True, the text is always free to digress into architecture, birdsong and diatonic bone flutes, but we are also shown Byrne's evolution through high school bands, art school busking, Talking Heads' album-by-album rise to fame, and the subsequent solo career. At its worst, it comes across as a faux-naive shtick that detracts from the content.ĭespite the opening disclaimer that "this is not an autobiographical account of my life as a singer and musician", a good half of the book could be described as just that.
Ruminating on the 18th century ("back in the day"), Byrne remarks that "meanwhile, some folks around that same time were going to hear operas." At its best, this approach cuts through the metaphysical waffle that often passes for music criticism and helps tease out what is common to punk clubs and La Scala. How Music Works is wonderfully wide-ranging, covering the prehistoric origins of music, Madonna's contracts, the musicality of animals, pie charts of earnings from his recent collaboration with Brian Eno, Pythagorean acousmatics, the compositional limitations of Midi software, Algerian pop, the Filipino People Power revolution, the ethics of philanthropy, 16 pages of tips on how to create a happening nightclub, and music's physiological and neurological effects ("not really my brief here", but he sneaks in a few pages anyway).Īnyone familiar with Byrne's song lyrics or spoken-word theatre projects will recognise his artfully artless narrative tone. In the introduction, Byrne lists all the things his book will not tackle, but he ends up tackling most of them regardless.
"Sophisticated innocent" is the Talking Heads singer's trademark identity.
David Byrne's book, although it's a self-conscious art object (backwards pagination, upholstered cover and so on) contains plenty of plain-spoken, sensible observations: a dichotomy typical of the man. G iven the vastness of the subject, calling a treatise How Music Works seems intellectually arrogant, but it could also be seen as disarmingly frank, a fresh perspective from a down-to-earth mind.
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