Open Web Player
![The Best Of Talking Heads [CD]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81emtQ+rc7L._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
![Whitsitt Chapel [Explicit]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41FR--5zGDL.__AC_SR166,182___.jpg)
Though the deep origins of human music will probably remain forever milkily obscure, no one probably intended it to make civilization seem strange, detached and sometimes alien. Pop music often celebrates or affirms a culture's predominant values and ideals. Rock n' roll embraced its own distracted, alternate ethos, which often resulted more in escapism and hero worship than in any meaningful scrutiny of reality. By stark contrast, The Talking Heads somehow made music that feels and plays like a distorted critical mirror onto their own society. Multi-layered, often highly hip-swinging rhythms, combined with sounds and effects approaching psychedelia provide enough ear candy to deflect the nearly deviant themes of the often twisted lyrics. As such, Talking Heads managed to provide a critical lens onto modern life and popular culture while simultaneously embedding themselves within it. Few have managed to inject so much intellectualism and artistic sensibility into pop music while keeping sales at reasonable levels of self-preservation.
The band's second album, "More Songs About Buildings and Food," sounds so refreshing, unique and singular that it seems like another debut. Their first album, "77," sounds musically light years away from the follow-up's thick arrangements and electronically laden atmosphere. Many bands require multiple releases to fully gestate, but Talking Heads miraculously attained it after a single album. Like an infant blue whale, they grew up fast and never sounded the same again. The 1977 version of "Stay Hungry," a bonus track included with the album's 2006 re-release, when juxtaposed with the version included on "Buildings and Food," demonstrates this astonishing transition.
Though the music exploded with a new frenetic inventiveness, the lyrics continued their skewed, confused look at human life in an increasingly technological civilization. One obvious standout track in this regard, "The Big Country," fully rejects this growing mass culture with an anthropological literal bird's eye view. From the window of an airplane, the song's narrator looks down on the fields, towns and people, who scurry ant and flea-like between their established institutions and expectations. Though the narrator admits that such a life has some advantages, the song's chorus chimes the harsh conclusion: "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." Paradoxically, one does need to get paid, sometimes heavily, to afford the lifestyle in question. Regardless, the song masterfully lays the average American life starkly bare. Though it doesn't present solutions - a song can only do so much - it does present the often automatic suburban lifestyle as a question rather than an inevitable fate.
Other songs also question deep societal norms. The jolting "I'm Not In Love" outright claims that we don't need love and that "I believe someday we'll live in a world without love." Equal to the seemingly deterministic suburban lifestyle, the emotion and value most treasured by that same lifestyle comes under scrutiny as potentially unnecessary. Were such an idea presented in a less musically seductive manner, the devotees of passion may cry heresy. Though one could easily see the song as a simple denial following a failed relationship, the lyrics' scope suggest a wider range of scrutiny.
"With Our Love" remains painfully relevant today. As many know, the combination of work and love doesn't mix well chemically or socially. The song's repeated cries of "I have to get to work now... set an example for us!" while elastic guitar riffs oscillate in unison heightens these familiar tensions to fever pitch. Modern angst pours from this song and many others on the album. "Warning Sign" needs little explanation following the opening lyric, "warning sign, warning sign I hear it but I pay no mind." "The Girls Want to be with the Girls" probably includes one of pop music's few lyrical instances of "abstract analysis." Is the song a celebration of supposed "female values" or an observation on gender tension? The sometimes vague words, like most good lyrics, leave room for multiple interpretations. "Artists Only," with its wonderfully creepy instrumental refrain, probably satirizes the worst sort of art school student. Since the band formed while in art school, they probably had plenty of experience with people taking themselves too seriously ("pretty soon now, I will be bitter"). And of course the album begins with a frenetic horse gallop into an ecstasy of shaping another person to one's own designs and desires. "Thank You For Sending Me an Angel" seems to explore the psychological dimension of relationships that involves the desire of one person to "improve upon" the other, or at least the trap of seeing one's partner exclusively in light of one's own expectations and needs. The song launches the album off appropriately and the energy never ceases until the first nanosecond of silence following the closing song.
"More Songs About Buildings And Food" stands amongst the Talking Heads' best work and amongst some of the best rock/pop produced in the late 1970s. The influence of producer Brian Eno stands out saliently and he helped propel the band forwards into increasingly innovative territory. The entire album, even the minor hit, an Eno-treated cover version of Al Green's "Take Me To The River," sounds amazingly fresh some thirty-six years later. Perhaps this is partly because the intervening years have seen an increasing commodification of pop music and a considerable de-emphasis on innovation and exploration. The bucks now seem to reign. Though the Talking Heads would eventually climb the popular charts in the 1980s, in 1978 their sales were by no means stellar. This remained true even up until their universally acclaimed album "Remain in Light." Would this important band have survived for so long in today's money music environment? Or would they have been relegated to Internet obscurity? Of course no one can say, but we can remain happy that these musically curious art students decided to take a different course in life and that they happened to live in a time that welcomed, or at least allowed, their askew questioning and angular perspectives. And 1978 was only the beginning, or maybe the second beginning?
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Reviews with images
All Photos
recieved warped record. bad stock. shipping pakage was o.k.
recieved warped record. bad stock. shipping pakage was o.k.
Top reviews from other countries
Andy McGrath
Excellent album, but you already know that yeah?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 28, 2023vanni
Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings & F
Reviewed in Italy on August 7, 2023