Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food Poll

11 The Good Thing = wtf???

Yeah, I was trying to do that and play a poker tournament at the same time. I'd put it #6.

this was the second album i fully digested by the Heads and is still my favorite. this, however, is a fluid situation as i'm still going through their catalog. i'm now convinced that they are one of the best bands ever!

voting for "The Big Country"

i live in Los Angeles, BTW.

For me it's the first song versus the last song.

If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right. If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right.

apply it to your life

bump

Found A Job.

DAMN THAT TELEVISION

― Matos W.K.

Was going to post exactly this!

― Mark G

I can't really think of another song that immediately jumpstarts as effectively as "Found a Job". I love how everyone plays like they're walking a tightrope for the first 3 minutes, before the amazing closing instrumental section where Jerry Harrison looses those little plucking guitar lines. I was just watching this clip from 1978...

...and it reminded me that as cool as their touring lineup for Fear of Music onwards was, there are certain Talking Heads songs (like this one) that benefit from not having dozens of people onstage, auxiliary percussion, backup singers/dancers, another guitar player, keyboards, etc. I love certain aspects of their expanded lineup's sound, but I'm fairly certain my favorite Talking Heads era will remain the early stripped down stuff.

I heard somewhere that the final section of Found a Job was a nod to Minimalism, like John Adams and Nixon in China...anybody know any more?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Thank You for Sending Me an Angel

1. This is too hard. I dearly, truly, and eternally adore this album.
2. Tina Weymouth was wearing a pink hooded sweatshirt I'm pretty sure, drinking MILK before the show when I saw them play at SUNY Binghamton campus in 1978. RICHARD BELZER was the opening act. One of the songs that played on the PA before the show was THE ROBOTS by KRAFTWERK.
3. The musical interplay on this record is deliriously beautiful in a way that I have never heard anywhere else, including any of the other Talking Heads records.
4. OK, Found A Job is my favorite.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I can't believe "Artists Only" only got one vote. Otherwise pretty fair.

One of the weirder polls so far.

Other than First, Second, and Fourth picks (or Tracks 6,10, and 10) all the songs on this record I find completely interchangeable

6, 10, and 1

I'm surprised "Warning Sign" got so little love. That's probably my second fav on here.

results aren't surprising at all in the sense that well over half the votes went to the 3 songs that were played in Stop Making Sense.

wow funny results.

I thought The Big Country would get more votes.

I wouldn't call the songs interchangeable, and I think the results here are an anomaly based on so few people voting. "Found a Job" is fine, but... what?

I'm surprised "Warning Sign" got so little love. That's probably my second fav on here.

The hands-down scariest track. "Psycho Killer" has nothin' on it.

Your glassy eyes and your open mouth
Take it easy baby, take it easy,
It's a natural thing and you have to relax,
I've got money now, I've got money now.

Actually, every lyric on this album is written through the POV of a total sociopath. If this is the only Talking Heads record you ever heard, you'd start investigating David Byrne for unsolved murders. He just hates people the whole way through it.

Or at least reduces them to math.

But... that's why I love it. Don't get me wrong... I do not share Byrne's apparent views on love and life and work, and I do not imagine that he does, either, not at all. He's weird, yeah, but the lyrics on this record are NUTS. And that's kind of what it is, as a record -- it's the record where David is a sociopath. He meant it that way. Him and his weird Eno friend.

People who think "art rock" is Rush doing a Coleridge poem are bloody morons.

Hang on wooah he doesnt hate anyone on FOUND A JOB. Quite the opposite.

No, he's very happy for the people who found something better to do than watching TV... by making TV shows. Way to break free of those constraints, etc.

It's reaaaal condescending, if not hateful.

Byrne seems to have made at least half a career of sounding enthusiastic about things he thinks are fascinatingly beneath him. "Portable buildings were the dream of every 20th century architect, only they didn't know they were having it!"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/sevenages/artists/talking-heads/

Click 'watch the short film' there and he has a few things to say on the subject of the lyrics.
He says he's 'half sincere half ironic' but points out that he didn't want to sneer at the average person as some would do.

Is 'don't get upset it's not a major disaster... if your work isn't what you love then something isn't right'
condescending or hateful? Shrugs never sounded it to me... i'm naive though i guess.

Well, the other half of him -- and this is what's weirdest of all -- the other half truly IS enthusiastic about things that truly are beneath him. Dude has had gallery shows and released books of art made on PowerPoint, and has given eloquent lectures on how PowerPoint relates to the increasing boxing of our thoughts into computer space. He really does thing about banal things, a lot.

(I still suspect that he's kinda trying to keep up with his bigger intellectual brother Eno, who loves the little scamp and tussles his hair, but will always be the big brother. Neither here nor there in this context, though.)

That's why I really like the True Stories film as a kind of not-quite-so subtle manifestation of his lyrics into a movie. It's a celebration of the mundane, not of the futuristic but of the present - treating shopping malls, mobile homes, project management, computer chips as works of artisanship. Kind of saying that in the future our architects and designers will be praised much in the same way as the ancient architects of the past.

On the other hand the tongue's also firmly in cheek. The natural "beauty" of a metal container is through its functionality and its function is to contain. There's that wonderful bit in the film where the business owner sits down with his family at the table and does a crazy choreographed serving routine that explains the structure of his business model with the different foods. I think I read something somewhere about Byrne's vision being "so normal it's crazy", and I totally agree with and love that aesthetic.

Aw man, messed around with that for 10 minutes before I read this:

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Hrm.

There's that wonderful bit in the film where the business owner sits down with his family at the table and does a crazy choreographed serving routine that explains the structure of his business model with the different foods.

Spalding Grey. Yes. Wonderful bit.

Also, I will grant that "Found a Job" is the most 77-like song on the record. But the rest of it is borderline sinister. And then there's "Take Me To the River," which is just off the freakin' map.

Gahhhhh this thread makes me want to listen to this album NOW. And my iPod and headphones are right in front of me, bbut I'm in my extremely shite work and can't. Frustrating.

Found A Job, FWIW.

See, I got the "Take me to the river" double single. "Found a job" on b-side, and "Love->Building and "Psycho Killer" on the other single.

How was that package not bought by *everyone* I'll never know...

But that's why I like "Found a job", even though I never bought "MSABAF"...

"Pretty soon now, I will be bitter."

"I don't have to prove that I am creative."

If I could vote over, I would go with "The Big Country". I just listened to the album and read the lyrics. I've always liked Talking Heads' slow country songs.

"Take Me to the River" always seemed out of place on this record, it was such a big radio hit and sounds more like Fear of Music.

Great album...The only I'm not keen on is 'Take Me to the River'.

Weird to see that '77 photo in this thread...I used to be really fixated on Tina in the 77 cover photo when I was very young, and turned out gay.

"And you may ask yourself - well...how did I get here?" - indeed.

heh... Tina looks as boyish as any of them in that photo! Ah, youth.

Listening again and I wish I would have voted for Warning Sign. That little two-note guitar part on the verses "Right when David's singing 'Warning sign! Warning sign!'" into the sliding syncopated chords is so beautiful. And like Kenan said, SCARY. What a great song. I still Found a Job though. The only way it could possibly be improved is if they would have made it the first track of side B instead of the last of side A. It would have made such a perfect opener for a side!

Play Find the Typo in that paragraph. Hint: there are 32.

are nwot.

I always appreciated Sand in the Vasline for including the non-single "Warning Sign" -- it was the extra bit of taut weirdness that convinced me to buy the damn thing.

And for Sugar on my Tongue.

Its a matter of degrees
And that's true
That's true
It's taken to extremes
and that's why we work so hard to
Take that love away

^^^ The theory of emotional relativity

stay hungrayyyyyyyyyy

i've been listening to the 1975 cbs demos thing a lot recently, which interestingly has like all the songs from 77 and about half of this one

Haven't played those demos in a while but aren't there actually more MSABAF songs on it than '77 songs?

I think it wasn't until "Fear of Music" that a lot of their stuff was jammed out in the studio and sort of assembled later, which partly explains the really weird structures, especially once you get to "Remain in Light." If you've ever seen a band cover (or been in a band covering) "Once in a Lifetime," it's almost impossible to tell where the "one" on the measure is.

I assumed that was down to listening to Fela Kuti

5. The Girls Want to Be With the Girls 1
7. Artists Only 1
2. With Our Love 1

robbed!

girls are getting into
abstract analysis; they want to
make that intuitive leap!
they're making plans with
far-reaching effects!

this is my most listened to Talking Heads album at the moment. also doing a Talking Heads poll sometime in the year 2020.

my cardboard fliptop double sire cassette of 77/msabaf from about 82 or 83 is now some rosebud level shit in my memory banks.

I had that cassette. And likewise about the rosebud effect.

it was fuschia and turquise you know.

or turquoise or whatever, with a big number _2_.

This has fast become like, my joint second favourite TH studio album.

the best thing about it is how short the gaps between the tracks are. a real sense of urgency.

both the first 2 albums are such GREAT guitar records. The way the guitars are arranged, the way they're played, the way they're recorded. I like the fourth world funk dream stuff that came after but their sound on the first records is even more special to me. Meat Puppets Up On The Sun has that same clean, interlocked ecstatic sound.

xpost just as rosebud for me was the special walkman I always played it on. It was the first walkman that was barely bigger than the tapes that went in it. Silver. My friend who was kind of a klepto stole it from me (I know he did). Its constant inhabitants were the 77/Buildings & Food 2fer and this weird Iggy cassette that mixed up tracks from New Values, Soldier and Zombie Birdhouse. And PiL generic.

This one! Rosebud...

http://www.oobject.com/12-vintage-walkmans/wm-10-foldout-tiny-walkman/5510/

I bought it with my paper route money

xxp i must check that Meat Puppets album.

It's not their only great album but it's the only one that has that particular sound. Definitely my favorite of all 80s US indie albums, even edging out double nickels and new day rising.

oh, yeah, i had that walkman too, precisely like that picture, gold and red!

my favorite talking heads album. this album is one of the greatest poems about america ever written, it so perfectly captures the spirit of american culture. "the good thing" is my favorite song on here, and one of my favorite talking heads songs overall.

perfect juxtaposition. listening to this on spotify right now, home depot commercial comes up. "more saving, more doing." could be an unused david byrne lyric.

take "the good thing". song was written in the late 70s, but it could be the religious hymn sung by silicon valley true believers in 2014. say what you want about david byrne, but he got it.

People who think "art rock" is Rush doing a Coleridge poem are bloody morons.

― Bad Banana On Broadway (kenan), Monday, February 16, 2009 2:23 AM (5 years ago)

MSABAF is a decent enough Talking Heads album, not my favorite. "Xanadu", OTOH, kicks all kinds of ass.

huh, it's funny, did some research on "the good thing" and it turns out david byrne's lyrics were inspired by old chinese communist party literature. i remember doing some research on authoritarianism in america, and found surveys and sociological papers that found that america was the most culturally authoritarian-leaning of the 1st world industrial nations, to an off-the-charts degree, in total contradiction of our own view as an individualistic culture, even before the bush/911 years.

guess it was a "happy" accident byrne's cribbing of authoritarian literature sounds so incredibly american. links up pretty well with this thread: Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism weird how we might have more in common with communist china than france or england.

I always thought there was a whiff of Japanese "happy corporate family" culture to lyrics like "The Good Thing" and "Don't Worry About the Government."

Ha! Musically, the verses Radiohead's 'Anyone Can Play Guitar' is identical to the verses of 'Warning Sign', except that Radiohead slowed it down.

This fuckin album.

Not even sure what I would have voted for. Maybe I'm Not In Love. Or The Big Country. But really the whole thing is pretty perfect.

Today, "The Good Thing."

his album is super-economic. no mucking about