As musical tastes mature or She's gonna open our eyes up
One day long ago, when I was young and stupid and still considered Rolling Stone's opinion, I went out and bought the Talking Heads album Remain In Light only because it was in the top ten of RS's list of the greatest albums of the eighties. I liked "Once In A Lifetime" okay, mostly because it was the only song I already knew, but the rest of the album almost made me uncomfortable. Songs like "The Great Curve" and "Crosseyed and Painless" were so manic that they made me squirm, and I could tell that there was African influences, but played with a quirky, angular feel and that didn't really make any sense to me at the time. I couldn't get my head around it, dismissed it as "critics like it only because it's kind of 'weird'", didn't listen to it much, and I eventually traded in the CD.
Flash forward fifteen years—pausing at the moments when I find that Stop Making Sense is one of the greatest live albums ever and other relevant moments where I found the appeal of manic and quirky music, not to mention funk and soul—and wind up at last week. I'm in the bathroom that's off the bedroom I use when I'm at my parents house. I'm fresh out of the shower, and I have the iPod serving up whatever it music it sees fit to give me, and on comes a song from Remain In Light, which I had grabbed from Ivan in my gluttonous mp3 feast a couple months ago. The song is "The Great Curve"¹ and I immediately recognize it as one of the songs that made me wrinkle up my face in disagreement when listening to this album fifteen years ago. Only this time, it makes me jump around (generously known as "dancing") in uncontrollable excitement, giving me goosebumps when I focus on the overlapping vocal parts in the chorus. I rewind it over and over, expecting the appeal to wear off, but it only gets better.
Sometimes these things take a while to sink in.
¹ It's in the jukebox, if you didn't already notice.
7 comments:
You forgot to mention the kickass horn stabs!
That's because I didn't hear any horns. I just hear "horns". It's a shame they went with the keyboards, but I'm assuming that's mostly because Eno was as the helm. Still, doesn't take away from the song at all.
But don't mistake me...I LOVE the horn stabs. I hope I've made that clear at practice.
Sometimes you've just gotta catch up to the music, dude.
Never doubt David Byrne. Everything he does seems like lunacy, but he's always right, particularly when he has the Tom Tom Club (aka his band) keeping him in line.
(I now have the sound of Byrne screaming "BLIND BLIND BLIND BLIND BLIND" in my head. Love that man.)
That's one of the funny things about my initial turn-off of Remain In Light: I already liked Talking Heads at the time. As a matter of fact, that was around the time that, listening to Naked (which Megarita now has going through her head) one night, I had one of the biggest epiphanies of my life: that I HAD to write songs. So it seems strange that I didn't like Remain in Light. But I just didn't.
Anyway, this is just chapter 8,345 of my book I Love Being a Grownup.
Our local radio station plays the Stop Making Sense version of "Psycho Killer" on a regular basis.
"Hi, I've got a tape I want to play."
Oh...that gives me chills. I once was almost beaten up by a co-worker when I said that I preferred the live version of Psycho Killer. Okay, okay...not almost beaten up. But damn, he wasn't happy about it.
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