The psycho killer: The killer who could not stand conversation and could not sleep

The first verse of “Psycho Killer” is a confession of sleeplessness. The narrator describes himself as tense and nervous, unable to relax or to sleep, and asks not to be touched. Then comes a chorus built on a question in French, and a whole bridge in that language in which he alludes, in fragments, to what he did that night and to what she said. He never says whom he killed. The song was first played in 1974 by the Artistics, the band David Byrne and Chris Frantz had at the Rhode Island School of Design, and it passed into the repertoire of Talking Heads; Tina Weymouth, whose mother is French, wrote the French part. It was recorded for Talking Heads: 77 and came out as a single in December 1977, months after the arrest of David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam”, who had terrorized New York since the summer of 1976. The band always maintained that the song had nothing to do with those murders. Byrne said he had imagined Alice Cooper singing a Randy Newman–type ballad. What came out is the portrait of a personality in tension with everything around it, the same one Hans Eysenck thought he had found in the offender.

// The theoryA personality that learns badly

In Crime and Personality (1964), Hans Eysenck argued that conscience is a conditioned reflex: we learn not to offend because punishment associates transgression with anxiety. Some people learn that association less well because of their biological make-up. Eysenck described three dimensions of personality: extraversion (need for stimulation), neuroticism (emotional instability, anxiety, irritability) and psychoticism (coldness, aggression, lack of empathy). According to his theory, high scores on all three predispose to crime. Later research found a link with psychoticism and, to a lesser extent, neuroticism; much less with extraversion.

// The subjectA killer who explains nothing

The most interesting thing about the narrator is what he does not say. He does not explain whom he has killed, or why, or how. He only describes his state: the tension, the insomnia, the rejection of others. That absence turns the song into a study of atmosphere rather than a story, and Byrne’s nervous voice, clipped and high, completes the effect. The French of the bridge adds strangeness: the killer literally speaks another language. The song does not try to understand the killer, but to convey what it would be like to be inside a head like that.

The band played with that distance from the start. The single’s B-side was an acoustic version of the same song, with Arthur Russell on cello, and the monologue sounds colder still once the guitar is gone. Years later, in the liner notes to the compilation Once in a Lifetime, Byrne explained his interest in the character with a comparison: the Joker and Hannibal Lecter struck him as far more fascinating than the good guys. That fascination is what the song exploits, and what Eysenck’s criminology shared in its own way: the offender as a creature apart, observed from outside, who bears no resemblance to the listener.

// The crackThe myth of the mad killer

The problem with “Psycho Killer”, and with much of popular culture, is the association between mental disorder and violence. Research shows that the great majority of people with serious mental disorders are never violent, and that they are more likely to be victims of crime than to commit it. The killer as mentally ill is a stereotype that feeds stigma.

Eysenck’s theory has also been heavily criticized. Its biological foundations have not been fully confirmed, psychoticism is a poorly defined dimension and the theory pays little attention to social context. What the song and the theory share is the idea that the offender is someone different by nature, an idea that is reassuring for everyone else, but not always true.