I wrote this today as part of my Brooklyn Public Library Monday writing group. All of it is true…
A few months ago I started seeing people on Twitter sharing pictures of an old man in a light grey suit with light grey hair and a surprised but engaged expression on his face, and I learned that the name of this man was David Byrne. I didn't know what to make of him, or what exactly he was doing, with his strange dance and his strange expression, looking straight forward. A few months later, bored and out of the streaming shows I usually used to pass the time, I put on an episode of Saturday Night Live, and saw this same David Byrne, for whom the audience cheered loudly. He performed a song that seemed like a combination of spoken word and music.
"You may find yourself. Living in a beautiful house. You may find yourself. Living in a shack!" he shouted, or something of that nature. Then the crowd of people around him started singing about the days going by, water flowing, etc, so on and so forth, and then he shouted again "Same as it ever was!" Many times he said this, with different intonations.
I'd heard the song before, but I didn't know where or when. It seemed to have been played a lot recently. I don't keep up with music recently, especially rock and roll, a genre that seems irrelevant by now, but the song was at least interesting, and I thought, well, this old man – I assumed from his suit and the idiosyncratic style of the song that he was a painter or some kind of retired lawyer who had taken up singing in his later years and met with a lot of success, someone rich, definitely a rich old man – is putting his riches to creative and interesting use. I was warmed by the fact that this was a phenomenon apparently enjoyed by the youth, that an old man had been accepted; it reminded me of Ed Markey, the old US senator from Massachusetts who's made an unpretentious alliance with young progressives, leading on the Green New Deal.
But, unlike Markey, Byrne wasn't easily accessible or understandable to me. I was still a little mad at how many people seemed to know him, how there was apparently this river flowing of pop culture that it was just assumed you were turned into. I didn't know why I felt angry. I was tired and cranky - otherwise I would have been watching a better TV show, and I think I might have been fast-forwarding, digging to see if there was an interesting sketch deep in the episode, and stopped paying attention, because rarely do I get to the musical guest. The time I want to watch a song and the time I want to watch comedy are rarely the same. I went to work, I remember I had an afternoon assignment that day, and it slipped my mind.
But over the next few months, I started noticing Byrne's name more and more, like how after you learn a new word or notice a new sign you seem to see it everywhere. A young political person I follow on Twitter – or actually, I think, who people follow on Twitter and “like” onto my timeline – had changed her screen name to "David Byrne's scream at the end of road to nowhere" or maybe it was always that way. It's hard to tell when new things start to exist. I thought I'd kept up with most of the new music –Megan Thee Stallion, SZA, Lil Baby, DaBaby, all those babies – but the Byrne audience seemed different, all these young white socialists loved him, and maybe the indie rock scene, which had always escaped my notice, was up to new iterations of its old tricks. I decided to look him up, still a little annoyed at him for being so unfamiliar but seeming ubiquitous. David Byrne? Was he some kind of off-brand David Lynch, another David of the same age bracket with a signature wave of white hair?
What I discovered was that he, contrary to my image of him as an old man hobbyist, had been a serious rock and roller in his youth, part of the band the Talking Heads whose era I couldn't place exactly, but everybody who knew about classic rock had known about him for a long time. There were pictures of him young, singing the same damn song - it just seemed wrong. Where was the novelty, why was it interesting, for a young guy to be singing this? It didn't make any sense. And how would a young guy know about this stuff?
I don't know what to make about any of this. I've been looking for someone who had this same experience, who had seen this old white man with white-gray hair in a white-gray suit, who had developed a grudging respect for him, only to discover he was someone different, but nobody agreed with me, nobody had seen the same thing, and for now the incongruity between what I knew and what was going on continues to grind in the gears of my mind.
end