David Byrne at Radio City
The concert so nice, they played it twice.
Some bands will play two or more sets in a city, and each night is completely different. Radiohead comes to mind, and I think Ben Folds Five used to do it back in the day.
DB’s second show (Saturday 2/28) was a song-for-song reconstruction of the previous night’s, which at first irritated me. But after a few songs I realized that with such intricate dancing, and more importantly with such a well-crafted arc to his story, changing the order would have broken everything. Like putting on a 15-scene play scene-by-scene in a random order. Each scene might have been strong on its own but the work as a whole would have fallen apart.
DB’s work is so effective because it functions on many levels. The song is one, but then each song says something about the songs before and after it, and those sets of three songs in turn stack into a larger unit—a record, a show—which says something all by itself. And then if we don’t feel like looking larger, we can look smaller instead. Even within each song, we find his same self-complicating principle at work.
Check out the way each line of the chorus of “Heaven” complicates the others.
“Oh heaven / heaven is a place / a place where nothing / nothing ever happens”
He begins each line with the word (or two) that closed the line before, leading us merrily along in a pattern of repetition + variation. In the first line, “heaven” could mean an idea, a goal, a place, a desire—we’re just not sure. In the second he narrows his focus, makes his subject clear, and in the third he finally seems ready to say something about the subject. But he doesn’t, not yet; he just says “a place where nothing”, and we wonder nothing what? Nothing can go wrong? Nothing can harm us? Wrong, he says. A place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
And so now, without ever asking it himself, he’s got us all asking for him—what do we want from heaven? The really fun stuff is all right here.
