With stirring emotions

I'm still in the mood for talking about David Byrne! Probably because of the seeing him in a few weeks.

The first David Byrne solo album I heard was Grown Backwards, which I heard shortly after it came out in 2004. And there's a song on this album, Empire, of which* I'm growing increasingly fond.

Anyway, this song is like an anthemic paean to the Republican party, a manifesto even. Thus, obviously, coming from David Byrne, it's completely, thoroughly** ironic, in the good ol' fashioned sense of the word. But what really gets me about this song... Well, there's the way the music perfectly accompanies the lyrics, such that an entire style of music is satirically skewered along with the contents of the lyrics. Though also, the fact that the song can become so singable after a few listens is probably also an insightful commentary on the power of this kind of music to inculcate its attitudes in a moderately receptive audience.

But what I was going to say is that what really gets me about the song is how relatively reasonable the lyrics are, for an ironic satire. As in, there's very little in the lyrics that you couldn't imagine a not-far-from-mainstream conservative wingnut saying. Byrne doesn't feel the need to grotesqueify his targets by suggesting they're baby-eaters or anything. He rather, more or less, uses their own words.

One of the more absurd sections goes:

Young artists and writers, please heed the call
What's good for business is good for us all

Now maybe I've been reading too much Sadly, No, but I don't find it too hard to imagine some right-wing American pundits lamenting the lack of pro-business attitudes in the artistic community. Of course, these lines take on a certain absurdity within the context of what is more or less a pop album, but, well... If it wasn't for that context, and if I didn't know this was by David Byrne, I would probably take this song completely seriously, and thus never listen to it. This is what I find so interesting.

To be fair, probably the least immediately believable section in the song goes:

And as it is in nature, so it is in life.
The weak among us perish, the strong alone survive.

Even that, though, doesn't seem too unlikely to come from the mouth of, say, an Objectivist.

Anyway, I think I'm done. I just felt like sharing those thoughts, and my fondness for that song. As a matter of fact, David Byrne has said much the same stuff himself, here, making this post fairly redundant, but... Err... Bye!


* I'll try doing that uploading it to a place so that other people can hear it thing here, but I don't know how that'll go.
** I wish I could learn to spell "thoroughly" without a dictionary.