The 1979 Talking Heads song that eerily predicted the future: “Computers the size of wristwatches”
The year is 1975, and David Byrne is holed up in art school on Rhode Island, feverishly cogitating how to shrink his own head. It’s not a simple task.
But he would soon crack the case, figuring out that the “easiest way to do that was to make [his] body bigger” rather than condensing his own cranium. Since that day, Byrne has seemingly always been thinking about how he fits into the wider world around him.
These thoughts are not just limited to gargantuan greyish suits. Byrne’s musings on civilisation and his role as a creator are a noble pursuit. The results have not only proved a precious addition to our dismal daily lives but are absolutely vital, too.
Because over 50 years on from his Rhode Island epiphany, our lives have only arced further towards actively shrinking minds and passively bloating bodies. The wealth of the working and middle classes is being purged by the powerful who tower above us.
In 1975, the average house price in the UK was 4.1x more than the average annual salary. Now, it is 8.8x more than the average salary. And it is getting worse. If inequality continues on its exponential trajectory, wealth concentration will continue to narrow ownership and widen dependence. In effect, our incumbent rent will only add to their bulging beltlines. Resources are being gobbled up. But we’re full enough to let it happen.
Is there any point in grumbling when you can sit back, relax, and, with a few quick clicks on your ironically eminently affordable dodgy stick, find yourself watching Stop Making Sense, one of the greatest works of art humanity has ever mustered, for free? What does it mean to protest material decline when distraction has never been cheaper, faster, or more immersive to an engineered nth?
It seems that as Byrne was busy adding scaffolding to a grey suit, he envisioned this very question being asked.
An eerie prediction
In a 1979 interview with Max Bell, Byrne’s patently apparent artistic foresight became spookily prescient as he seemingly predicted the future with one of the most exacting retrospective quotes you are ever likely to see: “There will be chronic food shortages and gas shortages and people will live in hovels,” he began. “Paradoxically, they’ll be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches. Calculators will be cheap.”
With cold sweat already forming on the foreheads of mid-21 century readers like dew, he gets even more eerily accurate, continuing, “It’ll be as easy to hook up your computer with a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries. I think we’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development and sitting on Salvation Army furniture.”
He added, “Everything else will be crumbling. Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience – but as more information gets on file it’s bound to be misused.”
To reiterate, he was saying this in 1979. All the Netflix, WikiLeaks, and iWatch inferences hadn’t even been thought of. The first household computers had only arrived on the market two years earlier. And capitalism cunningly turning your inability to buy new things into a ‘vintage’ craze was a Y2K away.
But still, Byrne somehow predicted our dystopian present with unerring accuracy. In truth, the conditions for capitalist realism were already latent in the late ‘70s, so, in some ways, Byrne’s take feels more like a prognosis of a system that could only unfold one way. Not content with mere clairvoyance, he decided to distil it all into a hybrid disco-punk song, too. The musings of his fateful interview with Bell were about to get funky.
The story of ‘Life During Wartime’
When Talking Heads emerged from the fertile creative stage of the CBGB and blossomed into the sort of band that Jeff Bridges would describe as “a splash of cold water” to the stilted ‘70s psyche, bassist Tina Weymouth laid out the following mantra for the group: “We call ourselves Thinking Man’s Dance Music.” Only thinking folk would think of that.
They were a pariah band of creative outlaws, and in their long, chequered history of gross assaults against banality, they never lost their “thinking man” edge. The song ‘Life During Wartime’ from their 1979 masterpiece Fear of Music is testimony to this.
“The guy I depict in ‘Life During Wartime’ is a very rational type,” Byrne told Nick Kent in ‘79. “When I wrote that, I was thinking not so much of a World War Three thing so much as a terrorist attack – a Baader-Meinhof situation, that would have escalated into pretty much civil war. And the narrator is just very logically running down a list of things – materialistic stuff that suddenly means nothing when a real state of emergency is declared.”
The world that Byrne sings of wasn’t all that distant, it’s just that few others saw it as becoming quite as prevalent and pervasive as it has proved to be for the 50 years that have followed. In 1977, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof had masterminded a movement that sent shockwaves through Europe when they kidnapped and assassinated the German industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer.
Schleyer was a far-right oligarch. In his position as the head of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations, he was, in effect, the outspoken face of West Germany’s capitalist elite. For many students bludgeoned by increasing inequality, growing fascistic control, and surveillance, he represented an enemy pursuing wealth and power at the cost of their liberty and future. In the process, Schleyer was pushing society closer to collapse.
Byrne didn’t see this as an oddity occurring some place far away over by the Iron Curtain, but a worrying portent. There are certainly shades of the song’s subtext in the recent Luigi Mangione case. But rather than focus on impassioned radicals, Byrne, once again, pushes his song closer to the core of the society he foresaw.
Our protagonist lives in a world of radicalism, detached from the various political causes but immersed in survival. Disco is dead, and society has fragmented into a dispassionate space where poor souls stretch the dregs of “peanut butter” out over “a couple of days”.
That might be a bummer, particularly if Byrne’s predictions keep edging closer to fruition, but at least the song is a masterpiece. There is no band in the world who could take on the terrorist ideology of West Berlin’s left-wing Bolshevistic Baader-Meinhof group, transpose the political assessment onto a disco beat, and not lose the visceral edge of either element.
Far from being a careless satire that misplaces the serious nature of societal destruction in a whimsical song, the band approaches the subject of rising radicalism and the issues underpinning it judiciously. Byrne’s savvy observations are housed in a rightfully jarring, angular abode. It is a track that feels fittingly fractured.
The track is as fast and furious as ever, with Funkadelic rhythms finding an unexpected soulmate in the snarling, seething passions of the New York art-punk scene. There is also a darkness on display here that illuminates the band’s ability to journey into all quarters that their wandering imaginations lead. “This ain’t no disco,” indeed. But it is still a bit disco-y, isn’t it?
The reason the song sits so perfectly with Byrne’s fool’s paradise view of the future is because of this very juxtaposition. He sings “This ain’t no disco!” but the music itself assures you that it is. His threats and warnings are drowned out by catchiness. Throughout the song, no matter how hard he tries to yell about the darkened kneeslide of the world towards dilapidated dystopia, the bright boon of music itself glitters over the gloom, and the lead singer’s survivalist words ultimately land in vain.
While on the one hand, this happy-go-lucky outcry against a bleak future is a metaphor for how the cushioning blow of faux progress and cheap, pacifying entertainment allows us to wander in a somnambulant slumber towards despair and depravity, there is a second factor at play: Byrne looks into the future, but he also guardedly puts the present situation of the Baader-Meinhof group at the centre to warn that while casual acquiescence of a doomed fate is to be avoided, extremism against it is just as bad.
His latest shows, American Utopia and Who Is This Sky?, offer up a solution: taxation, togetherness and democracy.
Just as he had intended a few decades prior with ‘Life During Wartime’, we shouldn’t go dancing blindly into the future like the world is one big disco, but the salve of music has to be part of preventing its collapse. In this increasingly conspiratorial age, Byrne warns against paranoia and mindless individualistic revolt. Instead, he calls for considered collective governance and constant assessment of the state of affairs.
The alternative
This same exulted viewpoint is at the forefront of his exceptional American Utopia, the live show that came almost exactly 40 years after his initial crystal ball quote. The tagline for the show is: “What if we could eliminate everything from the stage, except the stuff we care about the most… us and you… and that’s what the show is.”
With this message of simplified collectivism, he tackles the world head-on, but in typical Byrnian fashion, he accomplishes an uncompromised view of America without ever succumbing to cynicism. He celebrates the simple joy of life, unity and the potential that creates for positive and meaningful change. When despair and distracting division are so prevalent, we can often forget that collective alternatives are not just ideological pipedreams.
In an age where ridiculous and harmful conspiracies have created needless caustic division and shrouded the issues that really do matter in the blur of endless (mis)information and cyber-screaming, Byrne strips it all back and presents a utopia that keeps a keen eye on the world, but never loses sight of the most important things, while coming together to celebrate them.
In short, American Utopia and Who is this Sky? are not only two of the greatest live shows of all time, but – much like the warning of ‘Life During Wartime’ – they’re exactly what the world needs right now. Byrne has been eyeing up that vital function of art ever since his days of head-shrinking wizardry and foreshadowing society’s current crooked fate.
