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"Mind" is the second overall track from Talking Heads' third studio album, Fear of Music. The song was officially released on August 3, 1979. Lead singer David Byrne may be addressing someone in this lyric, or at least a certain way people can sometimes be. People who are very rigid and think they already have it figured out. They don’t have a “beginner’s mind.” It’s like in Making Flippy Floppy where he says “Nothing strikes your fancy/Nothing turns you on.”
What seems on the surface to be an indictment of someone else’s rigidity also calls the narrator’s inflexibility into question. The person whose mind the narrator is trying to change only shows up as an object to be modified, not something to be engaged with and respected as autonomous. The narrator's status here is, shall we say, ‘authoritarian’. The narrator is focused on ways to enforce his perspective on someone else – he and the ‘other’ are in a mirror-play of recalcitrance.
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