i wear a suit and a tie!

also say other things about this song if you think of any

I don't think it is anti-disco, it's war! There's no time to enjoy yourself! If it's anti-disco, it's also anti-'NY lower East side scene that some people called 'punk'', viz 'This ain't no...or CBGB...', surely!

Also, doesn't peanut butter count as groceries? Why the separation?

It might be more of a clarification than a separation.

And what about Houston, Detroit and Pittsburgh?

It's a character sketch, innit? I always interpreted the narrator as longing for the carefree days of disco, but I suppose, looking at the lyrics, it could go either way. It's GRATE lyrically, but musically, I never understood the fuss (besides the great hook, of course). No doubt it's wonderful, tho.

This just occured to me, but it's fun to read the lyrics as a great big pisstake of the whole "Disco Sucks" attitude - as Byrne impersonating a rock dude who's adamant about fighting the Number One Enemy of Rock. "This ain't no foolin' around" -- we've got canons (haha "cannons") to establish, wussies to fight! It's tough to say, though; even the beat itself is ambiguous - it thumps in four-on-the- floor stylee, but it rocks pretty convincingly, too.

i think david byrne clarifies this in his comments in the sleevenotes to the "sand in the vaseline" double set, that it is determinedly NOT anti disco at all...

And run with the creeps. Cos it's all about money. Ain't a damned thing funny. You got to have a car. In this landof milk and honey.

Liner notes from "Once In A Lifetime":

The line "this ain't no disco" sure stuck! Remember when they would build bonfires of Donna Summer records? Well, we liked some disco music! It's called "dance music" now. Some of it was radical, camp, silly, transcendant, and disposable. So it was funny that we were sometimes seen as the flag bearers of the anti-disco movement"

Hmm. That still doesn't really answer much, does it, only that the band themselves weren't a "Disco suxxx!" act. It depends on whether or not you believe the disco is part of the wartime (ie, they're fighting the disco) or that the disco is a place he wishes he could escape to (ie, this ain't no disco: disco as a place where he has no troubles). The line "I changed my hairstyle so many times now don't know what I look like" is probably going to have the answer in it somewhere, though. It's an obvious referal to cultural change.

the persona DB takes in LDW is "urban terrorist" (viz the weathermen) => the personas taken on EVERY SONG (i think) on fear of music are similarly "unreliable" narrators, in the sense that their take on the world involves no consensus perspective whatever

this is what "fear of music" means to DB, i think (for the purposes of this record): inability to frame consensus perspective

so the attitude towards disco — not negative precisely, but obviously rejecting it, in the name of "the struggle" — is a mark of the persona's one-dimensionality => however i'm not at all sure that DB is *anti* this one-dimensionality (in the context of this record) so much as momentarily fascinated and envious (maybe it's better to be like this, ie focused, than eg merely dweebily conformist-consumerist viz "punky" or "disco-going")

S/D: punk songs with disco subtexts...let's see, there's this and the Gang of Four's "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist"...any others?

Not anti-disco, but a rejection (or at least a non-recognition) of the idea (before it was ever stated) that disco could provide a soundtrack for serious business, a.k.a. "war." Er, maybe that's just naff. (Though no moreso than Byrne's "disco won't harm you, kids, really!" explanation, though...)

Oh, and of course, "Death Disco."

yeah but scott, the persona's idea of "war" is surely intentionally suspect? he is one step away from wearing a silver-foil hat to screen out the 12-foot lizards' telepathic commands

mark - Are you saying what DB is really afraid of (or is battling against) is Devo or Jim Morrison?

David Byrne in Rolling Stone (1977) (quoted from memory): "The difference between us and punk groups is that WE like KC & the Sunshine Band. Ask Johnny Rotten what he thinks of KC & the Sunshine Band and he's likely to blow snot in your face."

no i'm saying that the "we" in LIFE DURING WARTIME is not "talking heads"

I've always heard it as the equivalent of "ain't exactly no tea party", which IS a rather anti tea party thing to say.

However, by "disco", he's saying "dance club", not "disco music". He even clarifies it by adding "no Mudd Club, no CBGBs", a distinction apparently missed at the Comiskey Park bonfire a few months later, where they burned Donna Summer records but spared the Ramones and Television.

Why does no one ask if the song is opposed to parties or to fooling around?

I always thought he said "Silly Bee Gees" not "CBGBs", so my view has been skewered until today.

ILM- educating the masses.

I may just be recycling the D. Hepworth review of FoM in Sounds here, but an alternate reading is that there is no "war" at all. So yes, we have an unreliable narrator as mark s says, but he's not a Weather Underground-style resistance fighter, rather a gone over-the-edge paranoid who if not on the road would have been holed up in his home- made fallout shelter instead.

ok but if so he has an imaginary girlfriend who he acknowledges missing (DH's version is not impossible, but i think less interesting, actually, as several of the other FoM songs explore such similar territory)

Not imaginary but an ex (and unable to accept it)?
Or the girl is real and still present (think: Christopher Walken persuading his family to believe his delusion in 'Blast From The Past'). Anyway, I don't wish to flog this theory to death. But LDW is different from the majority of songs on FoM: I get the impression that Byrne generally started with the titles ("things") and then expanded from there.