It was only a matter of time before I used this picture, wasn't it? Today's agenda, coming back after my indulgent hiatus, is reviewing Talking Heads' Remain in Light, the best album of the 80s. In many ways it's a very visionary album, both in terms of its willingness to combine African polyrhythms with Talking Heads' already-unique sound and its early use (thanks, Brian Eno!) of advanced production and effects. Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold described the ideal combination of intelligence and beauty as "sweetness and light;" in our more enlightened age, there's only one way to describe an album like Remain in Light: thebomb.com.
Things start off with a bang in the opening track, “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)”. A deathbed confession, Byrne deliriously defends himself as a “government man” during a fever dream, clearly trying to make amends for past misdeeds as his guilt catches up to him. The government man’s epiphany is his guilt, as he realizes how many people he’s hurt now that he’s hurting himself. In a theme that we’ll see again in “Once in a Lifetime,” our narrator has kept “one step ahead of [himself],” and now death is forcing him to catch up. What really impresses me about the song is how incredibly lifelike Byrne’s character is (“I’m not a drowning man!” and other feverish outbursts only enhance the verisimilitude), and how sympathetic he remains despite clearly having done reprehensible things in the past. “And the Heat Goes On,” the headline of a newspaper Byrne saw, is a classic example of him using something with a strong subconscious resonance to help convey the mindset of his character (in this case, a reminder of the pain and inevitability of the character’s fever).
The next three songs don’t break this theme of continuing revelations and change. “Crosseyed and Painless,” another of the album’s many highlights, focuses on a person who has realized that his assumptions about life were ultimately wrong, and who is now living in a world of flux where he can’t trust any facts (“There was a line/there was a formula/Sharp as a knife,/facts cut a hole in us”). “The Great Curve” is a moment of relative lightness, an extremely funky look at a person left awestruck by a woman who’s walked past him and who is “moving to define” the world for him (“The world moves on a woman’s hips”). “Houses in Motion” is yet another paranoid revelation from someone who’s “noticed that there’s nothing around” him. His life is just “walking a line, just barely enough to be living,” another example in the album of a person in an extreme state of flux.
Next up is the best song David Byrne will ever write, “Once in a Lifetime.” With lyrics taken from a sermon Byrne heard on the radio, “Once in a Lifetime” is the thesis statement of the album. The “sermon” in the song is a series of revelations, slowly climaxing in the question, “My God, what have I done?” Despite Byrne’s emotion when he shouts it, the lyric isn’t in reaction to some great misdeed, but a rumination on what exactly the listener has done. Have we lived life only doing, never thinking? Do we really appreciate not only the people and things around us, but our own motivations? I used to think that this song was a miniature story-song about someone drowning himself (“Let the water hold me down”) after having this crushing revelation about being dissatisfied with his materialistic life. Now, though, I think it’s just an open proposition from Byrne to his listeners, reinforced those great subconscious suggestions (“Time isn’t holding up/Time is an asterisk”), to think about their lives instead of staying ahead of them.
“Seen and Not Seen” is yet another revelation, as well as the most poignant song on the album. Nowhere on the album is the music as effective in conveying mood, alternating between being worrying and comforting to convey the conflicted emotions of the character Byrne describes. He’s a person who has embraced “an ideal appearance” that he thinks will make him happy, unlike the people around him, who have made their choices of appearance based on a “childish whim” or “momentary impulse.” His revelation, however, is that “he too might have made a similar mistake,” a commentary on how crushingly superficial, sad, and unfortunately how common this person’s experience must be.
The final two songs are “Listening Wind” and “The Overload,” and they are, in my opinion, two of the (relatively speaking) weaker songs on the album. The former is about a young terrorist’s compunctions about murdering the Americans who have invaded his country, and his search for inner peace. The latter is Talking Heads’ unrelentingly dark impression of a Joy Division song, having heard the band described to them but never having listened to them. Both songs are pretty strong in their own right (especially “Listening Wind”), but don’t contribute much to the overall themes of the album.
Remain in Light is a desperate attempt from Byrne and the gang to get their listeners thinking about their lives, so that they can avoid ending up like the subjects of their songs. In trying to make their music more universal, they adapted the deep Afrobeat rhythms of Fela Kuti and combined them with their unique Western aesthetics (something that Byrne and Eno had already done on their side album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts). The result is a one-of-a-kind and deeply affecting album whose message amounts to, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
cool stuff, like your interpretation
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