A link to this song can be found here.
Sometimes the value of a song is the sense it conveys of inner experience. This is true of the Talking Heads song “Drugs.” There is not much musical structure to it. Its value depends a great deal on its production: I have heard live performances which have no significance for me. But the studio version, I feel, is something quite remarkable because it reminds me of the interior of my mind.
The song begins with a dull but not unpleasant repeating figure in the guitars amplified by a bass line and slow drum punctuation to keep it moving. It is very detached and seems to have no significance. It feels like waiting. It feels like mundane experience.
And then there is a slight figure in the synthesizers which sounds so clear and peaceful, some kind of visitation from another world, like an experience of “the clouds parting” and illumination. There is a feeling of significance, no doubt helped by the low synthesizers which fill in the under-texture of this portion of the song. But it is also strange and seemingly unrelated to things. This lasts for twenty seconds and is gone, returning the listener to the mundane sounds of bass, guitar, and drums which had vanished for the preceding twenty seconds.
After this return to mundanity the vocals begin. The vocals are very weird. If you look at the lyrics printed they seem fairly rational, but they have always seemed otherwise to me. For instance, the printed lyrics at one point say “the boys are worried, girls are shocked,” but I have always heard (and still hear) “the boys are worried, girls are sharp.” Just before the tape rolled, David Byrne apparently ran several times around the Long Island City block where the song was recorded in order to get a breathless, desperate sound to his voice. He is often incomprehensible. He breathes very loudly throughout. You feel you can hear the sweat which has formed all over his face and body. He sounds certifiably insane. The feeling I get is one of human effort, specifically aimed at expressing the experience, and which is not equal to the task. The illuminating keyboards return for twenty more seconds, and the vocals continue throughout, getting more self-explanatory as if convincing himself he is okay “I’m charged up… I feel me… I feel okay.” For the next pass through mundanity, the vocals rise in pitch and desperation, until the keyboards return for a third time, this time for forty seconds. The extra time is felt as great intensity. And the paranoid performance of the vocals makes the illuminating keyboards seem almost frighteningly indifferent.
And then the return to mundanity, which is even something embarrassing. But now there are strange percussive and sampled sounds interjected into the mix, and the song ends with a noisy guitar line whose main purpose seems to be to bring the song to a close.
The three main elements seem to be waiting and mundanity, moments of strange transcendence, and an effort to make some sense of it. This for me is a typical walk in the park, or a drive to the supermarket, or any time when I get to let my brain go through its normal processes alone.
It is interesting to me that this song would be called “drugs,” whereas I consider it normal mental existence. But that does not necessarily surprise me. I have never felt that I needed anything to amplify the strangeness and intensity of experience. I felt the same way when I read Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception.” If this is the drug experience, I said, I have had it more days in my life than not.
Postscript: After writing this piece I went to a diner and was thinking about Aldous Huxley. Suddenly I came up with one of the conclusions found in the Huxley essay – the “at reality” versus “from reality” distinction – and I was staring off at the other side of the diner. In part because this song was so recently on the brain, my mind began playing the mystical keyboard section. It fit perfectly.
2 Comments