My Building Has Every Convenience...

One of the benefits of having an hour long bike commute to and from work is that I have time to listen to at least two albums a day. Two weeks ago, I started out Monday morning listening to Talking Heads’ first album, Talking Heads: 77, the remastered version of which I had just added to my iPod, along with the rest of the band’s studio albums. This turned into a week-long listen to the band’s entire back catalog, including not only the studio albums, but also their live sets Stop Making Sense and The Name of this Band is Talking Heads.

An important, and somewhat embarrassing note before we get into a discussion of my thoughts: I have never really listened to Talking Heads’ studio albums before two weeks ago. I had heard the original CD versions of some of the early album, and the incredibly trebly mix as compared to the remastered live albums turned me off of exploring any further.

The mix on the newer versions is a revelation to someone who only heard the original CDs. The increased clarity and, especially, the significantly strengthened low end is essential for this band. Tina Weymouth’s bass is the driving instrument for the Heads’ sound, and without her busy melodic lines, the band can become static and, frankly, quite boring. “Heaven” exemplifies the power Weymouth wields, transforming a pretty, but uneventful song into an absolute masterpiece by simply never falling into a real groove; her constant runs emphasizing the unease in David Byrne’s lyrics. Put simply, if you have not heard Talking Heads outside of the original CDs of the studio albums, you have not heard Talking Heads, which is a situation you might want to think about taking care of.

That being said, I would still direct any newly interested parties to the two live albums first, as this band really excels in that setting. While The Name of this Band... is the superior album, I would recommend starting with Stop Making Sense, simply because it has more of the “hits”, and works a bit better as a primer (it also makes one of the studio albums redundant, as I mention below).

As every fan of the band will note, though, no amount of remastering can alter the fact that the band’s output follows a too common trajectory, with ’77, More Songs about Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and much of Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues being absolutely vital, with the rest pretty forgettable. The reason for this downward trajectory is notable in that it exemplifies one of the more notable qualities of their early triumphs. Talking Heads: ’77 came out in its titular year, the height of Punk Rock, and the band cut its teeth in the same scene that helped to birth that movement. However, I have always found it difficult to mentally define Talking Heads as a punk band. It’s not the sound of the music, as I have a fairly broad view of what punk rock can be musically; it was something else, something intrinsic. During the course of listening to everything, I finally put my finger on it.

If one gets to the bottom of everything, every musical genre/movement has at its core a specific emotional basis. Rock & Roll, at its origin, was about youthful exuberance, rap is empowerment, metal is masculinity, country is longing, etc. (yes, I know there are TONS of exceptions to all of these, but I think the core is there, but I would love to hear alternatives). Punk rock, at its emotional core, is the music of anger, and anger’s cousin emotions of frustration and indignation. Post-punk, as a genre, on the other hand, has at its emotional core anxiety, fear, and nervousness. Where Punk is an attack against the status quo, whether that be the government or the fact one’s girlfriend dumped him, post-punk sees that status quo and accepts it as inevitability – you can’t fight the status quo, but you can certainly be scared of it. For example, The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” deals with a similar factual situation as Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. The difference is how the narrators deal with the same set of facts. Pete Shelley seethes at the difficulty of situation, but offers the glimmer of hope in “we won’t be together much longer, unless we realize that we are the same,” holding forth a possible way to save things. Ian Curtis doesn’t permit this speck of hope, deeming the failure of the relationship not just imminent, but inexorable – “Love WILL tear us apart, again.” Similarly, one can compare The Clash’s “Career Opportunities” to Talking Heads’ “Don’t Worry about the Government” – while The Clash fight the impulse to settle into a menial job, David Byrne accepts it as a inevitability, he is going to have to settle into his modern building with every modern convenience to allow him to give up his life to work, except for the few times he is able to slip away because his “friends are important”. Byrne’s “Psycho Killer” is far from the swaggering, evil sociopath of horror films, but a troubled, jittery, compulsive mess, who just genuinely cannot control himself.

Ultimately, while Talking Heads pre-dates post-punk, they have an emotional core much closer to that later movement than they do that of what has become accepted as punk. There are a few other early punk-era bands that have similarly out-of-sync emotional cores that become much easier to categorize if they are considered as precursors to post-punk, such as Television and Pere Ubu. Talking Heads are the best example, though, as they basically epitomize the nervous end of post-punk’s anxious core. Everything is on edge and over-caffeniated, from the previously-mentioned bass lines to the skittery guitar lines to Byrne’s hiccuped vocals. Even when they add more percussion, it’s largely amped up and unsettling. Byrne’s lyrics follow suit, finding worry and anxiety in every aspect of modern life – buildings, animal, art, love, and even Heaven itself are all sources of concern. Byrne offers no answers, no hope for escape from the unease, just a constant reminder that things aren’t nearly as simple or as harmless as they seem on the surface. “Once in a Lifetime” decries the feeling of realizing that one has no idea how one’s life turned out the way it has with the simple mantra, “same as it ever was” – modern life is by its very nature unsettled, and that isn’t going to change.

Tellingly, the only real call to action Byrne issues is during “Girlfriend is Better”, when he exhorts that everything, “stop making sense,” as the only way to avert the sheer crushing inanity is to stop acting following logic and do something unpredictable. It is notable that this call to action, as minor as it is, comes on Speaking in Tongues, the last really good Talking Heads album, as it shows how the trajectory of the quality of their music traces the trajectory of their driving philosophy. Simply put, once the Heads stopped being nervous, they stopped being as musically interesting. Some bands are able to shift from their initial emotional core to embrace another, and maintain their vitality. Most aren’t, and Talking Heads falls apart like so many others when they start to grow emotionally and feel less trapped by the causes of their initial nervousness.

Thus, the first two albums and most of the third represent their artistic high points. Everyone needs to own these records. Remain in Light alters their sound by bringing in their noted afro-beat percussion, which, in and of itself, doesn’t hurt, but the songwriting drops off in the second half, with the notable exception of “The Overload”, where Weymouth’s bass finally drops to the bottom, the beats become darker and murkier, and Byrne’s nervousness finally succumbs to genuine fear. It’s a huge break from anything they had done before, and they would only really revisit it (mostly successfully) on the second half of their last album. However, Remain in Light is the last Talking Heads album I can fully endorse as a purchase.

Speaking in Tongues has the songs to be a great album, but it is also the album where recording in the 80’s finally catches up with them. Even remastered, the album is so tinny and bottom-light that it feels weightless and boring. There are any number of great albums that have suffered due to poor production, from ...And Justice for All to Give ‘Em Enough Rope to Raw Power (which may actually have accomplished the rare feat of being misproduced twice, sorry Iggy, but pushing EVERYTHING to 11 does not equal creating a more dynamic mix, it just means everything is one louder). Thankfully, the songs trapped in Speaking in Tongues' poor mix have an edge over those on these other albums, as Stop Making Sense has infinitely superior versions of all of the good songs on this album. Basically, buy that, avoid the studio album, as, except maybe for the studio version of “Burning Down the House”, it never comes close to its live counterpart.

Little Creatures and True Stories are completely forgettable records, with the notable exception of the former’s “Road to Nowhere”. Little Creatures is really where you can see Byrne trying to write more optimistic songs, and the nervousness of the band waning rapidly. Unfortunately, at this point, Byrne isn’t very good with this writing style, and they ultimately come of as flat and uninteresting at best, and pedantic and insulting at worst. The one bright spot is Byrne’s vocals as he begins to push toward the more soulful vocal style he would use in his solo work.

Naked isn’t quite a return to form, though it is better than the previous two albums, especially the last half, which revists the darkness of “The Overload”, reinserting some of that existential unease that was missing since Remain in Light. The only problem that I have with this album is the sequencing, in that “(Nothing But) Flowers” should have been the last song, as it perfectly sums up the situation in which Talking Heads, as a band, is no longer needed. The song, one of the band’s best, tells of an urban setting which, for reasons unexplained, is reverting back to nature – kind of like “Big Yellow Taxi” in reverse. Talking Heads, in addition to being the epitome of nervousness, is also the epitome of an urban band. Therefore, in the world of this song, a band that sings about finding a city to live in and taking the highway that runs next to the buildings, that rants about not trusting animals, that decries rural America with the pithy “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me too” (as ironic as these things are, of course) is no longer of value. Ultimately, for as nervous as Byrne was about modern city life, it at least was something he could express. Ultimately, Talking Heads wrote the song that defines their own obsolescence, the feeling of finding themselves in world they can no longer operate in and no longer grasp the parameters. It’s a perfect send-off for the band, and it is too bad it is widely seen merely as “that song that was in Clerks II.” (though it worked fairly well there). He ends “Flowers” with the perfect send-off, not just for the song, but for the band itself as an idea whose time had come, “I just can’t get used to this lifestyle.”