I’ve thought a lot about the Talking Heads’ influence on music. Their own stylings are hard to boil down to a single genre. At times they’re a little country. Other times they bring the funk. A lot of the time they’re straight rock n’ roll. Hell, their first show was opening for The Ramones. To pigeon hole them into a single musical thought isn’t doing them justice.
On the surface they helped bridge the gap between the 70s and the 80s - two extremely distinct eras of music. Unlike most pop acts, who were looking to continue riding the disco wave, the Heads reached back into the past. They mixed the dance beats of the late 70s with afro/world music in Remain in the Light - still one of the best albums I’ve heard. Following the release of the album, they took the show on the road and started experimenting.
The tour that followed helped blaze the path of digital integration that would define pop-culture in the early 80s. You can still see it if you look to film - Back to the Future, Star Wars, Brazil. There was a general feeling that technology had reached a point that would benefit every day life, in a good way. This very idea was at the heart of Stop Making Sense.
So, as you dig a bit deeper into what happened during the Eighties you can start to see the Talking Heads’ role in it. Luckily, David Byrne was a multimedia freak and happened to turn their off-the-wall live show into a video. The start of the video/show truely speaks for itself. This is the start of the 80’s. David Byrne + boombox. “Psycho Killer”.
- MJ
