Life During Wartime

Released on 14 October 1979 as the first single from Fear of Music, it entered the Hot 100 on 3 November and peaked at 80 over five weeks. Its full single title is Life During Wartime (This Ain't No Party... This Ain't No Disco... This Ain't No Foolin' Around). Byrne said he wrote it in his loft on Seventh and Avenue A, thinking about Baader-Meinhof, Patty Hearst and Tompkins Square, and called it a song about living in Alphabet City. The narrator is a clandestine figure in a dystopian United States who hides in a cemetery and lives on peanut butter, with Houston, Detroit and Pittsburgh named. Byrne considered the persona believable and plausible. The line about no Mudd Club or CBGB names two New York venues. Of the disco line, Byrne wrote in 1992 that the band liked some disco music and found it funny to be seen as anti-disco flag-bearers.

Gene Wilder and Ari played congas, with Harrison on synthesizers. An alternate mix with prominent guitar by Robert Fripp, 4:07 long with extra verses, appears on the 2005 box set and the Fear of Music reissue. The New Yorker in 2012 called it an apocalyptic swamp-funk transmission in four-four time.

Live

The 1980 Remain in Light tour version is on The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, and the Stop Making Sense performance, with Byrne and the singers jogging and exercising, runs 4:52 on the soundtrack. It closed the main set on the Remain in Light tour. It was one of three songs the reunited band played at the Rock Hall induction on 18 March 2002. The Staple Singers covered it in 1985.