Don’t Stop Destroyin’ This Heart Of Glass

NY-style art rock outfit into a pretty good disco band, sound-wise, with Byrne as flamboyant nerd-showman. But there’s only one David Byrne, so it’s not as though subsequent bands have copied that. And it’s not as though indie music subsequently went the pretty good disco band route. So they were, oddly, an evolutionary dead-end. Am I just talking nonsense?

I’d say yes. The literate nerd is a by-now venerable type of indie rocker that I’d by now has eclipsed the former type–nasty, drug-addled–of literate rocker; it was very much a type in Olympia’s music scene 1990-1997 or so (think Some Velvet Sidewalk), and probably even now. Disco rock was all the rage in Brooklyn about 5 years ago, and, while it might have claimed that Talking Heads were too mainstream, I’d say that !!!, the Liars, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Rapture owe as much to ‘Making Flippy Floppy’ and ‘Stay Hungry’ as they do to other NYC bands of that era (e.g., ESG and Liquid Liquid). I’d say the only place Talking Heads had no (good) influence were the horrible Little Creatures, True Stories, and Naked albums….

Yeah, I think you’re talking nonsense. Certainly the hugely popular Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were routinely described as Talking Heads successors (though I don’t hear it myself.) Arcade Fire are big fans and cover This Must Be the Place. Here in Madison we have a fairly popular Talking Heads tribute act, which must give some hint as to what parts of the past the scenesters are interested in.

It’s true that I don’t think you hear much “Talking Heads 77” in modern indie (and more’s the pity!) but I think there are plenty of yelpy, jerky pop bands that owe plenty to ’80s Heads.

Although I agree with Karl about the hidden importance of Talking Heads for “New York rock”, I don’t agree about them being a major input for the Northwest ’90s: I’m sure everybody knew the records by heart, but they wanted to do something different. Also will add that although they were never one of my favorite bands, Radiohead is named for “Radio Head” (never one of my favorite songs).

and “stop making sense”, the movie, is still the concert film by which all other concert films are measured.

I’m pretty sure I’ve read Black Francis say they had a strong influence, if only in spirit and sensibility, on the Pixies, though it’s hard to find it directly in their sound–apart from some vocal elements.

But there’s only one David Byrne, so it’s not as though subsequent bands have copied that. And it’s not as though indie music subsequently went the pretty good disco band route. So they were, oddly, an evolutionary dead-end. Am I just talking nonsense?

How about Beck?

Indie music eventually did go the “pretty good disco band” route. Examples: LCD Soundsystem, !!!, Outhud, Datarock, the Rapture, etc.

The Talking Heads have a sound that is hard to imitate closely without sounding really obvious, so there isn’t going to be anyone out there who sounds just like them.

Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the influential work that came out of Talking Heads. Legions of folks who make music and play with tapes followed the release of that record. Seeing the Stop Making Sense tour was okay I supposed but Eno had set sail by then and the Talking Heads got worse.

Google “talking heads” site:pitchforkmedia.com

Y0u can hear a lot of Royksopp

compare Ladytron:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fOExDknuYM&feature=related

with Royksopp: Remind Me

Hmmm, I take it no one wants to discuss how that Ladytron song sounds strangely like Journey?

John, “Don’t Stop Believing” is important advice about propositional attitudes, but I would say that the Blondie influence is the funky-authentic part of the song and the rest is basic New Order-esque electro; I’m sure someone more knowledgeable could find you a perfect Italo-Disco match.

Dude, listen to the just the opening bars.

Sounds like Midnight Express.

I think you’ve got it when you say they defined a musical moment, and you should be able to feel proud of having been there for it. But you’re also right that, evolutionarily, they were a “dead end.” That’s because TH were the kind of band that you couldn’t imitate (well) without it being blatantly obvious that you were doing so…and musicians mostly hate it when audiences can immediately pinpoint their strongest influence.

People will cover Talking Heads for years to come, but most will leave it at that. The trick is to figure out how their influence–which is undeniable–can be recognized, since it cannot be so on a strictly musical level.

In other words, the “idea of” the Talking Heads is the meme to focus on here ;p Props to John for taking CT to this level, btw. Henry, what’s in your pop-culture closet?

“I believe Holbo is too narrowly construing what might count as being an influence.”

that’s an interesting comment. an influence doesn’t necessarily have to leave a perceivable trace for the listener. axl rose always said he was influenced by elton john, and while if i stretched my ears really hard, i could probably find some way to hear that, it makes more sense to say that the influence affected his imagination, but didn’t come out on record. i could see the same being true with, say, TH and Arcade Fire.

Naked helped mainstream a lot of “world music” sounds.

No more so than the albums that were good.

This is just a hunch, but perhaps you’ll hear their influence in Vampire Weekend? I can’t be bothered to research that, since VW’s cutesy Paul Simon Graceland schtick bores me, but I’d suspect…

I’m with Wolfson in 28, influence needs to be viewed more broadly.

There are various downloads available of Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards Eno uses in his work that are useful for getting yourself out of a tight spot when composing. Lots of people covet the cards and use them; in this case it’s hard to imagine the influence of the compositional method being audible.

Ladytron: their new album, Velocifero, is even better than Witching hour, the album with Destroy everything you touch.

Saw them play in Malmö about a year ago. Great concert.

but a good deal better than True Stories.

Radiohead liked it. Enough to name themselves after a song off it.

Talking Heads: I think Karl @1 is right about the literate nerd trope; a pretty clear rejection of romanticism in rock. But that’s the early stuff, before Stop Making Sense. My impression is mid- to late-period Talking Heads is more important for integrating world music–mostly African–into rock. How many people followed this up is another question.

Ladytron: post-9/11 decadence (see also: LCD Soundsystem, Metric, etc.) seems to me to look more to Gang of Four for clues on how to combine disco with punk. With Blondie it was never serious. “Heart of Glass” is no more disco than “Tide is High” is hip hop.

I’m a big Talking Heads fan but I am so ignorant about pop/rock/indie music in general that I can’t really say much about how influential they were.

For what it’s worth, I seem to recall the guys in Phish constantly insisting that they weren’t heavily influenced by the Grateful Dead, they were actually heavily influenced by the Talking Heads. But nobody seemed to entirely believe them.

And then on the other side of the coin, people often name They Might Be Giants as Talking Heads-influenced, but they say they’re really not; the similarities that are there probably just come from similar nerdy/NYC/art-school backgrounds.

Pedantry bomb!!

‘Once in a Lifetime’ was not performed in the big suit. In Stop Making Sense at least, it’s performed in (if memory serves) a white suit and nerd glasses and normal-sized pants. The Big Suit isn’t around the whole show.

p.s. Claiming you ‘don’t hear’ the David Byrne influence on CYHSY is pure 100% music-snob posing. The vocalist’s style is practically a straight Byrne lift on some songs, the instrumentation is reminiscent of TH, etc. Songwritingwise there isn’t a hell of a lot of connection, true.

Well, I would list Talking Heads as influenced by Wilson Pickett, obviously.

I can’t believe no one else has gone for the obvious music-snob point: I don’t know who this band “The Talking Heads” is, but if you mean the band the name of which is “Talking Heads,” John, you are talking nonsense, if one can judge by understanding the music. I don’t know about their influence because, like so many others from the Heads era, I have been unaware of what the kids are listening to for 10 to 15 years.

But it seems to me that a band that is ubiquitously covered, and which casts a shadow on hip-hop, folk, world music, that stuff made with electronic things, and whatever music replaced rock, is influential.

All that remains to be made is the “Pickin’ On Talking Heads” album.

[48] does not argue its case strongly enough: that 1980 Rome show is the single best live music accessible via this here series of tubes…

Ahem, Nick: with all due respect to TH, this is the greatest live music accessible via these here tubes: 1981 Mats Show at 7th Street Entry.

But de gustibus etcetera… basically: the availability via YouTube of everything from old 120 Minutes shows to live bootlegs and all else in between makes the tubes worth every bloody dollar Comcast sucks from my wallet (well, it does if you also include the existence of stuff like this).

John, what RM said: ain’t no “The Talking Heads.” They were so opposed to people adding the definite article that they released an album called The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. There’s also no “The Fairport Convention” –dunno about “The Pink Floyd”, maybe that’s standard in the UK.

I have nothing of substance to say on the thread topic.

This is just a hunch, but perhaps you’ll hear their influence in Vampire Weekend? I can’t be bothered to research that, since VW’s cutesy Paul Simon Graceland schtick bores me, but I’d suspect…

Yes you can, but since Vampire Weekend channels just about every twenty year old worldbeat groove out there, I’m not sure Talking Heads in general or “Naked” in particular is a direct influence per se.

I like Vampire Weekend and their schtick. I like “Naked,” “Little Creatures,” and “True Stories,” too. The whimsy in the latter two — minus the dollop of humor it was served up with — sure seems onmipresent in the liberals arts grad wing of middle-brow pop culture, including indy pop music and movies.

I’m not even remotely familiar enough with indie pop and rock from the 80s and 90s to weigh in properly on this question, but I decided to submit it to a more knowlegable friend of mine, who said:

“Most of what I would say was already touched upon in the comment thread there. That is: (1) despite his distinctive vocal and performance style, Byrne’s music has been a moving target for the past three decades (and often across a single album), making imitation tough; (2) Byrne has had visible influence as a bridge and promoter for foreign pop in the US; (3) he has had a modest impact in the world of hip hop (and Weymouth and Franz, with the Heads-era ‘Genius of Love,’ had one of the most sampled songs in hip hop history); (4) I’ve heard covers of TH songs from all over (e.g., U2, Robyn Hitchcock, The Cardigans, Bonnie Raitt, Terry Allen, and many others, including the Phish Halloween concert that covered Remain in Light in its entirety), which would seem to indicate that–though there may not be a detectable ‘Talking Heads’ style out there–a lot of musicians listened to them, liked them, and continue to like them well enough to pay tribute through playing their music; and (5) in a hundred years, when people discuss the best concert movies ever made, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ‘Stop Making Sense’ on the list.”

Sounds pretty persuasive to me.

Sorry John, I don’t hear the Journey either, but I haven’t listened to them much, so who knows. You’ve got some euro-disco arpeggios and the harmonizing sighs that kick-in midway through remind me of My Bloody Valentine, but the song still essentially feels like this:

Re: 64

Yeah, I hear much DM in many of Ladytron’s tracks. I don’t hear the Journey either.

Off topic, but what’s the deal with the 80’s anachronistically redefining “arty” to mean african music, spasticness, and overflirtation with the fashion world? That scar still hasn’t healed. “Art” rock still seems to mean: wears annoying clothes.

Makes me nostalgic for the velvets. Or the entire history of art before 1981.

No, you’re dead on. I think Talking Heads may have been the 20th Century’s Rock n Roll answer to William Blake.

Pixies, Magnetic Fields, Vampire Weekend, Guillemots. The list could go on – young knives, mystery jets, even Gorillaz and other Damon Albarn projects. Scissor Sisters…The ways that TH has spread its tentacles of influence are many and varied.

I think the nerd-frontman trope is really common nowadays. And indie bands wouldn’t be so dance-friendly/disco-ish w/o TH.

Maybe TH are more influential on UK bands than on US ones. It’s a mix of the music and the image.