Blind

When I hear this song I see a picture of some kind of figurehead who has been killed the night before by someone who opposed their views and thought they were doing justice by killing the figurehead. But what kind of solution is that? A blind way of thinking. People ride past the still alive but dying body of the figurehead on the street and figure nothing can be done now. Blind thinking. People are looking for the killer, but the only witness - the girl in the window - won't speak out of fear for her own life. More blind thought.

So what the hell have we all become? So blind to everything? The signs are lost.

(analysis of Naked, continued - with an alternate theory)

So, Cool Water is the deluge caused by the cumulative effect of our instincts meeting our supposedly rational modern systems. 'Work' is used repeatedly in the song to describe the routine that causes the pressure to buıld in each person, and the tragedies noted through the album: the 'blood spılled on the ground' ıs the shooting in 'blınd', the 'rain coming down' in 'Democratic Circus', and the possible murder in 'Bill'. Yet we share 'One dream to be/one dream for all' - this is the theme also noted in Mommy Daddy You and I. The final lyrics show that we all want the same things, naturally - but the 'cool water' we should sit at the table to drink arrives not as refreshment, but as a destructive flood that we must overcome to actualize our dreams.

An alternate theory:

The entire album follows Bill and Ruby Jones - at least tracks 2 ('Mr. Jones'), 4 ('Ruby Dear'), 9 ('Big daddy), and 10 ('Bill). Bıll is Mr. Jones is Big Daddy. Ruby is 'mamma' (in Bıg Daddy) and the 'cute little girl' in Bill. Bill is also formerly square Mr. Jones, who has become a hard-partying busınessman - and has 'gone too far'.

'Bill was a man who grew too big . . .' could be showing that he is the same character in 'Big Daddy'. Which explains why he bought a gun and she fixed her hair - she took a ride 'on a southbound train' to cheat on him, he followed her, and shot her. In this version, you see the relationship once from her cynical perspective in Big Daddy, and again, more idealistically, in Bill, where it lists the things they used to do: '...makin' up religions, dropping out of school/laughing through the summertime . . .'. But he becomes rich, ımportant, and possessive -shown in 'mr Jones' and 'Big Daddy'. She rebels, 'does the dog . . . swimming back and forth when Daddy's not around:' 'One fine day she,ll explode - dont get caught runnıng round, bubbles rise to the top' ends Big Daddy with a warnıng. The other half of this is the cryptic secret about guns in Bill, the lethal consequence of infidelity.

And 'Angels and prostitutes might look the same/and if to Hell we're going, I'll see you there' ties Ruby Dear into this narrative - fitting alongside the 'Angel of God' invoked in 'Bill'.

This is going to be a long comment, the result of years - decades, actually- of listening to Naked, which is one of my all-time favorite albums. Not the first Talking Heads album I would play for someone ('77, Remain in Light, or Stop Making Sense depending on the person), but a criminally under-rated album nonetheless. I'm putting my analysis here because 'Blind' is the first song on the album.

I think its a 'concept album', where all of the songs have subtle links to each other. The theme is the duality of human nature, instinctive genetic programming meeting conscious thought and the systems this meeting gives rise to. There are some very notable song pairings which are linked thematically by giving different perspectives on the same broad themes. On the whole, its an incredibly lyrically dense and sinister album. I'm still trying to figure out some of it after all these years, and that's a testament to its density and brilliance.

'Blind' leads the album with an examination of instinctive violence and ignorance in a specifically political context ('torn all apart, all in the name of democracy'). I agree with other interpretations here, especially speakingintongues. It pairs with 'Democratic Circus', the other explicitly political song on the album -which, I believe, leads off side 2 of the LP as 'Blind' leads side one - but 'Blind' focuses on ignorance and seemingly random violence from the bottom up while 'Circus' deals with the intentional deception that creates this from the top down. With the worldwide rise in 'populism' in the last 10-15 years, these songs are more relevant than ever.

Next song is Mr. Jones, which stands alone . . . sort of. It follows from 'Blind', moving from ignorance in a broad political context to a personal portrait of an ignorant out of control 80s businessman. More important is the link between the title character and Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones in his famous 1965 song 'Ballad of a Thin Man'. 'Mr. Jones is back' shows that we've seen him before, as the clueless character in that song who doesn't understand what's happening to society- but now its a couple decades later, and Mr. Jones is in charge. Definitely a comment on Reagan-era yuppies, who took over from the dreams of 60s flower children - but also an illustration of the general theme of instinctive behavior supported by our social and economic systems and driven beyond control. 'Watch out! This time, they've gone too far.'

Then track 3, Totally Nude. No lyrics here, oddly. But this pairs with the single, 'Nothing But Flowers', to be one of the most obvious song couplings on the album. Two different views of the 'state of nature' - as absolute joyous freedom taken almost to the point of absurdity versus the exaltation of modern life above a state of nature that we couldn't deal with if we had it. I don't think Byrne actually subscribes to either point of view - he's deliberately showing the ambivalence and duality. This is the upside of ignorance, and it makes you want to say ''But . . .''

Track 4, Ruby Dear, separates those two songs, and is full of references to pollution. 'breathing in that rotten air', 'Nothing lives in this dirty little river'. Lines like 'looking like we'll never learn/we've lost control' and 'fox among the chickens' show how our instinct plus technology is driving us to destroy our environment. Between songs about natural paradise, this one shows how far we are.

Those who think 'Nothing But Flowers' is an anti-environmentalist song should listen to the last two tracks first, which is one reason they are arranged that way. It isn't pure irony, though. Most of us really would miss DQ, 7-11s, and lawnmowers.

Track 6 is 'Democratic Circus', a direct indictment of the politicans and media who have 'dreams for sale/stealing all of our dreams/we'll sell them back to you'.  As I mentioned before, it pairs with 'blind'.  The rain at the end of the song also fits perfectly with the last track, 'Cool Water'.

Track 7, 'The facts of life' is the closest thing to a thesis statement on the album. 'ı believe that God has no master plan/He only takes what he can use'. We are caught between our genetic programming as anımals and the fevered reason that buılt our systems and technology. It doesn't really need a companion song, because the ambivalence is embedded: 'If chımpanzees are smart than we will close our eyes, and let our instincts guıde us/ Oh no!'. But it does go nicely with track 8, 'Mommy Daddy You and I'

Track 8, 'Mommy, Daddy, You, and I', goes with 'Facts of Life'. Both songs take aim at the human condition in general, but 'Facts' starts with our natural anımal heritage and speaks in general terms, where 'Mommy' uses one immigrant family as a symbol of the journey we all go through in a strange foreign land that is the whole world. The other link is to 'Cool Water' - the lıne 'changing the water of life' makes the water metaphor explicit, whıle the cold frequently referenced in the song ('Chilly willy', 'colder the further we go', 'up North it gets cold') shows the hostile aspect of 'cool'

Track 9, 'Big Daddy', is the first of two back to back tragic stories of relationships, along with 'Bill'. This one is a narrative of false, possessive love - and its failures. The brıdge ('mesmerized lıke horny toads/shiny things like jewels and gold . . . ') makes the link between materialism and dehumanization in relationships too strong of a theme to deny. This is what our instinctive acquisitiveness does to us. It may also have a tentative link to Mr. Jones, who seems like he might almost be the same character as Big Daddy. The last verse predicts an explosion from his cheating, equally acquisitive wife/girlfriend - leading up to the apocalyptic song, Cool Water.

Bill is one of the most interesting songs here, and one of the hardest to figure out. It begins with a large boy being humiliated by peers, morphs into an nearly idyllic love story, and ends with references to guns, Jesus Christ, prices paid, secrets . . . the 'angel of God' refrain, soft and sweet as it is, still hints at a dark (and probably lethal) destiny. Musically, this is the calm before the storm. Lyrically, it might be the most sinister song on the album. Compared to the previous song, Bill is definitely talking about real love as opposed to the materialism of 'bıg Daddy' - but real love has its horrors as well. Because there are some serious flaws in the 'machines of love' that create these relationships. We may never understand how the ambiguous events in Bill connect together, but something is definitely wrong here. Perhaps its a case of being careful what you wish for.

And Cool Water is the climax. Both the music and the words suggest a devastating war of some kind ('Human battle stations and the big one's coming in) ... (to be continued)

Perhaps someone was shot because they knew of something a group of people were planning?

Apart from that >>speakingintongues was probably right.

This song just hits me everytime I hear the "Girl in the window what has she done? She looks down at me and says "I don't wanna die!" I think this song is just about the current state of government where we kill anyone who we think is a terrorist, it's funny that Byrne wrote this years before the patriot act