Talking Heads

I like this cover of Listening Wind by the Specials circa 2021 (rip Terry)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4bxtfjE0FY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oXIxXm3DyE

here's something orders of magnitude worse than phish's noodling

the phish full remain in light cover is quite strong, the separate 30-minute "crosseyed and painless" loses me pretty quickly though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhs2vVXEHwg

you will be unsurprised to learn “gotta jiboo” is horrible, but is an excellent jam vehicle

― ivy.

yeah one of the things i do like is this site called "phish just jams" that cuts out the song portions and just has them jamming.

and to be clear, i'm absolutely not saying "hey you have to listen to this sick jam". this is just music that a lot of people are _not going to like_. i don't think it's the best music ever, by any stretch of the imagination, but i do _like_ it.

i like phish in general. i mean if we're talking about privilege in music, i think their early years have some interesting stuff in them. ivy, do you know about richard wright, who wrote "halley's comet"? (he was going under a different name and pronouns when he wrote it.)

What the FUCK, Smashing Pumpkins. God damn this was so bad I couldn't stop watching it. Holy hell . Why take a song as rhythmically interesting and groovy as Once In A Lifetime and reduce it to absolute turgid slop. I've managed to avoid the Pumpkins for a long time since they were good, I had no idea it had gotten that bad. Shit.

that's a cover they were doing back in 2000 and have inexplicably revived more recently

how soon we forget Tom Jones + The Cardigans

I know I forgot that, if I ever knew about it

note to self if I see this thread on browser: check it the Delakota mix is still good

I know the discussion has moved on, but for the sake of pure hilarity, I feel obligated to share this geneaology doc some maniac made purporting to show that Tina Weymouth is a direct descendant of King Edward III.

https://humphrysfamilytree.com/Royal/Larson/Edw3-TinaWeymouth.pdf

I fact-checked it and it appears to to mess up in the 1400s; her ancestors include an English nobleman named Humphrey Stafford but not the same much more famous/powerful one in Edward III's lineage.

Anyway, I don't know if I'm more embarrassed that someone made this, that I found it, or that I spent 30 minutes at my job checking it's accuracy.

This of course says and proves nothing about her immediate family's power and financial status in the 20th century! I just thought it was funny to share--supports fgti's point about the scrutiny women artists face about their privilege. Or maybe just that geneology people are kind of nuts.

She’s bass royalty, isn’t that enough?

I like this cover, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k

lol, dinnerboat otm

Talking Heads 1377

More Listening Wind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwKRSxUfZw

Geoffrey Oryema

Not exactly a cover, but the version of Papa Legba sung by Pops Staples is better than the Byrne version.

Shawn Colvin's This Must Be the Place is a sentimental favorite of mine, because I am a softy. Sneaky woodwinds 2 minutes in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=486JJ6HaSyc

idk i'm still thinking a lot about privilege and art and marginalization, particularly with reference the part of david byrne's "how music works" on "how to create a scene", where he gives his perspective on the milieu that talking heads came out of

what i remember from it - and this is i think more than a decade ago that i read it - is that he talks about the rents being cheap and the place being undesirable. i think that's an important part of it! to me, though, i look at the larger history. in the early '60s there was the whole "inside llewyn davis" thing, you have hootenanies and woody guthrie is in a hospital there so some kid from minnesota comes by and hangs out there for a while and does really well and some other people do ok, phil ochs does ok until for a little while and then he does really badly for a little while and then he kills himself, dave van ronk does ok for a little while but mostly he winds up being locally renowned, the "mayor of mcdougal street", so when the cops go after a bar in his turf he goes out to defend the folks there, and winds up being arrested in the stonewall riots

because in the late 60s you have things like max's kansas city and you have warhol and his "superstars" and all of the people lou reed sings about in "walk on the wild side", and lou does ok for himself and the "superstars" and the women lou sings about wind up dead

i was jealous of the scene byrne described, when i read it as a struggling burnout weirdo in the midwest. i spent 20 years or so struggling to make it in the midwest. i was smart and i worked hard and then my dad died and left me $100,000 and i moved out to portland. and portland in a lot of ways reminds me of the kind of scene byrne describes. it's not _cheap_. i don't know how _cheap_ the east village actually was. out here there are a bunch of people talking about how "new portland sucks" and pining for the days when it was really cheap and not all gentrified like it is today

and i don't know what they're talking about really because i don't see portland as a super gentrified town. i see a couple big expensive hotels and chain restaurants and a bunch of grotty queer punks who are here because there aren't a bunch of other places who would have us, and i'm one of the relatively privileged ones.

which is i guess what brings me to godard college in vermont in the 1980s, which strikes me as a kind of privileged environment, this weirdo liberal arts college, and who winds up there are a bunch of the members of phish. and their drummer, you know, he gets up on stage and wearing a dress and sings old syd barrett songs while "playing" the vacuum cleaner, which is probably cringe but it's cringe in a way that i find pretty cool. sometimes you gotta embrace cringe. like, one of the people they're hanging out with is some 300 pound person who says they're a "lesbian transsexual" and goes by the name nancy butterbean something something i can't remember, which back then i think would probably be considered cringe by a lot of people. phish plays a couple of the songs this person wrote, and this person comes up on stage and sings sometimes, even though this person isn't necessarily a great singer. and eventually this person goes to see a psychic and the psychic says oh wait i see your problem, nancy is just the name of a lover you had in a past life, you're not actually a transsexual lesbian at all, and richard wright says ohhhh i see. and that's what some people would call "detransition" maybe, and i look at that and say so what if he's not actually a transsexual lesbian? it's cool that he got to be in an environment where he could figure that stuff out.

and of course phish wind up getting really famous which is the only reason i even know about him.

anyway i take my privilege and i move to portland and right now if you ask me i'll tell you i'm a transsexual lesbian.

like to me this isn't stuff that can be taken in _isolation_. out of the east village in the late 60s you had stonewall and you had david peel, and people know about one of those, and in san francisco in the late 60s you had the compton's cafeteria riot and the grateful dead, and people know about one of those.

i don't know what the fuck you have in portland today or what you're going to have in portland today. you have a city that's the "cheapest" on the west coast and you have queer refugees streaming in from all over the country but mostly from texas, mostly, and you have a bunch of incredibly brilliant, fucked up, desperate people in one place. and there's a lot of different art and music and writing that mostly people don't know about, _i_ don't know about it even though i live here, and maybe in six years you'll have a "scene". even if a lot of people here now say that it used to be better in the old days.

or maybe i'm wrong and portland is nothing like the east village used to be at all. fuck if i know. i've never even been to the east village.

For me one of the most revelatory bits in the Byrne book is the degree to which a space shapes the music (and vice versa).

You look at a medieval cathedral and you can see why Gregorian chant worked there; the long echo times and harmonic structure. A Viennese concert hall and see why Mozart worked there. The ovals of the balconies and resulting harmonic structure. And finally CBGB's - a long narrow hard-surfaced room, which makes sense (pun intended) if your music is spiky and trebly and tense and nervous.

You look at a medieval cathedral and you can see why Gregorian chant worked there; the long echo times and harmonic structure. A Viennese concert hall and see why Mozart worked there. The ovals of the balconies and resulting harmonic structure. And finally CBGB's - a long narrow hard-surfaced room, which makes sense (pun intended) if your music is spiky and trebly and tense and nervous.

― Washington Post Malone (Ye Mad Puffin)

i got that sense from byrne's book too, my family are foodies so i think of it as kind of _terroir_. i mean, in a broader sense, art is shaped by the material conditions under which it's made, and a lot of times those conditions can be invisible. or invisible in the present day! i mean shit, we're talking about mozart, we can talk about requiems, right? great classical art form, but it's a mass, and so there aren't a lot of pre-20th century requiems written by protestants (/me waves at johannes brahms)

i was jealous of the scene byrne described, when i read it as a struggling burnout weirdo in the midwest. i spent 20 years or so struggling to make it in the midwest.

the thing about the midwest, of course, is that david byrne wouldn't live there if you paid him to. no sirree.

idk. anybody here ever read the thomas m. disch novel _on wings of song_?

For me one of the most revelatory bits in the Byrne book is the degree to which a space shapes the music (and vice versa).

Eno said a similar thing in his diaries.

idk. anybody here ever read the thomas m. disch novel _on wings of song_?

Personal note: I spent the first half of my musical life basically doing Heads-esque music in CBGB-esque venues. It mostly worked.

The second half has been focused on acoustic music, and I've discovered that I can't always make it work in those same spaces. I failed spectacularly in a pub once. Once. And i haven't quite recovered.

Ages ago, yeah

― Al Green Explores Your Mind Gardens (James Redd and the Blecchs)

been a long time for me, too. disch is one of those guys who was a big creative influence on me, stuff like _334_ and "descending" and honestly, to me _on wings of song_ is one of the most depressing books i've read. from what i remember it's about someone who grew up in the fascist theocratic midwest who wants to be a fairy, and in the midwest that's the worst thing you can be, that's evil and satanic, and in new york, in new york it's different, but... this is my memory, maybe the book isn't like this... the people who've always been in a more open-minded environment don't necessarily really understand what it's like, to grow up wanting to be a fairy in an environment where fairies are the worst things imaginable. getting to be a fairy is great but basically everything else sucks. it's not a terribly optimistic book.

so anyway disch was raised catholic in des moines and moved to new york city when he was 17 and wrote a bunch of stuff and then his longtime boyfriend/partner died in 2005 and he completely lost his shit and spent a couple of years posting islamophobic shit on livejournal and then he shot himself.

i think "the big country" is kind of a shitty, ignorant song.

It surprises me when friends say they like it. It's long!

It does depend on how you read Byrne's vocal melody and how he sings it. He wouldn't live "there" if they paid him because he doesn't sound like anybody else "there."

xp solo drums would be a tough pub sell

It does depend on how you read Byrne's vocal melody and how he sings it. He wouldn't live "there" if they paid him because he doesn't sound like anybody else "there."

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i looked it up and you're right. genius says this about the song:

In an interview with Marc Maron in 2015, however, David Byrne claimed that the song is a satire of popular culture’s image of him: i.e. as a snobby city kid. However, in reality, he says that he has a deep respect for the smaller parts of the U.S.

well, i _don't_ have a deep respect for the smaller parts of the US. i wouldn't fucking live in indiana if you paid me to! a lot of these places will fucking kill your soul. that's why i left the big country, that's why i came out here, because indiana was killing my soul and because i had $100,000 burning a hole in my pocket.

i don't blame byrne and frantz and weymouth for moving to manhattan when they graduated art school. i think it was a good thing that they did! talking heads are a great band and the east village was an important part of making them the band they were. a lot of people don't have that option, or have that option but it takes a hell of a toll on you, doing that.

it's... this is kind of the insidious thing, particularly in people who belong to "marked" communities. like yeah i've envied certain trans women. it's not helpful or productive to do that but i have. sometimes i've envied, like, abigail thorn, who's younger than me and brilliant and gorgeous and successful and _lives on god-damn TERF island, for christ's sake_, what's to _envy_ about that? it is completely _fucked_ that i'd feel that way about her. or that i'd envy, say, hannah baer, whose book is literally called _trans girl suicide museum_. i don't know if any of y'all have read that book, but goddamn, the idea that anybody on earth would envy hannah baer...

but people feel how they feel. there are no wrong feelings. the challenge is just to act, i guess, wise-mindedly while acknowledging those feelings.

idk. i guess that maybe gets a little far afield from talking heads, but it's just interesting to think about.

have i ever mentioned how personally relatable i find "seen and not seen"?

xxxxp Billy Corgan in that Smashing Pumpkins "Once in a Lifetime" looks like the guy in Robocop who drives into a vat of toxic waste and then stumbles out of his car and his face melts off, but just at the very second his face starts melting off

also v bad version of the song of course

I thought it was like Chris Elliot doing his impersonation of Marlon Brando, cribbing Byrne for the climax of Apocalypse Now

Dobly Atmos Spatial Audio!

https://x.com/highdefdiscnews/status/1753951689936126111?s=46&t=bJOqpCuQneT7ju08y55VSA

Hot off the presses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A73voVPhMfY-

that's...fine, though musically a note-for-note recreation

I've seen that one coming up a lot on "social" over the past few days (I guess just cuz Paramore are particularly popular)