Mind

Another one of my favorite Talking Heads songs. I love the cold, mechanical, paranoid feel of a lot of these songs on Fear of Music, with flat, two dimensional titles -- Paper, Drugs, Electric Guitar, and this song inparticular.

I don't think David's really addressing anyone in particular in this song, it's more an exploration of the cliche of the chorus phrase.

I'm going to play this for someone who is going to leave me. I hope it works. I won't even talk. I'm just going to play the song.

ahhh i want to know if it worked!!! did the person leave you?!

There's only one line which seems to express a real emotion--"and it comes directly from my heart to you,"--so (not surprisingly) David sings these words with a total lack of conviction.

While annoying myself (nothing better to do?) with the tired subject of mankind's folly and the elusiveness of a better world in song I couldn't help but think of "Mind" by the Talking Heads from the 1979 classic "Fear Of Music." The album is notable for its one word titles and varied subject matter . "Air" is about someone who has reached such a point of desperation that even breathing air is painful. "Cities" describes the pros and cons of living in various cities of the world. "Mind" is about someone that cannot be changed. The music surges occasionally like random electricity and is awkward, almost ugly but for that very reason strangely appealing. David Byrne's delivery is cold, robotic and resigned. So who is this person Byrne is trying to change ? Time, money, drugs, religion, science...none of it works. Then Byrne brilliantly drops a hint in the only moment of humanity in the song, "I try to talk to you, to make things clear But you're not even listening to me...And it comes directly from my heart to you... ". "Mind" is picking up the baton where John Lennon's "Imagine" left off but is running in a completely different direction. Where Lennon was the dreamer and hoped that by imagining a better world in song we could join him and learn to "live as one", David Byrne is the realist and has acknowledged the fact that no one is even listening to him. His approach is characterized by resignation ("I haven't got the faintest idea" ) and the song's emotionless musical undertone underscores the abandonment of feeling that occurs when one succumbs to accepting the meaninglessness and absurdity of the world. This is from my blog site uofmusic.com

I think he is addressing someone, or at least a certain way people can sometimes be. People who are very rigid and think they already have it figured out. They don't have "beginner's mind." It's like in "Making Flippy Floppy" where he says "Nothing strikes your fancy/Nothing turns you on."

I like DevastatorJr's take on this LP. The coldly clinical abstraction is off-putting (an understatement). "Fear of Music" was a perfect title.

Though apparently that was at least partly an incidental thing, where either Byrne or Eno heard about an unusual mental state in which people literally do become afraid of music in general. And then thought, that sounds like a title...

The intensity of the desire expressed: that's a bit out-of-character for David in those days, who still had odd ideas about emotion being a useless imaginary construct (refer to "I'm Not in Love" for a kind of treatise on this subject). Yet this need, this near-compulsion to control another person? It doesn't seem to be directed to a particular human being, or even a specific trait that "ought" to be changed.

It almost makes me laugh, this inhuman lack of referent! Change whose mind? Change what about it? It's as if the song doesn't express anything real.

Paranoia: yeah, that's like a mood which hangs over everything David wrote (at that time). Which achieves a kind of frenzied peak on "Animals"--everything alive is laughing at me, I just know they are, but they won't admit it...

Also, I think of the term "flattened affect," used to describe the classic negative symptom of schizophrenia. The starkness of the cover art and song titles: I feel as if they reflect a deeply-ingrained refusal to become engaged with anything resembling a "normal life."

My mind is split on this one.

I think he's addressing somebody in particular, but I don't know if wants to change "your" mind for selfish or altruistic reasons. Is he trying to get somebody to move his thinking to the next level, or does he just badly wish somebody would make a different decision?