, and as the anthem matured, it simply picked up the miasma of Manhattan’s festering stench.
The initial idea might have been to pair the shock rock stylings of Alice Cooper with the literary postmodernism of Randy Newman, with the bilingualism of the song reflecting the duality of a deranged mind, but in the end, ‘Psycho Killer’ began to capture the fractured city where it was conceived. Sadly, this proved prescient with the words now tying into a time where intellectual reasoning can explain the demise of the present and offer up solutions, but does little to curtail the melodic mood of runaway inevitablism.
Or as Byrne put it way back in ‘77, “Psycho Killer / Qu’est-ce que c’est? / Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa”. Has a better debut chorus ever been written?
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