Talking Heads

Many forward-thinking releases are so unique it takes years for audiences to catch up with them. A weird thing happened with this 1980 Talking Heads classic -- nobody had ever heard anything like it yet everyone loved it. An amazing best-selling mix of African and funk rhythms, urban paranoia, rock, and intellect and heart, Remain in Light hasn't aged a nanosecond.

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. While blacks are almost entirely
uninterested in the clipped, rigid urgency of the New Wave, it's doubtful that more than a
small percentage of Rolling Stone's predominantly white readership knows anything at all
about the summer's only piece of culture-defining music, Kurtis Blow's huge hit, "... More >

In which David Byrne conquers his fear of music in a visionary Afrofunk synthesis--clear-eyed, detached, almost mystically optimistic. First side's a long dance-groove more sinuous than any known DOR that climaxes in the middle with the uncontorted "Crosseyed and Painless" but begins at the beginning: when Byrne shouts out that "the world moves on a woman's hips"--not exactly a new idea in rock and roll--it sounds as if he's just discovered the secret of life for himself, which he probably has. Second side celebrates a young terrorist and recalls John Cale in his spookiest pregeopolitical mode but also begins at the beginning: with "Once in a Lifetime," the greatest song Byrne will ever write. It's about the secret of life, which even a woman's hips can't encompass. (Grade - A)