Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s

Three: From Neurasthenia to Nervousness: The Whiteness of the New Wave

THREE From Neurasthenia to Nervousness: The Whiteness of the New Wave The Talking Heads’ 1984 concert ‹lm Stop Making Sense remains one of new wave’s de‹nitive artistic statements, an adventurous cinematic portrait of a band long associated with the genre’s most experimental proclivities. As conceived by the Talking Heads’ front man David Byrne and director Jonathan Demme, the movie intentionally unfolds as a three-act theatrical play. In the ‹rst act, we are introduced to the Talking Heads’ four main members, who enter the stage one song at a time. They are then followed by the auxiliary musicians: ‹rst, two female background singers and a percussionist , and then a keyboard player and a guitarist, all of whom, unlike the Talking Heads, are African American. In the second act, the collective nine-piece ensemble plays a number of songs, each of them exhibiting different cinematographic touches that highlight Byrne’s unusual choreographed dances and stage props. For the climactic third act, Byrne appears on stage in a specially designed oversized “Big Suit” that leaves him looking like a ridiculous cartoon character, with “a teeny little head and teeny little arms and feet stickin’ out.”1 Byrne’s meticulous attention to the visual and physical details of his bizarre stage persona seizes the viewer’s attention throughout the ‹lm and reminds one of why new wave was frequently labeled as a form of art rock. Unsurprisingly, the uniformly glowing reviews that accompanied Stop Making Sense focused their comments mainly on Byrne’s inventive, avantgarde screen presence. Writing about the ‹lm in the journal Artforum, Carter Ratcliff applauded the constructed nature of Byrne’s stage character as a subversive renunciation of the rock-star ‹ction of naturalness and easy 71 expression. An “emblem of selfhood plagued by self-consciousness,” Byrne presents to the audience a fractured “Frankensteinian” identity constantly aware of its arti‹cial design. At every turn the Talking Heads’ stage show re›ects his “awkwardness, rawness, [and] android angst,” all of which communicate an intense sense of alienation and difference: [Byrne’s] an outsider and he knows it; signaling his knowledge with a dazzling repertory of alienated moves: grimaces straight out of low-style, brand-X cartoons; mad-scientist leers; sudden ‹ts of the shakes; hyperkinetic lopes around and around the two platforms; a pas de deux with a tilting , lit-up lamp; running in place; hoedown stomps that induce the backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, to join in. They show good spirits but their grace can’t help looking like mockery, as they try to mirror Byrne’s ecstatic clunkiness. Guitar player Alex Weir never tries. His moves are as loose and warmed-up as Byrne’s are tight and cold and wound-up. With his human immediacy, Weir reminds you of all that Byrne’s stage presence has renounced.2 Ratcliff plays Byrne’s “tight,” “cold,” and “wound up” gestures against the “loose” and “warmed up” body language of guitarist Alex Weir for strategic effect. This stark contrast helps to underscore just how far removed Byrne’s constructed persona was from the typical performing bodies that had graced popular music concerts throughout the 1970s. There is an unspoken subtext in Ratcliff’s review, however, that is crucial to understanding the signi‹cance of Byrne’s performed awkwardness. Simply put, Byrne is white, while Weir is African American. Viewed in this context Stop Making Sense is more than just a three-act play; it is, as Talking Heads biographer David Bowman suggests, “the spiritual journey of a hapless white guy . . . trying to ‘get down,’” who by the end of the show “‹nds his mojo.”3 In this respect Stop Making Sense is nothing less than a musical and visual commentary on what it means to be white. While Byrne’s performance in Stop Making Sense is obviously an exaggeration , it nonetheless underscores a fundamental characteristic of new wave as a whole: it was overwhelmingly perceived as a white genre of music . Little has been made of new wave’s speci‹c racial constitution, but even a cursory examination reveals that in the United States especially the ma72 are we not new wave? jority of the genre’s performers were white, and more precisely white middle class. Many new wave bands, such as the Talking Heads, were formed by graduates (or dropouts) of art schools, universities, and colleges, traditionally white middle-class institutions that...