Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 20

down shirts and their unusual stage presence. Such unconvention
ality puts their audience off guard, not knowing what to expect.
More importantly, David Byrne is known for lyrics about the
tensions in America, about a “Psycho Killer,” for example, or a
middle-class man lost in his life:
You may find yourself
Living in a shotgun shack.
You may find yourself
In another part o f the world.
You may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile.
You may find yourself
In a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself:
Well, how did I get here?
For those of us who know this David Byrne, how are we to
react when we see the narrator, seemingly so straight and sincere,
making statements and showing interest in these people? How else
to react but to look at the narrator as a puppet with David Byrne
pulling the strings? Are we really supposed to sympathize with the
characters in this film? Are we to see them as honest, simple folks
who have their own ways of doing things and seeing things? That
seems to be the way the narrator sees them, at least some o f the time.
For example, he seems quite interested in the computer expert who
is trying to send signals to extra-terrestrials. And he seems
fascinated in the rather absurd dinner at which Earl Culver—who
hasn’t spoken directly to his wife in several years—explains the
industrial system to the narrator and to Culver’s children. And he
certainly seems interested in Louis Fyne. In fact, Byrne makes
Louis the prototypical middle American in his climactic song,
“People Like Us”:
People like us

14