Psycho Killers
What Stop Making Sense Can teach Us About the Iliad
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad.. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
When I was in high school–like many a high school geek in the early 90s–I was in a band. The other members of the band all had “cool parents” who played instruments and listened to early punk and the edgier “oldies”. (My father was congenitally deaf; my mother trended towards Neil Diamond and James Taylor). My best friend’s parents had us listening to the Talking Heads by middle school and by the time I got to college, I knew most of Stop Making Sense by heart. We obtained a VHS copy of the concert and watched it all the time.
(Stop Making Sense is a 1984 concert film and album.)
But then, at some party or another, I heard a strange version of “Psycho Killer”. It was slower, tinnier, and flatter in a way I immediately disliked. When I objected to the party host, he retorted that this was the original release from 1977 and that the version I knew was a later recording from the film, more palatable to the masses (or something like that).
It is hard for people accustomed to streaming music and the internet to relate to what it was like being a music fan in the analog era. Songs would basically just not exist unless you had a parent, friend, or some loitering older sibling who had them on record, a Maxell audio tape, or, in later years, CDs. I remember the days of Napster, followed by uploading CDs by the dozens to Apple iTunes, and then limewire (shhhh), just opening up worlds of music with an immediacy that is exhilarating and overwhelming. The ubiquity of music—the unmediated access—is worse than an embarrassment of riches–it in some way devalues it. (There’s an analogy to mortality and immortality in Homer here, but I have already digressed too much.)
My point in recalling this episode is the memory of that tension between “texts” (if you’ll permit me to refer to a recording thus.) I have been thinking for some weeks now about how Stop Making Sense, the film, can serve as a framework for thinking about the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, in particular, the relationship between their development and prior versions (performances, or texts) and the 24 books we have.
Homeric Book Divisions
Pseudo-Plutarch, De Homero 2.4
“Homer has two poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of them is divided into the number of letters in the alphabet, not by the Poet himself, but by the scholars in Aristarchus’ school.”
Εἰσὶ δὲ αὐτοῦ ποιήσεις δύο, ᾿Ιλὰς καὶ ᾿Οδύσσεια, διῃρημένη ἑκατέρα εἰς τὸν ἀριθμὸν τῶν στοιχείων, οὐχ ὑπὸ αὐτοῦ τοῦ ποιητοῦ ἀλλ' ὑπὸ τῶν γραμματικῶν τῶν περὶ ᾿Αρίσταρχον.
Let me start my explanation with a quick reminder of Homeric book divisions. As I discussed in a post on Iliad 14, we don’t really know where Homeric book divisions come from.
We have the basic options below that are discussed well by Minna Skafte Jensen, Bruce Heiden, Steve Reece, and Rene Nünlist (in addition to the overviews of textualization offered by Gregory Nagy, Jonathan Ready, and M. L. West)
The book divisions were there from the beginning, because the alphabet was adopted to write Homer down
The book divisions are features of smaller performance units
The book divisions were a product of Hellenistic editing, following the adoption of a regular alphabet and the impetus to present standard, synoptic versions of epic
The book divisions were a result of the process of dictating the poems: each one represents a day’s dictation, or something like that.
One of the things that really struck me while I was reading the Iliad and working on the posts in the substack, was how many episodes that were considered ‘traditional’ in some way were worked into narrative structures that subordinated them, even awkwardly at times, to the whole. So, the Catalogue of Ships makes sense in Iliad 2 both as a traditional unit and as a thematic restarting of the action after the political strife in Iliad 1. Book 3, with the duel between Menelaos and Paris following the Teichoskopia follows this “historical” anachronism to the thematic beginning of the war, but without losing the narrative of the present tale. This interweaving reminds me of the way performers combine and change songs from different parts in their career, from separate catalogs, and separate artists, to create a performance that in someway coheres in the real time of the audience’s experience.
The names we have for ancient performers of Homeric epic shift a little over time. Within the poems, we find singers (aoidoi), but our evidence from later periods have rhapsdoi, whose name has been etymologized as having to do with a staff or baton (rhabdos) or with a poetic metaphor that has to do with stitching or sewing. The distinction between the pair has been well summarized by José González who writes:
“The greatest hindrance to a proper understanding of the Homeric rhapsode and his craft is perhaps the entrenched, and diachronically invalid, opposition between a ‘creative ἀοιδός’ and a ‘reproducing (uncreative) ῥαψῳδός.’ Scholars who resort to this polarity often seek to preserve compositional creativity up until the time of the alleged ‘monumental composer’—Homer—who, with his dictated texts, arrested the traditional practice of recomposition in performance” (2013, Chapter 10).
Rhapsodes–and perhaps schools or ‘guilds’ of them like the Homeridae, can be dismissed as simple reciters of traditional poems; or we can understand them as something much more complicated and integral to a process of textualization.
Before explaining this, let me return to Stop Making Sense. I have always been a fan of live albums, concert movies, and live performances because of what it shows about the artists and their songs. Great performers allow their songs to be living things–part of the delight of a live performance these days is the productive tension between the ‘text’ (the recording) and the ongoing experience: how rhythms, melodies, and words change over time; how they can be integrated into other songs, both in transitions, and medleys; and how the performers in question arrange them (both internally as songs and as groups of songs).
Stop Making Sense is itself a text–it is a visual and audio recording of a series of concerts. It is a production made of Talking Heads songs but recorded from multiple performances and stitched together through editing. When I was in middle school, the only recorded versions of Talking Heads songs I knew were from this album, yet I had not seen the whole film. It has a plot that is independent from the songs: it builds from David Byrne’s entry on the stage with a spare “Psycho Killer” to the wild anthems “Burning Down the House”, the more contemplative “Once in a Lifetime” to the ending “Crosseyed and Painless”. Along the way, Byrne and his colleagues integrate different musical styles, different musicians, and different engagements with the audience.
For ‘original audiences’ of this tour, the songs built their meaning in part through the tension between their former existence as “texts” on albums, their memories of the individual songs on the radio (or in a friends smokey car or apartment) and prior performances. Many audience members would have performed these songs on their own! (My college band did “Psycho Killer” and, well, it was one of the few songs that actually killed.) For newcomers–and later audiences like me–Stop Making Sense was the text of its own that we took for granted, both in its pieces and its whole.
Part of the artistry of a live performance today is the fiction of improvisation, the energy brought by not knowing what the band on stage will do. As the recent rerelease of Stop Making Sense has made clear, there was little about this film that was not scripted. Jonathan Demme and David Byrne theorized the entire show; Byrne worked extensively on his odd (and unforgettable) dance moves. But the impact of the whole has years and countless other contributors to thank for it.
We have: (1) the songs that were developed by the band over time in recording studios and other performances alongside songs from different projects (solo songs, the Tom Tom Club etc.; (2) the original releases that presented the songs that appear in Stop Making Sense in different contexts; (3) years of performances that reshaped the songs, in part in response to audiences; (4) the decision by Demme and Byrne to transform these songs into a larger narrative performance that itself was transformed into a text through a different kind of technology. The concert film is an ‘epic’ performance that both depends upon and transcends the earlier instances of the same song. But it is a qualitatively difference experience from listening to the albums or the earlier song.
Epic Setlists
Now, how does this analogy work for the Iliad? Imagine that if we return to the idea of a monumental performance and the so-called “panathenaic rule” that had performers of epic in relay. The festival context would have furnished an opportunity to stitch together the episodes (“songs”) that were part of the ‘whole story’ of the rage of Achilles or the homecoming of Odysseus. The performers–rhapsodes–were competent not just at performing a traditional episode (say, Helen describing the heroes from the walls or Odysseus defeating the cyclops), but they were also adept at integrating these episodes into larger pieces, composing in performance to connect and interlink scenes, and collaborating with other performers to help provide the fullest Iliad or Odyssey possible.
Audience members would ‘know’ the songs, but delight in their multiformity, in the tension created between the performance offered now and those they had heard before. Their responses would guide the performers who were in nearly every sense of the word professionals who practiced, adapted, expanded, and re–stitched epic nearly every day of their lives. These rhapsodes, whether Homeridae or not, were constantly composing and recomposing their songs in and out of performance. The context of a large performance of an entire theme in front of a live audience would necessarily recreate something ‘new’. (And, to be clear, I don’t think this undermines the evolutionary model for textualization.)
I don’t know if this analogy does everything I’d like it to do; but what if we add to this the additional technology of ‘recording’ over time–scribes at performances here and there, themselves stitching together the song in the way Demme’s cameras and editing bring together the four live performances that provided the raw material for Stop Making Sense. Just as the existence of Stop Making Sense does not erase the earlier ‘texts’ (those recordings), so too would the performance of whole epic poems and transcripts made of them not supplant the old performances and new ones. But over time, as tastes and contexts changed and as the politics and economics of the Mediterranean transformed the transcript to the sacred/fixed texts of the Alexandrians, the monumental form remained and the earlier forms were lost or forgotten.
I’d be remiss not to mention that one of the etymologies for Homeros. Gregory Nagy has argued on multiple occasions in support of Homer as “explained etymologically as a compound *hom-āros (*ὅμ-ᾱρος) meaning ‘the one who fits/joins together’, composed of the prefix homo- ‘together’ and the root of the verb ar-ar-iskein (ἀρ-αρ-ίσκειν) ‘fit, join’.” “Homer”, then, as an idea, is aligned with those rhapsodes who performed in Plato’s time, as a “the master poet who ‘fits together’ pieces of song that are made ready to be parts of an integrated whole just as a master carpenter or joiner ‘fits together’ or ‘joins’ pieces of wood that are made ready to be parts of a chariot wheel.”
Short Bibliography
n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.
Bachvarova, Mary R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, Malcolm. “Apollonian and Homeric Book Division.” Mnemosyne 36, no. 1/2 (1983): 154–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4431214.
Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
G. P. Goold. “Homer and the Alphabet.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 91:272-91.
Graziosi, Barbara. 2002. Inventing Homer. Cambridge.
Bruce Heiden. “The Placement of ‘Book Divisions’ in the Iliad.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 118:68-81.
Minna Skafte Jensen. "Dividing Homer: When and How Were the Iliad and the Odyssey Divided into Songs?" Symbolae Osloenses, 74:5-91.
Nagy, Gregory. 2004. Homer’s Text and Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Nünlist, René. “A Neglected Testimonium on the Homeric Book-Division.” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 157 (2006): 47–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20191105.
Barry B. Powell. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss
Ready, Jonathan. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. 2019.
Reece, Steve. "Homeric Studies." Oral Tradition, vol. 18 no. 1, 2003, p. 76-78. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2004.0035.
Reece, Steve. 2011. “Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey.” Oral Tradition, 26/2 (2011): 299-326.
West, M. L. 2001. Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Munich: De Gruyter.
I loved this.