For many Americans, including David Byrne, who was born in Dumberton, Scotland in 1952, only officially became a US citizen six years ago, a guest appearance in the TV series "The Simpsons" is considered an accolade for the cool and bad.

It happened for Byrne in 2003, when he immortalized himself on the show with Homer Simpson's song "I Hate Ned Flanders", in which his music for intellectually demanding people doesn't seem to fit at all.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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But the Simpsons marry the lowest instincts with Harvard like few other formats.

Byrne, dressed in dandy clothes and speaking clear English, enters the pub because he has heard "Indigenous Springfield music" from outside, whereupon the tavern owner, instead of greeting, reverently mentions Byrne's diverse talents from Talking Heads singer, artist (he has several art books edited, is a painter and photographer) to film composer to director stammers.

Byrne adds the unexpected: "

And

I used to wrestle under the name of El Diablo.” The fact that he was still a wrestler himself would come as no surprise, since he always performed the song “Psycho Killer” in 1977 so convincingly, as if he could do it directly for autobiographical reasons put into this.

The lyrics are high literature with French educated passages, a celebration of the odd and the weirdest music at the same time.

After the deed has been completed, the described psycho-killer feels “Fa Fa Fa Far better”, so much better, whereby the Fa from the solmisation DoReMiFa of course corresponds to the sung tone at the same time.

Before anyone else, Byrne invented what today has its own section in record shops as world music.

Since 1981 he has been on a solo path.

In the same year, the album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", recorded with Brian Eno, stood out for the first time with organic-sounding sprinklings of authentic ethnic music, which were still recorded on tape, which naturally includes the search and journey to these voices and instruments.

His world music label Luaka Bop, founded in 1990, includes Latin American music as well as African and Asian ones.

In the sounding ghost bush

But as the creators of The Simpsons understood, Byrne is not only a gifted musician, but also captivates through the fusion of media, for example by taking over the artistic design of his and other covers as well as that of the music videos.

It is a total work of art, stylistically close to surrealism, but with images that one has never seen before in Dalí, Leonora Carrington or Dorothea Tanning, and with off-key tones that have never been heard before.

But what connects his last concerts in Germany, such as "American Utopia" in 2018, with the songs and the images they call up from the seventies and eighties is a body-sound motor skills that are unique to him.

In his inner melting pot, the American Scot amalgamates samba steps and college ticks as well as new wave robotics with African dances in such an organic way that it never seems superimposed or colonially appropriated.

He often invented his own gestures for songs, such as the paratactic chopping up of time on the forearm for “Once in a Lifetime”, which can be experienced live and in the music video.

The fact that David Byrne is still represented in the history of the most important music videos in the gigantic Völklinger Stahlhütte until October with the clip "Road to Nowhere" he shot himself (together with Stephan R. Johnson), this only proves that he can celebrate his seventieth birthday today Celebrating his birthday with the reassuring feeling that he not only belongs to the canon of music history, but rather actively helped to shape it.

And added many important pages to it.