"Byrne Confronts 'New Sins'"
By Rob Thomas, Capital Times, September 7, 2001

Ideally, you don’t want to just walk into a bookstore and buy a copy of “The New Sins.”

You want to have it thrust into your hand in an airport lounge by some earnest young man seeking donations, or stumble across it in the bedside table of your hotel room while hunting for your eyeglasses.

Because, if you don’t see it coming, the little leather-bound book looks every inch like the life’s work of a well-meaning but offbeat religious cult that wants to change the world, one passer-by at a time. It includes footnotes, key words in red text, and even a complete Spanish language translation.

But “The New Sins” is not written by the “Better-Emancipated Strivers for Heaven,” as the title page states, but by the former Talking Heads singer David Byrne. It’s a pocket marvel, a book that pokes sly fun at such dogmatic tracts while making some fairly sharp and salient points about the world we live in.

Byrne originally created “The New Sins” for the Valencia Biennial art project in Spain, and the book actually was handed out to tourists and concealed in motel rooms. McSweeney’s, the magazine and publishing house run by “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” author Dave Eggers, was able to lovingly publish the book for U.S. readers.

The heart of the book’s appeal is that it makes a passionate and seemingly rational argument for a premise that is completely illogical. The book claims that modern society’s values are so upended that what we think of as virtues – honesty, thrift, hope, wisdom, etc. – are actually vices.

“What was evil, despised and abhorrent yesterday is admirable and cheered today,” the book says. “The wealthy were once looked upon with suspicion, with the assumption that unusual wealth implied some unethical activity, the gains probably ill-gotten. But now this is a mark of virtue. The rich, the ostentatious, the loud, the crass and the indifferent are looked up to as models to be emulated. Only the old fogey would hold fast to childhood and traditional values.”

Therefore, thrift is a sin because it denies people goods and pleasures that they want. Honesty is a sin because it presumes that there is an essential truth. And hope, which holds more weight than all the others put together, is essentially empty wishing for order in a chaotic, unfeeling universe.

The text also includes a revised map of The Inferno, which includes public announcement speakers in the top tiers, with human rights activists and missionaries near the bottom. (Journalists fall somewhere in them idle of the eighth circle of Hell, just below market researchers, while serious pop musicians like Byrne reside in the fifth circle.)

The book also includes over 80 illustrations and photographs by Byrne, most of them wonderful enough to merit their own book. In fact, the text dryly suggests that the illustrations should be the reader’s primary focus. “The text is merely a distraction, a set of brakes, a device to get you to look at the pictures for longer than you would ordinarily.”

Like most of Byrne’s pop music, “The New Sins” is so immediately entertaining that you don’t see it coming as art. For Byrne fans in particular, passing up this small, odd, fascinating tome would be at least a minor transgression.