Talking Heads: 77 (2003)

I was attracted to John Domini’s first novel by its faithful reproduction of the title of the first Talking Heads album, preserving the eccentric punctuation intact—one colon, no apostrophe. It turns out to be a story about the alternative press in Boston in the late 1970s. There’s some talk about Talking Heads and that album, but not much. I know Jerry Harrison went to Harvard and played with the original Modern Lovers, which is maybe as close to Boston as he got. Punk-rock is a continuing theme in this novel, though not particularly a main one and, for that matter, and not to split rock critic hairs, but Talking Heads is closer to new wave and/or postpunk than to punk-rock. “Talking heads” as a media style also gets its allusions here. There is even the cardinal sin of attaching the definite article to the band’s name—“the” Talking Heads. The name of this band is Talking Heads, as one of their album titles spells out so clearly. I have some interest in Domini’s era of alternative press, as I worked it myself for much of the 1980s. The story here involves a hapless editor and investigative reporter who is looking into corruption in the Massachusetts prison system and trying to keep his paper going at the same time. There are many references to the 1977 movie Between the Lines, which features an alternative newsweekly with Jeff Goldblum as its rock critic. There is also a kinda sorta rock critic on the staff of the paper here. She talks a lot about punk-rock and “the scene” but never makes much sense. She is the daughter of the paper’s money man so maybe she’s meant to be “nepo” and not much good as a writer. When I looked this novel up on Goodreads I saw it has a lot of five-star rankings and reviews. I thought it was a terrible mess and a slog to get through—two stars. It had very little about Talking Heads or their album, and what there was seemed only dimly aware of them. Domini seems more to be talking about an album that exists as some kind of idea in his head, and not the actual album. I appreciated the effort to do the alternative press, especially in the era it focuses on, but Domini doesn’t make much of a job of it. You’re better off tracking down Between the Lines, which I don’t remember as great but certainly it’s more entertaining than this trying-too-hard exercise. I hope Domini got better, but I would need more encouragement from somewhere to look into it myself.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

4. Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979)

[2007 review here, 2011 review of “Cities” here, 2012 review of “Animals” here, 2014 review of Jonathan Lethem 33-1/3 book here]

I was stoked to see that Wikipedia classifies this album as “psychedelic funk”—only after “new wave, postpunk, and art-rock,” but still. I thought I might be out on a limb stanning one of my all-time favorites since the day it was released, whatever category you want to put it in. But songs like “Mind,” “Memories Can’t Wait,” and of course “Drugs” make the sonic and lyrical case (and the band finishes the thought with supreme funk). What often confuses me about Fear of Music is the unexpected layer of humor wrapped into it. It may be most obvious in the hilariously bizarre “Animals,” which the raging singer cries “are laughing at us” when they “don’t even know what a joke is.” Yes, he’s talking about the extant nonhuman fauna on the planet at large. “They think they know what’s best,” he says. “They’re making a fool of us.” Further sins: “Shit on the ground ... see in the dark.” Other songs continue in similar veins, often named for nouns (“Mind,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Electric Guitar”). We hear that “Air can hurt you too,” that heaven is a place where nothing happens, and that members of a jury at trial have rendered verdict. “Never listen to electric guitar,” they solemnly chant. “Someone controls electric guitar.” David Byrne’s lamentable inclinations to mock people he considers ignorant and/or beneath him can be discerned developing here. His main character, who wavers in some detail from song to song, remains recognizably a type of political crank prone to conspiracy theorizing. No doubt he is as worried about fluoridation as he is about the conspiracy of the air when the weather turns cold. Byrne’s impulse would continue with the album he made with Brian Eno in 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, where a lot of the vocals are screeds tape-recorded from late-night religious stations on the AM band. It would be worse and most fully on display in the 1986 album and related movie True Stories. But these things are still more indeterminate on Fear of Music.

The most famous song from the album is likely “Life During Wartime,” which is more dystopic than psychedelic and seemed uniquely suited to the Cold War moment in the late ‘70s, on the eve of the conservatism that continues to metastasize into fascism, a hit in the UK but not the US. “Cities” is another song that’s not particularly mind-altering by intention, but I hope it remains relevant to people in their 20s and 30s trying to figure out where they want to live. Implicitly it recognizes that a better life can be consciously sought by starting with this vital choice. Preach. Most of the rest of the album is trippy one way or another. “Mind” reminds me a little of P.M. Dawn’s “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” in that the lyrical concerns are more on the order of pedestrian love troubles. “I need something to change your mind,” the singer wails plaintively. Then a walloping “MMMMMIIIIINNND,” reminds us where we got the idea this music is psychedelic. The strange, unlikely views of air, heaven, animals, and the electric guitar infect us with new ways of looking at them. The longest song on the album, at 5:10, is also the last. Called “Drugs” here, and “Electricity” in earlier versions, it presents a guy (likely the same paranoid-delusional we’ve seen in many of these songs) obviously tripping out on hallucinogens. Byrne reportedly got the unusual intensity of his vocal in this song by going outside and running around the block a few times at top speed, and then recording while he was still out of breath. The effect is stunningly accurate, full of the strange sights and sounds and feelings, the coincidences and the social anxieties, of the hallucinogenic at full effect. “I'm charged up ... I'm kinda wooden / I'm barely moving ... I study motion.” You know it when you hear it. Play loud.

Talking Heads' Fear of Music (2012)

(My Internet-ironical review of the album here.)

Jonathan Lethem is one of my favorite writers and Fear of Music is one of my favorite albums—of all, ever, not just of Talking Heads albums. So this was practically guaranteed to impress and it did not disappoint. For what it's worth it's also the first book I've read, beyond browsing in bookstores, in the still-growing 33⅓ series. The series matches one writer to one album (based on a curated volunteer system, it appears). Lethem is good, a really fine novelist (Motherless Brooklyn is a particular favorite), and this shows how casually excellent he can be as a rock critic too. Well, 2003's Fortress of Solitude had already made that quite evident. But I really love the way he goes at it, bearing down so hard. And this should be instructive too—for me and for all of us! Hours and hours of intense listening and gathering up of scraps of notes and thoughts went into this. It is as much a labor of love as anything I know. I think he might even like Fear of Music more than me, and I have always been that crank in my circles. Lethem attacks the whole by theme and each song individually, exploring a taxonomy of "types": Talking Heads versus David Byrne albums, text, concept LP, science fiction, Asperger's artifact, in terms of the paranoiac, etc. It's an album you can go quite deep with and he is here to prove it. I don't agree with him on many particulars—he calls "Electric Guitar" rather than "I Zimbra" the weakest track (one of my theories for why it's such an underrated album relates to kicking off with the one song that doesn't belong). And he often seems to be missing the humor I perceive as pervasive. But he brings a tremendous, even daunting level of insight to the album, the music, and the band, picking up on all kinds of things I had missed before or never exactly put together. Lethem makes a beautiful argument for why "Life During Wartime" and "Memories Can't Wait" are titled appropriately for the album's naming schema, as opposed to "War" and "Memories," which might seem more apt at first. Admittedly, we might be going into the deep weeds here. I love it when he talks about the "disco ambulance" of "Cities"—that is nigh perfect. He locates a critical center of gravity on the album in "Cities" and "Life During Wartime," side by side, nearly direct inversions of one another, each furiously name-checking city names and worried about the future, albeit in very different ways. "Memories Can't Wait," Lethem says, implodes them both, proceeding out of themes first established in "Mind." It's altogether quite a trip, much like the album. Recommended.

In case it's not at the library.

Brian Eno & David Byrne, "America Is Waiting" (1981)

(listen)

I liked the idea of this early solo collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne: taking random snippets of audio from AM radio broadcasts and matching them with ambient in-studio musical accompaniment heavy on the African influence. The two disparate elements somehow (not always) meld into songs, sometimes even with recognizable verse-chorus-verse movement, and work on each other in interesting ways, obscuring, highlighting, changing—and/or, ultimately, failing to change—the churning forces at play. I think it works best of all on this opener for the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and then gradually declined across the space of the album; the '06 rerelease, which added seven more tracks, only repeated that experience. But what an undeniable idea, as crystallized in "America Is Waiting," with such ingenuity of repurposing, belittling yet still bearing the chilling raw power of the original broadcasts. The album can claim a historic position for its use of sampling, a notion still in its infancy at that point though already in the arsenal of hip-hop artists in New York, which likely explains how these skilled musical voyeurs picked up on it. "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another," says San Francisco talk jock Ray Taliaferro in a broadcast of April 1980, according to Wikipedia, which statement in hindsight appears prescient—I'm not even sure Taliaferro, let alone Eno and Byrne, knew what they had there, so close to the historical political fault lines themselves. But sure, I'll call it prescience. And maybe it's projection on my part, but I hear great roiling mounds of anxiety in the musical trappings too, with contributions from Bill Laswell, David Van Tieghem, and Tim Wright, which appear to be attempting to encircle this potent gibbering with magic rituals of some sort or another. The result is like few things before or since.

Talking Heads, "Listening Wind" (1980)

(listen)

More trials and tribulations of the contrarian: As often the case with me when favorite artists find success, I had a number of misgivings about the fourth album by Talking Heads, Remain in Light, arguably their breakthrough project artistically and maybe even commercially too. Certainly it delivered them to a wider audience, building on the hunger for wide-ranging source material that always drove the band and producer/collaborator Brian Eno, and certainly "Once in a Lifetime," "Houses in Motion," and "Born Under Punches" have become significant signature songs in the many years since, and yes, I've more or less embraced all that entirely. But the quiet and evocative "Listening Wind," which seems closer to Eno's Another Green World, remains the song on the album that never fails to win me over when it plays, a quiet insinuating thing of canny textures and effortless execution, moving along like a well-oiled buggy. The vocal line is chanting and rhythmic, opening up to a gorgeous moan on the chorus that is a pleasure to sing or roll one's head about with, and the instrumental is rich with grain and feel and the sweet touch of an undercurrent of urgency. It's way less complicated than the other songs on the album, almost a lullaby in effect, with numerous small pleasures that tell, never making a particularly big deal about it. I guess I thought the rest of the album was a kind of exercise in braggadocio—"Look at what we can do now," it demands by implication—whereas "Listening Wind" feels much closer to having absorbed something essential, now reflecting it back with preternatural poise.

Brian Eno, "King's Lead Hat" (1977)

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Honestly I never figured out until I saw it the other day in Wikipedia that the anagram of the title is "Talking Heads." Gratification. Relief. At long last. Why didn't anybody ever tell me?! Robert Christgau's review of Before and After Science alluded to it, and I don't know why I didn't get it. I'm usually pretty good at anagrams. I guess I got stuck on "death"—I thought it had to include "death." But no, just some greeting from afar to a musical relationship that was about to take off like rockets. "King's Lead Hat" was always my favorite song on the album. Much like "Third Uncle" on Taking Tiger Mountain, my other favorite album by Eno, it's about as hard as Eno was ever going to rock, in the context of albums that were themselves as rocking as he was ever going to get ... more or less. But he really pours everything into this, with a wall of sound affect that swarms like all 17 musicians listed on the credits could have chipped in. It fades up quickly to full-scorch groove and continues from there, with Eno yelping along with a nursery rhyme kinda melody on top of the stone groove, and it breaks wide open at the chorus, goes a little robo-loopy at the bridge, pirouettes and drops to a knee. It's fun, it's ecstatic, and there's a feeling of discovery about it. I see that it was released as the only single from the album and never did anything, even in the UK. So I will have to acknowledge that in many ways Eno's entire '70s catalog (heck, the whole career) is on the order of a cult level of operations. I want to sign up to be a priest in this cult.

Stop Making Sense (1984)

USA, 88 minutes, documentary
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writers: Jonathan Demme, Talking Heads
Photography: Jordan Cronenweth
Music: Talking Heads: David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, Steven Scales, Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell
Editor: Lisa Day

It's interesting to think about what one does with favorite bands. As a point of conversation I used to argue for the importance of always having one, or several: favorite locals, favorite performers, favorite within genres, favorite favorites. At some points, overwhelmed by so many choices, it becomes a pretty good problem to have. Many happy years can go by where the thought is basically on when a next album is coming out and/or a next show happening. Then one day something changes—the band breaks up, puts out a bad album, somebody says something stupid, a death—something—and it doesn't have the same allure anymore.

Talking Heads were like that for me, my favorite band from 1978 when I first heard the debut and then the follow-up. I stuck with them all the way to 1986 and True Stories, which was too rancid, and left a bad taste that's still there. Stop Making Sense was a high point of the good years, coming even as the band was visibly beginning to fracture and it was easy to wonder each time if there was going to be anything more. I saw the movie on its release and it was more than I could have hoped for, as was the album that followed the next year, Little Creatures, the last good thing they ever did. I actually saw Stop Making Sense a few times, and that was back when it felt more like an odd extravagance to see a movie more than once. Then it became a casualty of backlashing reassessments.

Talking Heads, "Animals" (1979)

(listen)

Fear of Music has its flaws but it's also a great album, the best Talking Heads ever did I think, and it's mostly because of these loopy wackjobs that keep coming out of nowhere. There's a bunch of them on the album—"Electric Guitar," "Mind," "Air," you can tell most of them because the titles tend to be simple nouns—and they're not anything like this or one another either, at least not in the ways they approach being a song. Here the singer has a comically deranged take on the fauna, which goes mostly unnamed by species (except for a "crazy dog"), who he is convinced "are laughing at us / Don't even know what a joke is." I liked David Byrne a lot more back then when I didn't know as much about him. He was still pretty much a mysterious figure, skinny and intense, rumored to be mentally ill (fallout from writing "Psycho Killer" most likely), wearing all black and hanging around with Brian Eno, and he could really pull off a joke like this, not least because it was so unexpected. The singer is in a rage. It's the first thing he tells us. And why? Something about animals eating nuts and berries. "I will ignore animals' advice." And, oh yeah, he thinks they're laughing at us. "They're laughing at us!" he says for emphasis. You can tell it's what really sticks in his craw. The whole thing is so stupefyingly inane, just dumb. That's why you start making like an animal too, baying with laughter at the guy. With also, let us not forget, a very find band throwing down a regular pile driver pattern to drive the thing at throttle. Just like that it's over. On to the next trip.

95. Talking Heads, "Cities" (1979)

(listen)

I've said before that I'm a big fan of the Talking Heads album Fear of Music, as much for its humor as for its adventurous experimentation, but this piece of it is an enduring favorite for slightly different reasons. It's not without its jokes, of course—the way Byrne yelps and otherwise fools with the chin-stroking, thoughtfully meditated problem of making the comparisons ("good points, some bad points"), and the thing about the smells of home cooking in Memphis ("home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks") being "only the river." But at a time when I badly wanted to leave the place where I grew up, Minneapolis, it offered a kind of primer on how to decide what to do next. "Find a city, find myself a city to live in" became a way of living for a year or two before I finally settled on Seattle, a place I visited and instantly felt a connection. I still love the way the song so much makes oneself the agent of the decision, and the open approach it takes to solving it, considering as example in its four minutes or so London, Birmingham (presumably in England rather than Alabama, but who knows, given what follows), El Paso, and Memphis. In the end, evidently, Byrne chose New York. But you know what? You can live anywhere you want, anywhere that feels right. It's just a matter of picking up and doing it. As the song warns, you'll get a little freaked out now, and that's for sure—I didn't know anyone in Seattle, I didn't have a job, and I didn't have a place to live. But it all works out. This ridiculous little song provided me a lot of comfort on the way.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)

All fans of Eno and of Talking Heads under his sway were pretty sure even then that this was well ahead of its time. But such things are so hard to know for sure. In many ways it seemed too good to be true—this powerhouse concatenation of beats, noise, shards and fragments of world music, and found sound taken most often right off of the kind of lunatic evangelical Christian and/or political talk radio that seems to broadcast most wide and virulent late at night, heard under the cover of stars in cars moving fast on freeways in strange parts of the country. "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another," is how it starts, with a booming, clanking, wheeting groove that lumbers it into irresistible existence. Though I had my doubts at the time about Remain in Light (since dispelled), I had been and am still particularly enamored of Fear of Music, and this seemed to me an even further distillation of that. Brian Eno and David Byrne here demonstrate conclusively their affinities for a fascinating and very pure level of collaboration. As credited, this is not an Eno album, nor a Talking Heads or Byrne album, but something fresh and different, equidistant between their sensibilities. Both seem to me drawn about equally to a broad palette of world music, but I suspect it was Byrne in charge of getting the grooves to work right and Eno for continually exploding and pushing boundaries as wide as possible. According to Wikipedia, "Q" magazine asked Eno, 20 years after the release of this album, if he thought he and Byrne were responsible for the invention of sampling. Eno demurred, pointing to figures such as Holger Czukay, but the fact that the question could even be asked only gives some indication of the kind of impact it had on people. As for me, I thought the first side of the vinyl album was a mad swirling wonder, a perfectly sequenced and balanced set that occupied my days obsessively for a good long while. But I did think it lost its way some on the flip and gradually came to focus almost exclusively only on that first solid 20-minute blast. The 25th anniversary edition, which adds on several more tracks, including two made available under a Creative Commons license for use in anyone's remixes who wants them, adds a few interesting chapters to the story and is probably the version to have now.

"Burning Down the House" (1983)

36. Talking Heads, "Burning Down the House" (Sept. 3, 1983, #9)

Purely a personal favorite and hardly my favorite Talking Heads song at that, I'm getting behind this strictly because it made me almost as happy to see this band win a top 10 hit as it did the day in about 1978 when I accidentally tuned in "American Bandstand" and found them featured. From 1977 until 1986 this was probably my favorite band, for better or worse (I know I'm telling stories on myself here), and every time they took a step that worried me—joining forces with Brian Eno, expanding to a band more than twice the size of the original, releasing a double-live—they redeemed themselves and then some. This originates on their 1983 album Speaking in Tongues, at which time fans were worried because it had been a few years since the band had released anything with all-new material, the longest gap yet in its career, and the problems among the members were starting to leak out and affect things. Happily, the album turned out to be a good one—workmanlike, maybe stinking a little of professionalism, but neatly consolidating their many previous gains. If it didn't offer many surprises or challenges it did provide a good deal of pleasure. This song represents its strong points as well as any (save, perhaps, the lovely "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)"). They bring the funk, which has always marked their best work, even that arch first album. And Byrne's crazy mixed-up strategies for the words and vocals continues apace. Wikipedia informs me that he worked on these lyrics basically at the level of the syllables, piecing it together in fragments, and it shows, but not in a way that isn't charming.

"Genius of Love" (1982)

50. Tom Tom Club, "Genius of Love" (April 10, 1982, #31)

So the husband and wife rhythm section of Talking Heads, for whatever reasons, decides to split off on its own in 1981 for a side quickie project. Something to do with David Byrne's release schedule? It's true that the albums came slower in the '80s, and the various personality conflicts began to harden into what they appear to be today, a great chill. But whatever. They did it. It was fluffy as a pancake and ultimately, with the butter and syrup, just about as filling. But that seemed hard to believe at first. In fact, arguably, this band, this album, this song—take years to fully reveal. It does seem so aimless, doesn't it ... tuneless ... childish, all together or each track on its own, including this. Until the moment when it kicks in, and then you belong to it forever. This is the one that did something extra special right, got peeled off as a single (hey, why not?), and somehow found its way to the top 40. Lord God there is justice in this world. I guess I must be a fan because half the pleasure for me is just that they did it at all and the other half keeps uncoiling still. Longer versions better versions—there are many versions, you know that. It's so almost nothing at all, just tripping on its rhythms and sounds and bouncy beats, until like cotton candy forming on a cone the little grainy wisps repetitively begin to cling and wrap around our heads, fluffy and pretty and sweet, and we just want to hear it again. And what's the hook to all this, the secret ingredient around which it all binds? Chant with me now: "James Brown. James Brown. James Brown. James Brown." Next thing you know Afrika Bambaataa might take a notion too.

Fear of Music (1979)

"Animals" Another Eno production, and personally my favorite of all Talking Heads albums, it must be said this is also the place where David Byrne's hubris problem first really rears its dispretty head. The anxious, yelping neurotic remains front and center, but these songs are funny, practically every one, and in a wiseacre way that's no product of a high-strung personality. There's a sardonic edge: heaven is a place where nothing happens; animals, eating nuts and berries, are making a fool of us; the smell of home cooking in Memphis, Tennessee, is only the river (it's only the river). "Air," "Paper," "Electric Guitar": the titles alone are willfully simple, setting up the gags sprinkled liberally throughout. That, of course, is not to undercut or deny the walloping soundscapes here, the free-wheeling experimental strategies (the effect of the vocal track on "Drugs," I've heard, was achieved by Byrne taking to the streets and running for blocks and then recording while still out of breath), and, heh indeed, the brilliant counterpoint of the laughs and the anxiety baked right into the songwriting. Not to be missed.

more from eMusic

More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978)

"Found a Job" Enter Brian Eno, in a uniquely prolific phase of his own career, who would become a source of controversy among Talking Heads fans. For better or worse, he did wonders for David Byrne's self-esteem even as he "ruined the band" in the estimation of many. Me, I'm not so sure about that. As much as I've always liked the debut, I think this one's even better. I don't see that producer Eno imposed anything on them, but rather helped them find the confidence to keep moving toward the spry funk band they always had in them. As the title implies, song content remains mostly disaffected and quirky, but they take on Al Green (with mixed results, though it's probably their best-known song), loosen up, and even rock out here and there. In retrospect, it's a band on the rise, with a trajectory that might take them anywhere.

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Talking Heads: 77 (1977)

"New Feeling" As it happens, my initial sense of '70s punk-rock was largely based on "Anarchy in the U.K.," a few sightings of the Ramones, Ultravox circa Ha! Ha! Ha!, and this debut from what turned out to be -- what should have been recognized even with this as -- an art-rock outfit of highly sensitive intellectual filigree. Probably safer and more accurate to catalog them all as "new wave" -- "Anarchy," after all, for all its rage and outrage, remains perhaps the most hummable pop tune of all from the Sex Pistols. But whatever. The basic shtick here is radically stripped down 2 guitars bass drums w/ occasional keyboard rock 'n' roll in support of quick and quirky verse-chorus-verse mostly non-love pop vignettes delivered by a painfully self-conscious neurotic with guaranteed damp palms. Yeah, you could sing to it start to finish. Yeah, it's all perfectly unthreatening aw-shucks innocence, even when they implore the psycho killer Why? "Hip to be square" years before that went mainstream. And perfectly charming, every second of the way through.