Icon: Talking Heads
Arguably America’s greatest new wave band, Talking Heads turned fine-art working methods and ideals – subversiveness, detachment, ambiguity, perpetual self-transformation – into magnificent pop songs about the relationship between mind, body and mystery. David Byrne was the least likely of great frontmen, a buttoned-down nerd with a voice like a frightened goose, but it turned out to be the perfect vehicle to upend the traditions of rock singing. Bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz provided the hip-swing to go along with Byrne’s hyperactive brain (and scored a few dance hits with their side project Tom Tom Club); multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison helped give the band a different sonic palette with every record. Each of the albums they released between 1977 and 1988 challenged assumptions – even their own – the way good art is supposed to.
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When Talking Heads' fourth album appeared in 1980, nobody had ever made an album like it and nothing much like it has been heard since: a startling, chattering amalgamation of Afrobeat, downtown NYC avant-garde sounds, the hard funk that had evolved alongside disco, snarling rock 'n' roll, and the cadences of frothing-at-the-mouth radio preachers. Expanding their lineup to include lacerating guitarist Adrian Belew, Labelle singer Nona Hendryx and producer/conceptualist Brian Eno, the band built these songs from the groove up, with liberating results. "Born Under Punches" is magnificent information overload, seemingly six different songs accidentally falling into synch; "Once In a Lifetime" is half prophecy, half midlife crisis, and all dancefloor-packer.
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A full-bodied, headlong plunge into funk and mental dissociation, Talking Heads' second collaboration with Brian Eno was an artistic breakthrough the album on which they stopped trying to rebel against the archetypes of rock and started seeing how far they could take their own eccentricities (David Byrne's adenoidal gulp and cracked navt) and gifts (especially Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz's rubbery thump). A hot-on-the-one setting of a Dada poem by Hugo Ball leads it off, and makes it clear that they're trying to come up with a fresh approach to lyrics. For the rest of the album, Byrne writes and sings from the perspective of some kind of alien groping toward understanding human customscities, paper, electric guitars. The album's centerpiece is "Life During Wartime," an apocalyptic fantasy about the band's entire subculture becoming meaningless, but its secret gem is "Heaven," whose affected oddness loops all the way around until it becomes genuinely poignant.
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Having established themselves as cosmopolitan, visionary funkateers, Talking Heads took a year off and reinvented themselves as a straightforward rock quartet whose crisp, foursquare little songs featured light-hearted domestic observations and touches of country music. "I've seen sex and I think it's all right," David Byrne admits on the title track, and there are other flashes of whimsy all over this 1985 album (the "baby" in "Stay Up Late" is an actual baby, and the Tex-Mex march "Road to Nowhere" may be the happiest declaration of nihilism ever written). But what they carried over from their funk years was a playfulness about rhythm and arrangementsthe escapist/feminist fantasy "And She Was" finally unleashes its best riff in its last fifteen seconds, and "Perfect World" makes the cracks and strains in Byrne's voice sound like decorations.
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For a bunch of eggheads, Talking Heads were a hellraising live act. This soundtrack to Jonathan Demme's concert documentary is a record of their final tour, from 1983, for which they were augmented with five extra musicians, including Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and became a gigantic wall of groove. Byrne is as much an actor as a singer here ("Swamp" is a flat-out character-acting piece), and the rest of the band works overtime too: when he pops offstage for a costume change, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz take over to play their Tom Tom Club hit "Genius of Love." Considered as an album, it's celebratory in a way they rarely were in the studio"Slippery People," in particular, turns into a gospel blowout.
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Talking Heads were art-school kids before they were anything else the original trio met at the Rhode Island School of Design and their debut album feels like a grand, arty gesture: rock 'n' roll with the affected swagger stripped away, punk in button-down shirts and preppy sweaters. Even when David Byrne impersonates a "Psycho Killer," he makes him sound nervous and confused. Byrne's lyrics draw their diction from un-rock sources: psychotherapy, the office, real-estate brochures. What elevates the whole thing above gesturedom is the band's clean, clear instrumental attack (new guitarist Jerry Harrison had previously been in the Modern Lovers, a major source of inspiration for this album), and Byrne's sly way with a bubblegum hook "Pulled Up" is both as arch and as catchy as the first wave of new wave got.
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"Watch out!" David Byrne declared. "You might get what you're after." Somehow, Talking Heads had become a party band, largely since they'd figured out that a good dance beat would let them get away with just about anything else: the blorping synths and fugue-state terror of "Girlfriend Is Better," the psychotic rant "Swamp" and Byrne's spluttering scat-singing in "Slippery People" all come off as part of the fun. This 1983 album's lead track, a good-natured stomp called "Burning Down the House," became their biggest hit, but the album bounces cheerfully all the way to its closing masterstroke, "This Must Be the Place (Nave Melody)," which gropes blindly around the idea of a love song for a few minutes, only to discover that it's become a beautiful one.
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On their second album, Talking Heads began their fruitful three-year alliance with producer/auxiliary member Brian Eno, whose experimental techniques weren't yet fully integrated into the band. It's a transitional recordDavid Byrne's still wrestling with the conventions of pop songs, and still sarcastic enough to write lines like "ooh girl, you can initiate an impulse of love." But the album's also full of juicy hints at what the band was about to become, like the funk riffing of "Found a Job." Best of all, there's the Heads' first Top 30 single: "Take Me to the River," a sinuous cover of Al Green's soulful classic on which Byrne's tremulous, bobbing-Adam's-apple performance signifies not sanctified grace but an outsider's longing for it.
