Divine Symmetry I 11 I Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” and Bowie’s Vision of the Apocalypse

The end of the world seems to have preoccupied David Bowie throughout his career. His vision veered between the actual death of the planet with “Five Years” (1972) and societal breakdown “Panic In Detroit” (1973). I view those as Bowie’s idea of the coming end, then the end in progress. “Diamond Dogs” (1974) paints a picture of the aftermath. Notably, that sequence rolled out one year after the next, but Bowie revisited the topic much later with “Sunday” (2002) which envisions a world in which “nothing remains.”

Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” (1979), which was my personal song of the pandemic, comes closest to “Panic In Detroit.” It even mentions Detroit Its about a survivalist caught up in a dystopian crisis. Both describe chaos, but both have a sense of humor about it.

At first blush, these two songs should have quite a bit in common. David Byrne and David Bowie actually do have much in common (Byrne even inducted Bowie into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). But despite covering similar subject matter, I actually think the two songs are quite different. Bowie uses his dystopian songs to comment more about society than the individual, whereas the Talking Heads song is set so much from the perspective of an individual that we can’t be quite sure if it’s all in his imagination. There’s at least a hint that the war is imaginary in “Life During Wartime,” or worse, that the narrator is acting on paranoid delusions. It very well could really be about the absurdity of the survivalist mindset.

While Bowie at least partially uses the first person in “Five Years,” he does so as an observer of how others react to the news that the end is near. What he sees ranges from a mother attacking her children to someone drinking milkshakes as if nothing was amiss. The narrator of “Panic” again is making observations, but he’s also taking actions. Unlike the narrator of “Wartime,” the narrator of “Panic” isn’t stocking up on weapons and food; instead he’s looking for an autograph from one of the revolution’s celebrities.

There are similarities: The narrator in “Wartime” transmits a message and hopes for an answer. The narrator in “Panic” wishes someone would phone. Both songs evoke the sounds of conflict— gunfire in “Wartime” and sirens in “Panic.” Both songs, oddly, mention school.

The 1967 Detroit riot might have been the inspiration both for Bowie’s song and the “Life During Wartime” reference to Detroit. What’s a little odd about the “Wartime” reference is that it included Detroit, which was infamous both for the 1967 riot and riots in general, alongside Pittsburgh and Houston. Both of those cities experienced civil unrest either in the “Long, Hot Summer” of 1967 or following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, but they were hardly alone, and there are “worse” examples, such as Chicago. Maybe “Chicago” as a word just didn’t fit into the song. Perhaps the line doesn’t refer to the late-60s riots at all, and are more or less random cities that were supposedly, within the context of the song, in a (real or imagined) state of upheaval in the moment (the song was released in 1979).

It is also worth acknowledging the possibility that Talking Heads injected Detroit into their song as a nod to Bowie’s earlier song, or even just because “Panic in Detroit” was floating around in the back of David Byrne’s head.

The hint in “Wartime” that it’s all a a delusion comes with the lines, “We dress like students, we dress like housewives; Or in a suit and a tie.” To me, this suggests that the paranoid narrator is looking around at normally-dressed people going about their lives and concluding that they are all in disguise. If the four Bowie songs I mentioned are indeed a sequence, there’s little to suggest that what’s being described isn’t real. Instead of looking normal, the characters that populate Bowie’s dystopia look like Che Guevara (“Panic”) or have featureless faces (“Diamond Dogs”). Despite the signs of conflict, “Wartime” mentions no casualties, whereas “Panic” mentions “a trickle of strangers were all that were left alive” and the narrator of “Sunday” is searching for signs of life.

In the end, neither Talking Heads nor Bowie hold out much hope for revolution. But beyond that, they cover similar ground fairly differently.