Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 08.10.1980
The conflict in music between what was intellectually conceived and what was emotionally felt was reaching its peak. As disco continued to dominate music made for dancing, rock was approaching the greatest possible degree of theoretical sincerity.
Although they were a new wave band, "Talking Heads" operated within New York's broader punk scene, which sought music that was felt rather than merely performed.
And yet "Talking Heads" were conspicuously artificial. David Byrne made his approach to both songwriting and performance as unnatural as possible.
He wrote Dadaist lyrics about parking lots and fire. His voice cracked and twisted through unnatural modulations that frustrated melody. Onstage, his movements suggested nervousness, but nervousness executed with precision. When he danced, he looked as though he were making fun of dancing.
In short, he acted like a fake.
His fakery was so consistent, its logic so persistently clear, that it became a convincing public identity. Onstage and on record, there was no part of Byrne that was not himself. As a result, his artificiality came to seem like the height of sincerity.
That was precisely the essence of "Talking Heads", whose artistic artifice felt more sincere than much of American culture. The band's development can be understood as a continuous layering of devices and disguises. While other punk bands pursued authenticity by stripping things away, "Talking Heads" kept evolving.
African polyrhythms, Brian Eno, Fela Kuti, fear of music? After their previous album, "Fear of Music", had offered a glimpse into the world of African rhythms, it seemed that Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison would need to make a radical change of direction.
Influenced by Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, they combined African polyrhythms and funk with electronics, recording instrumental tracks as a series of looping grooves. The session musicians included guitarist Adrian Belew, singer Nona Hendryx and trumpeter Jon Hassell.
Eno remained a dominant presence in the work of "Talking Heads" for a third consecutive album. This time, however, he and the band faced a higher hurdle. After songs built on intuitive writing and subjects such as paranoia, Byrne found that his fears and eccentricities had finally blown up in his face.
Writer's block was preventing him, and the band, from moving forward. "Talking Heads" were aware of the emergence of a new musical current called hip-hop. Unexpectedly, it was hip-hop that would help Byrne overcome his block and lead him and the band toward the promising safe harbor of "Remain in Light", their fourth album, released on October 8, 1980.
Meanwhile, drummer Frantz and bassist Weymouth, a married couple, discussed leaving "Talking Heads" after Weymouth argued that Byrne was too controlling. Frantz did not want to leave, and the two took an extended Caribbean vacation to reflect on the state of both the band and their marriage. They attended Vodou ceremonies in Haiti, practiced local percussion instruments and spent time with reggae duo "Sly and Robbie".
Frantz and Weymouth ended their vacation by purchasing an apartment above "Compass Point" studios in Nassau, the Bahamas. Byrne joined the couple and Harrison there in early 1980.
The band members realized that songwriting had largely been Byrne's responsibility up to that point, and that they had grown tired of the idea of being a singer and a backing band. The ideal they sought, in Byrne's words, was "sacrificing our egos for mutual cooperation".
Instead of writing music to Byrne's lyrics, the band performed extended instrumental jams, using "I Zimbra" from "Fear of Music" as their foundation.
According to psychoanalyst Michael A. Brog, the eight songs on "Remain in Light" have a "striking free-associative feel", with no sustained train of thought to follow through their stream-of-consciousness lyrics.
Byrne was encouraged to experiment and give himself greater freedom in his lyrics, and was reminded that rational thinking has its limits. He began finding a way out of his difficulties through rap passages inspired by the emerging hip-hop genre, particularly Kurtis Blow's single "The Breaks", which Frantz had played for him.
Byrne drew inspiration from African mythologies and rhythms. The principal literary influence on the lyrics was John Miller Chernoff's "African Rhythm and African Sensibility", which examined how music enriches life in rural African communities.
Chernoff traveled to Ghana in 1970 to study local percussion, and wrote about the ways Africans conduct complex conversations through drum patterns.
"The Great Curve" illustrates this African theme with the line "The world moves on a woman's hips", which Byrne used after reading Robert Farris Thompson's "African Art in Motion". The album touches on subjects such as the passage of time, the elusive nature of truth, life's uncertainty and the individual's struggle to find purpose. Through mysterious lyrics and evocative imagery, "Talking Heads" explore universal themes while leaving room for personal interpretation and introspection.
"Remain in Light" has been described in many different ways, including new wave, post-punk, worldbeat, dance-rock, art pop, art rock, avant-pop, Afrobeat and psychedelic funk. Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it a dense blend of African percussion, funk bass and keyboards, pop songs and electronics.
"Talking Heads" used the working title "Melody Attack" throughout the studio process after watching a Japanese game show of the same name. According to Harrison, the band's ambition was to combine rock and African musical forms rather than simply imitate African music.
Eno's production techniques and personal approach were central to the album's conception. The process was designed to encourage instinct and spontaneity without becoming overly preoccupied with the sound of the finished product.
Eno compared the creative process to looking out at the world, marveling at the extraordinary place we live in and deciding to celebrate it. Instrumental sections were recorded one at a time in a deliberately discontinuous process.
Loops played a crucial role at a time when computers could not yet handle such functions adequately. "Talking Heads" developed "Remain in Light" by recording jams, isolating the best passages and learning to play them over and over.
The basic tracks focused entirely on rhythm and followed a minimalist approach built around a single chord. Each section was recorded as an extended loop, allowing compositions to be assembled by positioning or combining loops in different ways. Byrne likened the process to modern sampling: "We were human samplers."
The album's opening track, "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", draws its style from preaching, shouting and bursts of speech. The phrase "And the Heat Goes On", used in the title and repeated in the chorus, came from a "New York Post" headline Eno read in the summer of 1980.
Belew joined the sessions at New York's "Sigma Sound" studios after Byrne and Harrison met him at a club in the city and invited him to play. He contributed guitar to "Crosseyed and Painless", a track that leaps from nonsense into dream logic. What begins as an idea becomes, in its fullest expression, a feeling.
"Talking Heads" were among the first American bands to make music videos before MTV went on the air. Videos were made for "Once in a Lifetime" and "Crosseyed and Painless" from "Remain in Light". Both were directed by Toni Basil, with Byrne sharing directing duties on "Once in a Lifetime". In 1982, Basil became an MTV star herself with the hit "Mickey".
"Once in a Lifetime" examines a life lived almost on autopilot, until the moment someone stops and asks how they arrived at their house, their family and the reality they inhabit. Like trying to remove the water from the bottom of the ocean, there is no way to stop life from moving forward.
Byrne shed some light on his lyrical inspiration when he explained that much of the song's language came from evangelical preachers he recorded from the radio, taking notes and collecting phrases that suggested interesting directions. He wondered whether his fascination with the middle class came from how different that way of life seemed from his own, and how far removed it was from what he did, to the point that he could not imagine living that way himself.
The track was originally called "Weird Guitar Riff Song" because of its composition. It began with a single riff before the band added a second. Eno alternated eight bars of each riff with the corresponding bars of the other.
There is something galvanizing about "Remain in Light", both as dance music and as a form of expression. In "Seen and Not Seen", Byrne imagines a man changing his appearance by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed at the back of his mind.
It is an absurd commentary on the nature of vanity, yet it also declares a touching faith in the power of artistic will, a faith the album rewards. "Houses in Motion" incorporates extended brass passages from Hassell.
"Listening Wind" features influences from Arabic music, with Belew adding sonic textures through an "Electric Mistress" effect and bending the sound. The lyrics, meanwhile, sympathetically portray a man carrying out acts of terrorism against the Americans who have settled in his country, in response to their colonialism.
In a 2004 interview with the "Sunday Herald", Byrne described the song as partly reflecting his understanding of the motivations behind terrorism. He explained that the reasons America was not universally loved had been clear to him for years, while many Americans preferred to assume it was a matter of jealousy or a desire to adopt the American way of life.
The closing track, "The Overload", features tribal-industrial rhythms created mainly by Harrison and Byrne, alongside Belew's growling guitar atmosphere. It has been regarded as "Talking Heads"' tribute to "Joy Division".
According to the familiar story of the track's creation, the band tried to imagine the sound of the gloomy Manchester quartet from the reviews they had read in the music press rather than from listening to its records. They were so fascinated by those descriptions that they decided to try it anyway.
The album presents an artistic vision so strange, so alien to what came before it yet so assured in behaving like the culmination of a long tradition, that it seems to proclaim the power of strangeness itself. To be not merely strange but unique, to reinvent a form in a way people can dance to, is the inner thrill of art. We want to deny it on theoretical grounds, but we cannot. So we have to change our theories.
Weymouth and Frantz conceived the album artwork with the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Walter Bender and his "ArcMac" team, the precursor to the MIT Media Lab. Taking inspiration from "Melody Attack", the couple created a collage of red warplanes flying in formation over the Himalayas.
The planes are an artistic depiction of "Grumman Avenger" aircraft honoring Weymouth's father, Ralph Weymouth, an admiral in the US Navy. The original idea for the back cover featured simple portraits of the band members. Weymouth visited MIT regularly during the summer of 1980 and worked with Bender's colleague Scott Fisher on computer renderings of their ideas.
The process was cumbersome because computing power was limited in the early 1980s, and the mainframe alone occupied several rooms. Weymouth and Fisher shared a fascination with masks and used the concept to experiment with the portraits, obscuring the faces with blocks of red. When the album's title changed to "Remain in Light", the portraits became the front cover, while the planes were moved to the back.
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