“WE’RE AIMING AT SOMETHING DIFFERENT”
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS NOVEMBER 8, 1980 LOS ANGELES is the entertainment capital of America. In little more than 50 years, the business of entertainment has built a vast, moneyed urban sprawl around the billboards that line Sunset Strip announcing the latest records and films. Most of the people who live here either work in the entertainment business or else they clean up after it.
A city like this, which is not really a city at all but just 72 suburbs in search of a city, is bound to have character problems. America views Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California with apprehension. Southern California, for its part, seems to have renounced the rest of America.
Even for a country that regards politicians as being almost by definition corrupt and self-serving, the level of interest in the imminent elections is absurdly low. The one solitary note of political support I’ve seen in the streets was a customised van with a bumper sticker advocating something called the Libertarian Party…
“Beer drinkers,” according to David Byrne, a New Yorker whose job has taken him all over the world. “They want to make everything legal, abolish taxes, and just have a good time.”
Byrne recently rented a house in Venice, an ‘artists community’ by the beach, while he and Brian Eno worked on an as yet unreleased album called My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts. Venice is a centre of what Wet magazine calls “responsible hedonism”, which is a sort of intellectual version of the roller-skating fad. Roller skating is just one of the fads that originated in this vanguard city. And Los Angeles is a vanguard city.
The LA art/punk crowd like to think that there’s something vital going on here, and there is, but it’s everything they despise. LA is the centre of contemporary American culture, broadcasting through films and music the blueprints for contemporary ways of life; little parcels of clothing and attitude for consumers starved of real sustenance.
David Byrne had to move out of Venice after just two weeks. It didn’t suit him.
“Everybody was just relaxing in the sun all day, tossing Frisbees around…”
And in the land of
