Life During Wartime . . .
A few weeks ago I saw Stop Making Sense again after many years and it brought back so many thoughts and memories from a time back in the 1980s. Some of the songs that were so memorable back then are now earworms in my head and I think about them all the time against my will. One song that had such power over me for a time in my life was “Life During Wartime.” The refrain, "This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around," now endlessly circles in my head. I write this essay hoping to find some peace from this circling inner noise that I still like as a song.
The song came out when I had just returned from my misadventure with a friend in Kawaii and so much of my thinking at this time was deeply framed by the kind of paranoid and anxious ideas spoken of in this song. I recall initially searching for a way to validate my experiences in the song, only to eventually recognize the parody and excess contained in the spinning and irrational ideas. Hiding in Plain Sight was my theme song of that time, a product of having lost faith in the institutions that surrounded me and having not yet found a place where I belonged.
Today, I find the music both funny and upsetting in the way the mock paranoid rambling conspiracy theory-like excuses circle around and around in the song. David Byrne seems to open up the ways today's culture has embraced these unsettling fake truisms and urgently searches for enemies: terrorists, immigrants, or some such boogiemen to pin all our fears on. These are anxious times of our own making that the cellphone echo chamber amplifies.
Perhaps the intensity of my feelings for this song is like how I felt learning of Peter McIndoe’s mock protest “Birds aren’t Real.” I laugh as I cringe inside. It’s an apt parody, but it also just keeps adding to the crazy and the irrational posturing. Parody is an unstable kind of commentary that can be mistaken for boosting the very causes that it mocks. I don’t think Life During Wartime is coherent enough to be a specific social commentary. It implies and characterizes a situation generally without really identifying who or what is at war. Parody is not exactly the right idea here, the song is more of a pastiche of ideas that exist in the world and their accumulation alone is what makes them seem contradictory and unstable.