Crosseyed And Painless

Since I’m stuck in my apartment with Covid for a while, looks like I have plenty of time to continue my Talking Heads series. Here’s one of their funkiest and most Afrobeat-sounding tracks.

David Byrne always speak-sings to an extent, but this song has an actual rap verse (“Facts are simple and facts are straight…”) Chris Frantz says that he played Byrne “The Breaks” by Kurtis Blow to inspire his delivery. Frantz also says that the song’s title refers to being extremely drunk.

In live performances, Talking Heads added a slower intro with a reggae feel.

This is the song that they chose to end Stop Making Sense, and rightly so.

Angélique Kidjo’s cover is pretty excellent.

Phish has made “Crosseyed and Painless” a regular part of their repertoire, and sometimes they play it very stretched out. This version is almost half an hour long.

Talking Heads covers really bring out the best in Phish. When they began one of their albums with a cover of “Cities“, the Village Voice wrote a review with the headline, “Look Who Stopped Sucking.” (Oh, also, here’s David Byrne interviewing Phish!)

If I had to sum up Remain In Light in four words, I would say, “harmonically simple, rhythmically complex.” Here’s my transcription of the first minute of “Crosseyed and Painless”.

Here are the opening four bars in MIDI view, wrapped in a circle.

My chart simplifies a bit: the “keyboard” part is standing in for the combination of at least one keyboard and at least one guitar, and the “bell” part stands in for at at least two different cowbell parts and a woodblock by José Rossi. The bass is doubled by a guitar an octave up throughout. You can hear the different parts a bit more clearly in this extended remix.

The entire tune is in B Dorian mode, sometimes known as “funk minor.” The vocal melody in the verses hovers obsessively on the notes A and B. In the chorus it opens up to include G-sharp and F-sharp too. That is not a lot of material to work with. The relentless churning syncopation in all the rhythm parts carries most of the musical interest.

The guitar solo is by Adrian Belew. It isn’t so much a “solo” as it is a college of various textural weirdnesses layered up and interspersed with long silences. I assume he just recorded a bunch of crazy stuff and then Brian Eno assembled the final solo at the mixing desk later on. Apparently Belew did all his guitar parts on Remain In Light in one session. Quite a session!

I was surprised to learn that Talking Heads made a video for “Crosseyed and Painless”. It was directed by Toni Basil, who also directed the “Once in a Lifetime” video, and briefly dated David Byrne. The band does not appear in the video; instead, it features an excellent breakdance crew, the Electric Boogaloos. (They are unrelated to the movie or the fascist movement.)

It’s interesting that the video edit of the song doubles the length of the rap verse. It’s also interesting that at 3:33, Skeeter Rabbit does the moonwalk, two years before Michael Jackson did it at the Motown 25th anniversary show. The philosopher Timothy Morton, who coined the term “hyperobject,” wrote an entire book chapter about the song and its video. As you might expect from cultural criticism by a philosopher, it is very heavy and full of esoteric language, but I will do my best.

[T]he video stages the proximity of poor African Americans to the broken tools of modernity, far from valorizing their immiseration, offers a way to think black environmental consciousness as symptomatic of and central to the emerging ecological age, the age of global warming (p. 167).

As the William Gibson quote goes, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

[T]his video and the song are part of the anthem of global anxiety, the overwhelming sensation that underlies ecological thinking like a note that no one wants to hear, a certain high-frequency hum like the sound of a malfunctioning electric pylon (p. 168).

This is definitely how I experience climate anxiety.

“Crosseyed and Painless” is a superb example of funk, a broken blues without a story, without that four-chord trick, that twelve-bar narrative, just popping in and out, locking into that first section, like a needle stuck in the groove of a broken record. Funk evokes the repetition compulsion, returning again and again to the same part of the city, like Freud in his essay on the uncanny, over and over again to the same strange part of town, the part that is your home, made stranger by the constant popping dislocation of the groove. Funk burrows into that initial moment, the beginning of the blues sequence—the basic unhappiness that spawns the ironic enjoyment, the blue note. That chorus-like section that tries to fly from the sickening lurch of the verse, and seems for a few seconds to float above it, before descending back to uncanny home base, like a bird with a broken wing. No escape velocity can be achieved from the horrible gravity of the song, the centripetal torque emitted by the sharpened, shortened blues on heavy rotation (p. 170).

It’s not a musicologically well-supported idea that funk comes from the first four bars of the twelve-bar blues; it’s probably the other way around. However, what I think Morton is saying is that for Talking Heads in 1980, twelve-bar blues would have been the familiar template, and funk would have felt like looping the first four bars.

Haunted by illusion, lies, anxiety, the black working class knows the secret life of things, the way they are in excess of their social role. Yet inner space does not provide a refuge from the outer world. There is no escape from this implicitly racist environmentality: The feeling returns / Whenever we close our eyes. Race, environment, nonhuman things are intertwined (p. 175).

Environmental racism is real. David Byrne gets into that with his bicycle activism, and in his book about biking around different world cities.

Between the flattened seventh and the tonic note of the funk sequence, there is nothing, not even nothing—an oukontic nothing, like the forbidden gap between electron levels, which an electron jumps across when excited by a photon in the crystal lattice on a phosphor screen (p. 181).

“Oukontic” means absolute, as opposed to relative. Thinking of scale degrees as quantum modes of vibration is a rich and generative analogy. The flat seventh in blues probably arose from the seventh harmonic in the natural overtone series.

The horrible familiarity and strangeness of anxiety, its uncanny creepiness that seems to lurk just off of the edge of our perception like a car in a driveway beside the street we’re walking on, or a car approaching in your wing mirror. U.S. car wing mirrors are object-oriented ontologists: they say, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The trouble with ecology is that it brings everything too close. Things become vivid, yet unreal, at the very same time and for the very same reasons (p. 185).

How much of any of this might have been in David Byrne’s mind, or any of the other Talking Heads, or Brian Eno or Toni Basil or the Electric Boogaloos? Maybe not consciously, for any of them, but unconsciously, it would make sense. The whole point of the Talking Heads aesthetic is to sneak intuition around the barrier of the conscious intentional mind.