(article from The Atlantic)The Strange, Tense Power of Talking Heads' 'Fear of Music' When I was a high school freshman, in 1991, my struggling-artist uncle gave me the first four Talking Heads albums on vinyl, mumbling "You might like 'em."
If only he knew. Night after night I commandeered my parents' turntable to immerse myself in the band's first two albums, Talking Heads: 77 and More Songs About Buildings and Food. The attitude the band conveyed on these works—wry, intellectual, urban—provided a sharp contrast to the bland suburban environment it seemed some mistake of fate had landed me. Talking Heads' fourth album, Remain in Light, perplexed me, with its weird squalls of keyboards married to conga drums and cryptic lyrics delivered in what couldn't often be called singing—chanting, yes, but also, in some songs, moaning, yelling, preaching, and most troublingly, speaking in a monotone whose flatness trembled with inflection. It would take me till college to thread my way through that album's fantastically deep soundscape.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/the-strange-tense-power-of-talking-heads-fear-of-music/256071/...Because no matter what you think of Talking Heads' weaker, later albums as opposed to its early ones, or the solo work of any of its members, these people made music that captured a spirit both of its time and universal enough to speak, some 15 years later, to a boy like me, living about as displaced from New York in the late '70s as one could imagine. Lethem's book puts that work in context, to some extent. But more importantly, he revels in Fear of Music's strain, the way it encompasses punk and disco, aggression and passivity, paranoia and resolve, gleefully dancing its way off the brink.
I saw the Talking Heads in their prime ~1983 and it was a fantastic show.
One of he only good things about being "older" = We had much better music....
Gaga, Bieber M&M, Sluty Cyrus....barf Do you know about the Talking Heads, especially the early years?