The Name of This POLL Is...- ILM artist poll #82 - TALKING HEADS - (voting is open until Sunday March 26, 2017)

nearly 35 years down the road, speaking in tongues is still far & away my favorite talking heads album. that it was my entry point undoubtedly has everything to do with that. i recognize that they were taking much bigger artistic risks on fear of music and remain in light, developing their own musical language, but song-for-song, i just can't deny the tongues.

Controversial opinion: I don't like "Genius of Love," I think it is one of the most annoying songs ever made. And even if you disagree with me, and most of you probably do, there is no question it absolutely kills the momentum when integrated into "Stop Making Sense."

I've had almost every one of the TH albums be my favorite at one time or another, but not the first one and not "True Stories."

i like genius of love but the chris frantz interlude is just too much for me. it's just so fucking stupid that it ruins the rest of the song, which is brilliant.

i can imagine byrne listening to it at the time it was released, getting a little nervous that his bandmates might have outshined him, but then when it gets to the "james brown! james brown! james brown!" part he realizes that he can never have a serious conversation about music with chris frantz ever again and he immediately feels better

otm

I think More Songs was my first TH album. The Tina and the Typing Pool bits in "The Good Thing" are my earliest memory of loving this band.

i can imagine byrne listening to it at the time it was released, getting a little nervous that his bandmates might have outshined him, but then when it gets to the "james brown! james brown! james brown!" part he realizes that he can never have a serious conversation about music with chris frantz ever again and he immediately feels better

― Karl Malone, Tuesday, March 14, 2017 12:32 PM

then he opened up Billboard and read that Tina and Chris were getting a gold record before he was.

it's a fantastic song! and at least on the radio there's the option of fading it out before frantz completely ruins it.

it also ruins SMS

specifically, the chris frantz interlude. god damn that is a terrible interlude

Wait so just so this is clear: we are not voting for "Name of this Band is version of..." or "Stop Making Sense version of..." or "album version of..." tracks separately, or even specifying which version of the song we're voting for, just voting for the song full stop? Where the ranking is implicitly understood to mean "ranking of my personal favorite recording of this track?"

I believe that would be consistent with past polling practice

aww i love the james brown part of genius of love

Just vote for the songs. Why complicate things?

aww i love the james brown part of genius of love

― neva missa lost, wednesday nights on abc (voodoo chili), T

he is the Godfather of Soul, y'all!

voodoo, i want to understand, i want to love, i do

I don't feel particularly strongly about the Frantz parts. They're just part of the song. They're worse on the live version though.

I am intimately familiar with the first four or so albums and love them dearly--I need to dig a little deeper into the '80s for this poll, but I could prob make a 25-track ballot with just those songs.

aww i love the james brown part of genius of love

me too. same way i love the "knight in shining armor" part of emotional rescue.

Bohannon! Bohannon! Bohannon!

The Naked thread I started years ago has whatI thought was a fascinating discussion about the quickness with which the Heads' rep crashed after 1986 when they were, before R.E.M., the biggest college band in America.

as someone who was following them at the time, True Stories was considered a huge letdown among nearly everyone I knew

people were mostly still on board for Little Creatures

Coming of age in the 90s, I never heard anything about Talking Heads at all. It's like they'd been wiped from the collective memory. It wasn't until X-Press 2 and the whole DFA thing that I guess they came back into favour. Naked is a decent album. It's the ones before that that kind of suck a bit.

LC is their biggest-selling studio album iirc. My AOR station was all in on "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere."

for a while it looked like "Road To Nowhere" was gonna eclipse "Naive Melody" as their best-known iconic tune, but I think that moment has passed

Coming of age in the 90s, I never heard anything about Talking Heads at all. It's like they'd been wiped from the collective memory. It wasn't until X-Press 2 and the whole DFA thing that I guess they came back into favour. Naked is a decent album. It's the ones before that that kind of suck a bit.

^^^ my experience too. When I dug into the catalog after nearly wearing out Sand in the Vaseline in late '92/early'93, they were verboten.

I made a Spotify playlist of all of the non-album material I could find, minus live versions and demos of songs that otherwise appear in album versions. Am I missing anything crucial?

yes!! this should be fun

also raising my hand for sand in the Vaseline being my first TH record, featured selection of the month/week whatever at columbia house

Ha, I got that one through Columbia House too.

My parents were in college in the late 70s and the Talking Heads were THE BAND of their college experience.

For some reason, I feel like the Heads are underdiscussed/underappreciated by people of my generation, despite the massive respect for David Byrne as a public intellectual.

My experience as a trying-to-be-cool high school student in 1987-88 was not exactly that Talking Heads reputation crashed -- Naked was indeed seen as a letdown, but non-stop listening to Stop Making Sense was absolutely de rigueur (along with Document obv.) Considered VERY cool to be all "this ain't no disco" as general dismissal of popular culture despite none of us really being old enough to remember disco

And btw for the mid-40s people SMS definitely plays the Sand in the Vaseline role of "this is how we encountered and largely how we stayed engaged with this band," I don't think I heard the 77 version of "Psycho Killer" until I got to college

what is Sand In The Vaseline??

https://www.discogs.com/Talkingheads-Sand-In-The-Vaseline-Popular-Favourites-1976-1992/master/39425

a two-disc comp with excellent heterodox selections and liner notes

and more generally, it's a dangerous sex move

Considered VERY cool to be all "this ain't no disco" as general dismissal of popular culture despite none of us really being old enough to remember disco

and despite the Heads recording many dance tunes!

"The Big Country" could've been commissioned by the Democratic National Committee last summer.

True Stories was considered a huge letdown among nearly everyone I knew

― sleeve, Tuesday, March 14, 2017 9:50 AM (fifteen minutes ago)

Naked was indeed seen as a letdown

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, March 14, 2017 10:01 AM (five minutes ago)

These two did quite a bit to deflate their rep, but breaking up at low ebb buried them - for a while, anyway

I'm 45 and came to TH via Stop Making Sense. Backtracked to Speaking in Tongues and then leapt all the way back to the debut; never heard the intermediate albums until years later. Didn't like Little Creatures, but liked True Stories (the album) - in fact, "Puzzlin' Evidence" will almost certainly make my ballot.

I'm too young for Stop Making Sense but its spending two years on the Billboard chart suggests that it became a favorite of mid '80s college students.

yeah, it's their bon jovi or w/e

Always interesting to see when/at what age people got on board with certain artists. (Spin Alternative thread is great for this too.) I'm lolold, so I first heard the Heads on this promo sampler (with Dead Boys, Saints and Richard Hell.) Drove my Pure Prairie League-loving roommate up the wall.

http://assets.rootsvinylguide.com/pictures/1977-sire-2-x-7-comp-new-wave-rock-n-roll-get-behind-it-before-it-gets-past-you_9501388

I used to have that!

braggin/

I saw the SMS tour in high school, my younger stepsister left "after they played the hit" ("Burning Down The House") and we teased her about it for years

/braggin

From the second album through SMS, Talking Heads was the consensus soundtrack for my high school and college crowd. I remember people starting to get off the bus when Little Creatures videos were in constant rotation on MTV (the "Burning Down the House" video had started that process). By that point maybe they seemed a little too popular to be cool. SMS was such a powerful summation of the earlier material that it was really hard to match.

I made a Spotify playlist of all of the non-album material I could find, minus live versions and demos of songs that otherwise appear in album versions. Am I missing anything crucial?

"A Clean Break" from The Name of This Band should probably be on there, since there is no studio version
"In Asking Land" from the Once in a Lifetime box set

Both are on Spotify

By that point maybe they seemed a little too popular to be cool.

little creatures also a very comfortable album. cheery vibe, familiar song-forms, pastoral imagery, songs about having babies, and quite a bit of mainstream radio play. heads felt safely middle-aged at that point (which they were, or getting there). no longer the alarmingly thin weirdo twitching in the corner, smoking like a chimney.

as someone who was following them at the time, True Stories was considered a huge letdown among nearly everyone I knew

― sleeve, Tuesday, March 14, 2017 12:50 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people were mostly still on board for Little Creatures

― sleeve, Tuesday, March 14, 2017 12:50 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Little Creatures was hotly/highly anticipated -- their first studio album after Speaking In Tongues! Their first record after the triumph of Stop Making Sense! I remember walking into a mall record store in Omaha on release day and hearing this great song playing in the store and thinking, "wow, wouldn't it be something if that was the new Talking Heads record?" And it was/ "And She Was." Most of it holds up for me.

True Stories was one of those records that I listened to a bunch of times trying to figure out why I didn't like it. I gave up and started listening to XTC instead.

I don't mind "Wild Wild Life," which sounds like the band writing a hit to order.