Doesn’t this harken you back to the good old days back when extremely weird people could be extremely successful? Because Talking Heads are pretty weird when you think about them. They were a group of nerdy white people who decided they’d just start playing African tribal music and make it into popular rock’n'roll. Which is exactly what they did, and it worked as if it had always been meant to be. I’ve mentioned before how there seems to be an odd cultural taboo on mixing cerebral white people stuff and instinctive black people stuff. Be it music, art, sports, you name it, there’s always that dichotomy, and it’s really quite racist and offensive when you think about it. You can read my opinion about it right here. Talking Heads are pretty much the ultimate example of being able to balance high concept intellectual ideas and butt-shaking grooves all at the same time. All that, but they’re also instantly accessible. There’s almost no better choice of party music. You can get drunk and dance to it, or you can drink tea and think about it. The real miracle is that people went out and bought it.
A foreshortened missive today. My internet has chosen this day to go crash, and I’m at Starbucks. Super frustrating, but it’ll all be straightened out in a couple of days. Meanwhile, Talking Heads!
Funky nerd-rock rules. As evidenced, Talking Heads were an amazingly good live band. That might surprise you if you associate being cerebral with not being funky, but we’ve covered all that before and decided it was racist. So there’s no arguing Talking Heads were supremely funky, and if only they all got on a little better, we’d still be having the chance to see them. But no, apparently the other three got jealous David Byrne was spending too much time with Brian Eno. And I think there was something about David Byrne not having the best social skills. In short, Talking Heads are among the least likely bands to ever reconvene, so don’t be holding your breath. Byrne meanwhile keeps himself extremely busy and tours all the time, currently showcasing a collaboration with St. Vincent. I thought than particular endeavor was less impressive than the one with Fatboy Slim or all the ones with Brian Eno, but still pretty good, and worth seeing, if I had the dinero. With all these collaborations and activism and art projects, you begin to think maybe Byrne’s social skills aren’t so bad after all. St. Vincent’s not one of my favorites, but there’s always the next project, and who knows who will appear on it.
It’s hard to tell sometimes if David Byrne is being sincere or facetious. Deadpan wit can be hard to judge. There’s some contrasting opinions on whether heaven’s being a place where nothing ever happens is supposed to be a good thing or not. Is it Byrne’s honest idea of what heaven would be or a sarcastic deploration of the very idea of heaven? Is he subtly making fun of people who are perfectly contented with their boring repetitive little lives? Or are those people really on the right track? I don’t know, you’ll have to ask David Byrne those questions, next time you see him. As for my opinion, I always took it at face value. The ironic interpretation didn’t even occur to me until I read about it fairly recently. Maybe it’s because I myself feel satisfying within the confines of a small boring life, but I think that heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. I think maybe it means that nothing bad ever happens and happy memories are relived ad infinitum. That sounds good to me. I always heard a beautiful message about appreciating the things that have made you happy. After all, if you’re not capable of finding heaven at your neighborhood bar, you’ll probably never be happy no matter how far you go in life.
Talking Heads were one of the funkiest bands ever to walk the planet, and as such they contradicted certain paleolithic notions about musicality, intellect and race. Gender also. Tina Weymouth was one of the first to prove that a woman could pick up and play an instrument without having her little arms fall off, which is now considered an incontestable truth. The other great curveball Talking Heads threw was showing that nerdy white people could be funky. (I apologize for repeatedly referring to David Byrne as a ‘nerdy white guy’ but that is very much his persona.) The baseless and rather racist conventional wisdom is that a)black people are naturally funky, presumably because they keep their brains in the vicinity of their pelvis; therefore they are not naturally intellectual because those two things are mutually exclusive; and b)white people are naturally intellectual and have great big heads but can’t dance, because intellect and funkiness cannot coexist; c) the more intellectual (i.e. nerdy) a white person is, the less they can dance, or make funky music, or even be allowed to appreciate funky music from a safe distance. Now obviously, the part about black people not being intellectually inclined is racist thinking and there may be a certain President who would beg to differ. But the idea that white people can’t dance is also racist, and stubbornly persistent, despite the continued existence of Mick Jagger. Note here, I’m not subscribing to the dumb and self-serving idea that white people are somehow being unfairly maligned – we’re still the dominant majority and as such should shut the fuck up about our stupid imaginary problems. ‘White people can’t dance’ is racist not because it maligns white people, but because it presupposes that the opposite is true – the aforementioned notion that ‘blacks = funky and dumb, whites = not-funky and brainy,’ which is still a deeply held and insidiously oppressive belief that our culture clings to. It may seem that a popular rock band can’t do much towards influencing an entire culture’s racial notions, but the seemingly innocuous field of entertainment can make a huge difference, just because people are absorbing their entertainment with open minds. It’s clear when you see girls today playing in bands like never before, partly because of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ fight for equal rights and suffrage on the political stage, and partly because they grew up seeing Tina Weymouth rock out on MTV. Nobody is brainier that David Byrne, just look at his great big brainy white head. At the same time, he’s one of the funkiest guys around, and Talking Heads not only made some of the funkiest music ever, they helped bring Afro-rhythms to a wider audience in the 70′s and 80′s. Hopefully, a childhood spent watching Stop Making Sense led today’s youth to get up and be funky together regardless of race, perceived intellect or levels of nerdiness. Way to represent.
An early Talking Heads track I too often find myself forgetting about. Overshadowed by the fame and power of the trio that followed, the first two albums get forgotten about a lot. For all the time I spend listening to them, I easily forget also, that Talking Heads didn’t have a very long career together and only made eight albums. They went very quickly from being just quirky and good to brilliantly good and still quirky, and they quit while they were ahead, avoiding the inevitable decline of any long-playing band. I have to pay more attention to the first two. Though the Heads hadn’t yet mastered combining their ideas and wit with memorably catchy tunes, they already had a nervy energy all their own. The Good Thing is a step towards the future, being catchy as a cold and dense with cryptic words.
She’s better, you know, after that coma she was in, she’s all better now. Sadly, there’s no video on YouTube of this song from Stop Making Sense, for legal reasons. What happened to freedom of posting copyrighted things on the internet without permission? In this case it’s no great loss, because this is a movie you already own, right? If you don’t you’re a nincompoop. No, I’m kidding, I don’t own it either. That’s just because I’m so over owning things on disc. I still love my vinyl, and I believe the vinyl record is a medium that has proved its worth in longevity and it won’t ever completely go away. The CD and DVD, on the other hand are transient mediums already halfway to being fully replaced by digital files like the MP3. They’re small but not small enough to be worth how expensive they are, they wear out, they get scratched, they melt. My Labyrinth DVD broke in half as I was trying to extract from the drive. On the other hand, I’m not ready to graduate to keeping my files in the cloud, either. I don’t trust the cloud. If some server goes down somewhere all your stuff is lost. I like to have my stuff located somewhere I can see, although I realize that’s just an illusion of security. Anything can get lost or destroyed at any time, and there’s a good chance it will. If the servers crash, if the internet is down, if the electric grid is out, if war breaks loose… If those things happen you’ll be wishing you still had that hand-cranked Victrola.
A residual sentiment from the bad old days when it was thought degenerate to listen to electric guitar music? Makes you wonder what people did with electric guitars before rock ‘n roll was invented. There’s also a reference in there about a guitar brought in to court – is the guitar up on trial, or music in general? But really, the lyrics make about zero sense, so make of it what you will.
Yeah, what they said. The title, consoling though it may be, has nothing to do with the content of the song, far as I can interpret. It is all a bit vague, what he’s talking about. I’ve always thought it was a song about mental illness (and buildings.) I think it’s about a dysfunctional person’s pride at achieving some normalcy in life. For some people, just living in a building (with every convenience!) is a big accomplishment. Coming from self ascribed borderline Aspie David Byrne, it makes sense. It could also, depending on your point of view, be any number of things – a satire of the American dream, perhaps. Or a heartfelt tribute to the honorable pursuit of civil servitude. Or just another song about buildings.
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