jere7my | Byrning an Onion (Reply)

The Onion AV Club interviews David Byrne.

[Regarding his new album] I wanted to create something that was tacky, but yet, to be immodest, kind of beautiful. We live in ugly times. The Bush years have been emotional. They've been driving me crazy. Not so much a guy or an administration, but the fact that large portions of the population seem to go along with it and be swept up in some kind of weird, feverish hallucination.

[Regarding his politically motivated song Empire] That's the problem I think I have with the song. Taken out of context, somebody else could do it, and then it wouldn't be ironic. It's totally ironic because I'm doing it, and the listener has to know that I don't mean this—and they might not. I mean, some of the lines are totally ridiculous, and nobody could really sing them and expect people to go along with it. But I've thought that about a lot of stuff and been completely wrong. Somebody could pick it up, and I'd get a call from the Monsanto Corporation, and they'd say, "We want to use this song for our new commercial. We like this song."

[Regarding his PowerPoint art project] I realized later, as everyone does, that what I should have said was that, of course, I like the limitations and the faults and the clunkiness of the program. I love the fact that it eliminates choices of what you can do, because there's so much you can't do. And having stuff that can do everything is not always a good idea. Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively. So I like the fact that you can only do certain things, and some of the things it can do, it can't do that well, but it does them in its own kind of way. If you accept that, it's okay. Sometimes I can tell it to do things, and it really has a freak-out. It starts shaking, and it's great! I mean, try and do that in Flash. I showed him stuff that it was doing where the dissolves would be so imperfect that it would do this very complicated destruction of the image before the next one cleared. To do that in another program would be really, really time-consuming—to make something look this bad, but in a particular way.