Air

David Byrne said in an interview once that it's about somebody who's afraid of air , but he says it's not a song about pollution, it's about someone who thinks the air can hurt you almost as he described "It's about being afraid of being alive!"

Shloogorgh\'s right on. I hear this song as the concerns of a very worried terrified person. On a side note, when my cat was a kitten, the first time I took her outside I could notice her being frightened by the way a slight breeze blew over her, something I would not have otherwise noticed, but she was experiencing for the first time.

I read somewhere that it was about somebody who was afraid of going out of their home. So the air is actually the exterior. Can't remember where I read it, think it was an interview with Byrne.

To me, the song is about people harming the environment and the air around us. With the holes in the ozone layer, the sun can come through and damage our skin. We as people tend to simply ignore these problems (Some people say not to worry about the air), and pretty soon we won't have the air we need anymore (Some people never had experience with air).

I don't really see it being about STDs. I mean . . . why say 'air' if you mean 'sex'? The song isn't constructed like a metaphor for sex, and there's nothing in it to suggest that it's talking about STDs from sex rather than something actually to do with air, such as what speakingintongues said.

I think this song is about when the negative experiences in your life make you feel fragile, to the point where "air can hurt you too"

As with a great majority of Talking Heads lyrics, David Byrne continually writes about the drug experience. These other explanations always hit upon more of the banal, his concepts are so much more ethereal than unprotected sex or pollution. At times, he does write about seemingly banal subject matters, but it's used as a tactic to pull us away from our programmed reactions and views, making us vulnerable to life as children are. This song specifically dwells on the experience of depersonalization in the drug experience, ego-death, transcending our corporal body, no longer having the safety blanket of being 'me'. No safety to fall back on, the personality, or role which we come to identify with our self. It is obliterated, and we become one with the air around us, fully a sensation, no longer an entity.

I don't really see it being about STDs. I mean . . . why say 'air' if you mean 'sex'? The song isn't constructed like a metaphor for sex, and there's nothing in it to suggest that it's talking about STDs from sex rather than something actually to do with air, such as what speakingintongues said.

Tragically the song is absolutely right. Air can and does hurt you: oxygen is what makes you grow old!

lol, leave it to the heads. sometimes their songs are just so unobviously obvious! stop making scence, and ya just might get it ;]