First off, a bit of history where I pretty much touch my dick for a while. The reason I'm writing this article is two-fold. One, I'm pretty sure I'm qualified. The majority of my harddrive consists of music, and as of last count, my foobar has well over 30,000 tracks. I am also aware that this is pathetic as hell! They tend to hit on almost every genre, not because I'm some collectionist dork but because I genuinely do enjoy most genres of music.

The second reason is because I've been around GW long enough, and the music forum long enough, to know which bands people tend to talk about, and there's an abysmal lack of certain bands and albums ever being discussed. It's sad that we aren't talking about these groups for whatever reason, so I'm taking it on myself to recommend bands.

These recommendations don't come just from me but they are usually widely recognized critically as being some of the best music around. For some odd reason, we don't tend to discuss them though. So let's get to it.

One last note: this are absolutely not at all in order of quality. This first album I'm listing is easily one of the best of all time, and one of my favorites, if not my clear favorite. The ordering is just so I can keep count.



100. Talking Heads- Remain In Light (1980)

David Bryne's collaboration with probably the greatest producer of all time, Brian Eno, resulted in this amazing album. After listening to Fela Kuti, Bryne started incorporating that African polyrhythm that would define the band's sound. This itself was rather controversial, seeing as how, well, no one was doing it at the time, and arguably no one has done it quite as well. The guitars went from funk to slurred, the drumbeats became spastic, the lyrics became deep. Remain In Light is a fine fucking album, and is on any list worth a damn. Rather than attempt a Pitchforkesque breakdown of the album, although it could be done since the album is a solid work, I'm going to talk about two of my favorite songs. The song Once in A Lifetime is probably the most famous Talking Heads song (according to wikipedia, it's been referenced by every fucking thing on the planet) and for good reason. Here, lets get a youtube.



The lyrics, though, are what really sell the song to me.

Many bands have written condemnations of society and modern and normal life. Punk rock is based on a rejection of a society as a whole. Most of the groups that do love normal life tend to be of the saccharine sort, like the Carpenters or the Beatles's greatest sin, “When I'm Sixty-Four”, where everyone holds hands in a Norman Rockwell painting. Very few have that singular quality of real honesty and truth.

Not so in this song. The character suddenly falls in the middle of a midlife crisis and wakes up and sees his home and Bryne says:

“And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!”

It's about that slow acceptance all of our parents had to go through, to give up the politics and drinking on weekdays and the fucking and the drugs and the nights on the internet (figured I should relate it to the audience) and being, god forbid, normal. But while the character panics, he does accept at the end that guess what; it's not selling out when you're truly happy and that's the question we all have to ask.

We all give up little aspects of ourselves as life goes on; you'd be dead by now if you didn't. Bryne CELEBRATES that process. He recognizes it as powerful and scary and inevitable, but in the end, the wife is beautiful. The house is too. There is balm in Gilead. One of the best songs about being middle class and scared, and beautiful to boot.

Where “Once in a Lifetime” is beauty in American middle class life, “Listening Wind” is the horror of American intervention. It's chilling when we consider the current administration's policies with foreign lands because this is what's really going on here. Mojique is a terrorist. And the listening wind is God. And interestingly enough, we don't quite sympathize with him, but we understand him. It's like Bryne saw into the future with this song, because it's incredibly prescient.



Mojique sees his village from a nearby hill
Mojique thinks of the days before Americans came
He sees the foreigners in growing numbers
He sees the foreigners in fancy houses
He thinks of the days that he can still remember...now.

Mojique holds a package in his quivering hands
Mojique sends the package to the American man
Softly, he glides along the streets and alleys
Up comes the wind that makes them run for cover
He feels the time is surely now or never...more.

It's a terrifying song and absolutely chilling in today's political climate.

That's just two songs off the album, both incredibly different and relevant still today. It's rare you can find even one song like that on an album nowadays. Remain In Light is FULL of them. Absolutely fantastic album, powerful in every way, and almost more importantly, it's actually good music. But you know, David Bryne and Brian Eno are pretty much the biggest names from the 80s. Which goes to the second part of the article

Why Doesn't GW Talk About This?

Part of it is that most of GW wasn't around when this album came out. Most of us weren't born, so when someone says THE BIG SUIT RULES, we tend to blink and look confused. A lot of GW is also European, and so their parents don't bring up Talking Heads. Oh, and that's another thing; most of our parents, probably not huge music people to begin with, were busy getting ready to have kids, not listen to music. Talking Heads came at that point between generations where we were too young and our parents were too old, so most of us missed them. It requires either meeting an older music fan or someone like me who did meet an older music fan, because while people namedrop Talking Heads, people namedrop all sorts of horrible shit from back then.

Why Would GW Like This?

If you like fucking MUSIC you will like Remain In Light. If you don't, then you won't. Honestly, it was so influential on post-punk, New Wave, and culturally infused music. It's the counter to Graceland's coopting of African music; a genuine mix instead of forced overlaying of musical styles. Absolutely fantastic album.

Talk about the Talking Heads and Remain In Light now!