![]() ![]() ![]() The Heads’ ecstasy has always been both sincere and calculated, and when David Byrne self-diagnoses with some sort of Asperger’s, a few chapters into How Music Works, you nod. He's tense and nervous and he can't relax The opening scene, Byrne toddling bug-eyed onto a bare stage with his boom box to squawk his way through Psycho Killer, is iconic - but as musician after musician is wheeled on to join him it gets bigger, and impossibly big and, finally, some sort of religious experience. Their great magic trick is that they can make ironic performance art about rocking out, but also legitimately rock out, at the exact same time. ![]() In Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert video ever filmed, the Talking Heads both celebrate and subvert the act of performing. (Later when a solo Byrne makes it explicit with Rei Momo, it’s like a comedian explaining his joke I lose interest.) Years before Graceland, the Heads were sampling world music. I’m a tumbler." Behind him the Talking Heads hijack Afropop, hip hop, funk. "You may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife,'" he suggests insidiously. Like a caricature of an amateur weatherman. He stands up there twitching and tweaking and exhorting, like an amateur weatherman who thinks too much about his hands. ![]()
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