Talking Heads

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Daryl Umberger

From their earliest days, Talking Heads were a band that defied categorization. Playing in New York during the height of the mid-1970s punk scene, Talking Heads were a preppy-looking trio that became a punk band by association. Despite being musically different, Talking Heads' minimalist sound, their musical combination of energy and intelligence, and their self-conscious and unpretentious demeanor connected them to punk. Some critics tried using the term "Art Rock" to describe the band's intellectual approach to their music, but the term fell short: Talking Heads were cerebral, but they were also eminently danceable, too. Like the characters in their songs, Talking Heads' music dramatized the human predicament of the duel between head and heart.

David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), and Chris Frantz (drums) began as a trio in 1975, after dropping out of the Rhode Island School of Design and relocating to New York. Their first single, "Love Goes to a Building on Fire," was released in early 1977 and displayed the band's spare technique. That same year, the band signed to Sire Records, an independent label whose roster included the Ramones, and released Talking Heads '77. The album added keyboardist Jerry Harrison, a former graduate student at Harvard. Their debut appeared to often ecstatic reviews. The lyrics to "Don't Worry About the Government" celebrated civil servants and life's more mundane qualities: "My building has every convenience/It's going to make life easy for me." The song's simplicity was almost shocking in its honesty. Hardly a tentative songwriter, Byrne was also capable of writing tense music in "No Compassion" and "Psycho Killer." The latter song, although not a hit single, brought the group widespread attention for the song's psychodrama: "I can't sleep 'cos my bed's on fire/Don't touch me I'm a real live wire." The notoriety of "Psycho Killer" was fueled even further by Byrne's physical resemblance to actor Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

The group's 1978 release, More Songs About Buildings and Food, began a long collaboration with producer Brian Eno, who essentially became a fifth member of the group. The album produced a Top-40 hit, a cover of soul singer Al Green's "Take Me to the River." The modest hit provided a glimpse into the band's future commercial successes, as well as their developing forays into dance, funk, and international rhythms. "Take Me to the River" also vindicated the band's commercial philosophy: "It wouldn't please us to make music that's impossible to listen to," said Byrne in Rolling Stone, "but we don't want to compromise for the sake of popularity. It's possible to make exciting, respectable stuff that can succeed in the marketplace."

The opening track on 1979's Fear of Music, "I Zimbra," had polyrhythmic arrangements that announced the group's new musical direction. Not everyone was paying attention. "Life During Wartime," one of the group's best-known songs, contained the line, "This ain't no disco," and some mistakenly thought that Talking Heads were the new standard-bearers for the anti-disco movement. The irony around "Life During Wartime" was all too real. Around the time that Talking Heads began incorporating international rhythms, rock critic Ken Tucker wrote that "seldom in pop music history has there been a larger gap between what black and white audiences are listening to than there is right now." Remain in Light, which was released in 1980, was the realization of the polyrhythmic experiment in "I Zimbra." Augmented by a host of outside musicians, Remain in Light had the feeling of a free-flowing jam session at first, but it was tightly structured and disciplined. The album displayed funk and African influences when many whites took the phrase "Black music" to describe several distinct musical forms, like disco, funk, soul, and rhythm and blues.

The next year found the band pursuing solo projects that continued the group's musical blends. Weymouth and Frantz's side project, The Tom Tom Club, contained a merger of new wave with dance music, and also rap. The self-titled album included "Genius of Love," a song whose rhythm was used by several R & B and rap artists of the 1990s. Byrne completed a score for The Catherine Wheel, a dance performance by Twyla Tharp that proceeded with Remain in Light's sound. In 1985, Byrne's next project was for an experimental theater piece called Music for the Knee Plays, which employed traditional New Orleans brass band struts and funeral marches. Byrne's skill in working with other musical forms was hitting its stride.

The band's first album in three years was 1983's Speaking in Tongues. Eno was no longer sharing production chores, and the band shed many of its guest musicians. Talking Heads had a hit with "Burning Down the House" and reached the peak of their popularity with the 1984 film, Stop Making Sense. Directed by Jonathan Demme, the film documented the Talking Heads' 1983 tour, and won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Documentary. The group recorded three more albums until 1988, before they unofficially broke up in 1988. In 1996, at the peak of alternative music's popularity, the group decided to reform without Byrne, as the Heads, and recorded No Talking Just Head. Byrne sued his former bandmates and asked for an injunction against the album's release. Then, shortly before the album's release date, a settlement was reached and the album was released to generally abysmal reviews.

Talking Heads expanded the musical borders of American popular music. By the late 1980s, international musical styles were being adopted by mainstream artists, like Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon. What the mainstream considered to be acceptable was broadening. In another sense, Talking Heads extended personal musical borders as much as they were intent on stretching national ones. Ken Tucker, in his review of Remain in Light, summed up the climate in which the group was attempting to bridge musical gaps: "By 1978, punk and disco had divided the pop audience. What did Talking Heads do? They recorded Al Green's 'Take Me to the River.' The gesture was a heroic one."