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TALKING HEADS
Talking Heads: 77 (Super Deluxe Edition)
Qu’est-ce que c’est? CBGB art-school normies invent the future.
By Sam Richards
Talking Heads: finding meaning in the everyday
GIJSBERT HANEKROOT/REDFERNS
RHINO
8/10
‘‘THE
popular song is
a very efficient and effective means of getting across ideas,” declares Talking Heads’ original typewritten ‘Statement Of Intent’, reproduced as part of this reissue package. “Without seeming pretentious, the band would like to think that music and the popular song (as a specific case) has the potential to inspire constructive feelings in the listener. The band hopes that their songs and presentation will inspire confidence in the audience. Words the band would hope can be associated with their ‘image’ are: sincerity, honesty, intensity, substance, integrity and fun.”
These don’t sound like the ideals of a blank generation. Even among the supposedly iconoclastic denizens of CBGB, there was a widespread fixation with a well-established Stones/Stooges MO of leering, leather-clad hedonism and/or messianic self-destruction (which, as Tina Weymouth noted wearily, tended to come with a side-order of decidedly old-fashioned sexism). Fresh from the progressive Rhode Island School Of Design, Talking Heads surveyed this not-so-radical scene and quickly deduced that if punk really was going to provide some kind of new feeling, all those “traditional rock’n’roll stances” would have to go.