A Quick Look at Talking Heads and their searing ’80s MTV hits
Critical darlings of late seventies and early eighties new wave, the Talking Heads were one of those bands we respected but never loved. That’s too bad because their good stuff is really good and a lot of us just don’t know it yet.
The songs we did like were the MTV staples especially the fantastically off-center “Once in a Lifetime” (from Remain in Light, 1980,) which stuns as a rhythm track as well as a swooning representation of paranoia, self-doubt, and futility. There have been tons of interpretations over the years, but I think the existentialist line of thought makes the most sense: We’re doing all these things, and one day you wake up and say: “How did I get here?” It kind of shakes you to the core. We seem like we’re on autopilot sometimes, and then it all catches up to you in one of those weird separations that happens in your brain.
Do you ever look at your spouse and suddenly have a break, like you fully realize that a person is someone else? You are sharing space with a living, breathing being who is not inside of your consciousness, someone with their own thoughts and fears. It humbles you instantly. It tears down whatever social fabric we’ve constructed, like someone punched a hole in your mind. The feeling makes me panic because just for a split-second, you have no idea what the hell any of this is or how it got here.
The song inspires powerful stuff, obviously – trance/dance pop that doesn’t stop, gurgling with “world rhythms” that read profound and primal. The song’s effect is magnified by a classic video, where bespectacled Byrne has a sweaty seizure and performs that gesture of his hand cutting into his arm – a gesture that has entered the cultural lexicon. Wanna get a laugh at a party? Just do the Byrne thing.
Talking Heads had some great eighties singles aided by Byrne’s singular, awkward, thin-guy genius countenance, best on display in the clip for another amazing song, “Burning Down the House” (from Speaking in Tongues, 1983). The video kept me from sleeping as a kid. During the intense slash and burn instrumental break, Byrne’s giant head in the vast blackness of space (just like the subliminally fast shots of demon faces in The Exorcist) turns slightly and blinks, and I’d run screaming from the room. Such studied accidents smash the inside of my eyes every day.
Byrne had a cinematic quality, and all these new-wave bands understood the power of new-media imagery. His giant head (after some funny maneuvering) ends up perfectly still and situated to swallow the broken center-lane lines at the end of the video, an image that will live on forever. I think about famous photographs, video images from lands far away, fires, tornadoes, crumbling buildings, weeping children – and somewhere in there, Byrne’s head just floating down some midnight road as the song fades in the background. Good lord, what did the eighties do to our brains? Even if you couldn’t understand the (fantastic, searing, imaginative) lyrics, you knew you were witnessing something serious and darkly funny. It’s one of the great clips of the eighties, one of the great examples of a song’s intention and mood perfectly personified in visuals.
My favorite Talking Heads song is “Wild Wild Life,” (from True Stories – 1986), a song that’s impossible not to sing along with — bright, melodic, bouncy, with a huge sound that makes you feel happy. The video is yet another absolute home run from this cinematic band (True Stories was made into an intolerable film, however) and provides a few minutes of absolute joy when the great John Goodman shows up to do a hysterical “basketball referee calls traveling” gesture that he can barely contain.
A cursory look into the lyrics for such an uplifting song shows that it’s not uplifting at all, as is usually the case with Byrne, and he describes with studied distance the dangers of drug use and other issues of modern life. The song’s triumphant, dramatic final chorus builds an unbearable tension before Byrne lets loose with his final: “Ain’t that the way you like, it, whoa-oh?” It’s accusatory, angry, beautiful, stunning, and sad all at the same time. I heard the song in a yogurt shop the other day as I decided which topping to add to my cookies and cream/marshmallow swirl. That’s where we’re at, and it’s the kind of moment that proves the songs that made us form a trap we’ll never escape from.