The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 20

Talking Heads
More Songs About Buildings and Food

Let's be clear about something. Saturday Night Fever was released at the end of 1977, and the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever pretty much owned entire chunks of 1978's musical landscape. But underneath all that, in the realm where music nerds gauge the world by calendar release and not by distinct day-to-day impact, Saturday Night Fever was still 1977, with 1978 owned by one dude and one dude alone. This isn't the first time he's shown up on this list, and it won't be the last, but here he is, the man who was, the man who remains: Brian Eno.

Okay, that should probably be more like this: Brian Motherfucking Eno.

His work with the Talking Heads started with More Songs About Buildings and Food, although it's sort of besides the point to admit that a huge quantity of the 70's musical landscape wasn't in some form of artistic negoiation with Eno at the time. (After all, Before and After Science had showed up at the tail end of 1977, people were still dealing with Roxy Music and he had plenty more to come.) Eno's work with the Heads serves also as the beginning of a period of time where the Talking Heads released albums that could do no wrong. They'd started out rough--anyone who had seen them live couldn't stop talking about it, and yet their only prior release, Talking Heads '77, was considered a bare glimpse at who they would eventually become, which might just be one of the most emblematic bands of the early 80's. The Talking Heads--a band composed in 1978 of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz & Jerry Harrison--weren't the first to combine multiple strands of music into a sort of proto-post-punk pop, but by the late 70's, nobody who wasn't making straight punk, pure disco or classic dub was still allowing themselves to be dictated by the listener-imposed labels of genre. One of the trivia answers that makes the Talking Heads so remarkable was how they transitioned between the style of the time into what was soon to be the style of the future, wherein bands unwilling to make music videos and explore intricate multimedia concert epics would find themselves relegated to the "classic" (read 'old') category. The Heads also paved the road for bands like Radiohead and Wilco in that bizarro category that is "bands that critics worship while also being liked by normal people". For better or--actually, fuck it, it's just "for better"--the Talking Heads, with and without Eno as their production mastermind, popularized a model that became the norm: make great music that people who don't care about great music can dance and sing along with while staying true to whatever artistic muse it was that captured that moment's attention. In other words, Eno never tried to simplify what David Byrne's poetic lyrics contained--even if those messages could come off as being more than a little depressing--but he never tried to conceal it, either. In the same way that Ronald Reagan blurted out witticisms while thinking that "Born In The USA" was a song about love-of-country despite the lyrics clearly pointing towards the anguish of betrayal, More Songs About Buildings and Food was celebrated by thousands with little more than a wink and nod to the unsettling, loveless relationship saved through imagined employment at the heart of "Found a Job" or the creepy come-on line of "I've got money now, I've got money now" from "Warning Sign". Predating Tricky's "...and now they call me superstar" by almost two decades, Byrne's biting sarcasm didn't just became popular, it wormed its way into becoming the distilled truth of the '80's: we don't care about you, or them--it's all about "me" getting paid and laid. Did it matter that the Byrne was being just as playful with self-centeredness as he was at playing crazy on '77's "Psycho Killer"? No, but then again--it was only the critics who were trying to figure him out anyway. Those cats are joyless pricks.

Of course, with the dust of history and the onslaught of archival releases amongst us, we can certainly look to different explanations--part of the darkness of the songs is assumed to come from the people in the band not named Brian or David feeling a bit shuttled around, and Byrne's cryptic explanation of his own writing--that his lyrics contained no "hidden messages" only serves to confuse the explanation further. That is, as always, why the call it the "dust" of history though. There's only one reason shit gets dusty: because you let it sit there for too long. Rectify.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[Chris Jones]

In many ways I think this should probably be higher.

(In many ways, I'm not sure how many albums I've heard from 1978 and I'm too lazy to look)

[Marty]

I think that'd probably be the general consensus, and, while we considered putting it higher, we felt that 1) each of the albums above it had something over it, and 2) there are other albums in Talking Heads' body of work that are more representative of how awesome they are--like Fear of Music and Remain in the Light.