Life & Mortality Quote by David Byrne

Byrne strips smoking of its costume and forces it to stand under fluorescent light. “True face” does double work: it implies we’ve been looking at a mask, and it frames tobacco marketing as a kind of drag performance - glamorous, “sophisticated,” carefully lit - designed to make harm look like identity. The pivot is blunt and rhythmically ugly: “disease, death and horror.” No euphemisms, no soft-focus health warnings. He piles nouns the way an ad piles lifestyle cues, flipping the industry’s own technique back on itself.

Calling tobacco executives “pushers” is the tell. That’s not public-health language; it’s street language, and it collapses the polite corporate veneer into the moral category of dealing. The subtext is accusation: smoking isn’t merely a personal choice gone wrong, it’s a choice engineered by people selling addiction while pretending to sell taste. “Try to portray” matters, too - it concedes the marketing’s power while insisting it’s ultimately an illusion, something staged rather than earned.

As a musician who built a career skewering modern consumer life, Byrne’s intent isn’t to sound like a surgeon general; it’s to puncture the pop-cultural spell. Smoking has long been packaged as mood, rebellion, elegance - a prop in film, fashion, and music scenes. Byrne’s line reads like a counter-lyric: unglamorous, percussive, meant to stick in your head and make the “cool” suddenly feel like someone else’s script.