Pop Appeal and Post Punk

as for backing up my assertion that more people know the heads than the fall is just my observations in daily life. in college (just a few years ago) people could reference the heads on the spot. a lot of people loved psycho killer and burning down the house, but if I meanted the fall or mission of burma or any of those other bands, they had either never heard of them or new nothing by them.

It just seems that the heads might have had more pop appeal and their weirdness was a bit more digestible.

hope that sets up the parameters, but feel free to beat me up on this one.

-oh and yeah blondie for sure is more popular than the heads. how could i forget that one. i guess that makes my arguement flawed.

-and the reason i say "not among critics and audiofiles" is simply because critics and audiofiles know the other bands i have mentioned but most people not obsessed with music don't. talking heads certainly were one of the greatest pop bands of all time. no doubt.

If the Heads had remained as deliberately abrasive, arty and abstract as their first four records, they'd be just as obscure as the other post-punk luminaries mentioned... But they didn't. By incorporating funk, world music, straightforward pop, wide-eyed optimism and even outright sentimentality (if only for subversive effect), they enabled themselves to speak to a much broader audience. And they were never afraid to play up the cuddly qualities of their weirdness. FWIW, Flaming Lips have acheived similar success by doing very much the same thing.

After all, I can't imagine the members of any of the other bands mentioned being involved with anything as effervescent and universally appealing as "Genius of Love."

Compared to "And She Was", "Stay Up Late", "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)", "Road to Nowhere", and even "Burning Down the House", the early material can be quite angular, harsh and even abrasive. I'm not calling the sound abrasive in comparison to Merzbow, of course, but in comparison to pop radio - even new wave pop radio - it's hardly ear candy.

The first two records are jerky, wiry, tense, nervous and even deliberately annoying. Fear of Music is forbiddingly dark and dense, and contains some of the most "difficult" sounds they ever recorded ("Memories Can't Wait", "Drugs"). Sure, it's pop, but it isn't comfortable pop. Same can be said of Remain In Light.

With Speaking In Tongues, however, they began to turn a corner towards "real pop." Not just catchy music cloaked in arty abstractions, but pop so insistent and universal that its "art music" costuming becomes secondary. Little Creatures completed this transformation, and was another HUGE hit.

Can't underestimate the power of their visual art, either. Stop Making Sense and the iconic "Once In a Lifetime" video probably have as much to do with the band's longevity in the public imagination as their music.

Here's the Billboard top ten from that year. Try to get your head into this mindset, and then think about More Songs:

Andy Gibb - Shadow Dancing
Bee Gees - Night Fever
Debby Boone - You Light Up My Life
Bee Gees - Stayin Alive
Exile - Kiss You All Over
Bee Gees - How Deep Is Your Love
Player - Baby Come Back
Andy Gibb - (love Is) Thicker Than Water
A Taste Of Honey - Boogie Oogie Oogie
Commodores - Three Times A Lady

The Heads' music is thin and comparatively underproduced. Drums chop and guitars sound like thin sheets of aluminum foil. Byrne's voice is awkward and nasal, whooping and stuttering in odd time with the music. He's not smoothly inviting you into a dimly lit forward cabin with the promise of silk sheets and champagne. He's wigging out on speed in a parking garage.

It's an extraordinarily anxious and frentic sound. In the context of a pop era defined by the likes of Helen Reddy, I think it's perfectly reasonable to characterize this approach as deliberately abrasive and annoying. Hell, those qualities are what make 'em punk...

Huh?

To my ears, MSABAF sounds a lot like that stuff you listed. It's not really that different. Talking Heads are the stuff that sounds closest to the chart you listed versus the other legitimately abrasive/deliberately annyoing bands at top of thread. Take Me To The River charted and it was played over and over on the classic rock stations I grew up listening to and it was not wedged in between "City Hobgoblins" or "Natural's Not In It."

And I mentioned Helen Reddy 'cuz she had tons of hits throughout the 70s (three number ones between '71 and '78), and her approach is fairly representative of what sold back then. Not uniquely representative, but still...

Anyway, I agree that the Talking Heads were always far less abrasive than the Fall, Wire, Pere Ubu, Mission of Burma, etc. That's probably why they generated more hits, and in the process, more fans to keep the memory alive. But they do display many of the qualities that safegaurd the outsider status of less well-known post-punk bands.

My point is that they shed their arty standoffishness as they matured. And that (combined with great visuals and memorable songwriting, of course) is why they became so widely popular.

FWIW, I think most of the material on More Songs would sound much more at home slotted between "City Hobgoblins" and "Cloud 149" than between "I Love You Just the Way You Are" and "Hopelessly Devoted to You" (two other big hits in '78).

But that's just me...

Really? You really think More Songs About Buildings and Food sounds like "You Light Up My Life" and "Three Times a Lady"? 'Cuz I sure don't.

No. I didn't say that. I said it's not really that different from the stuff on your list. It sounds closer to the things on your list (Bee Gees, Andy Gibb) than Pere Ubu, The Fall, etc.

"The Modern Dance" and "Cloud 149" sound like they could have been on More Songs. The Fall, of course, ride champion in the annoying/abrasive sweepstakes, but saying that the early Talking Heads have more in common with the Bee Gees than with post-punk is mind-boggling to me.

Listen to their rhythm sections.

By incorporating funk, world music, straightforward pop, wide-eyed optimism and even outright sentimentality

They were incorporating some of this stuff starting with their second album (for the funk/pop/optimism), and the rest by their third. And even then, their later records didn't incorporate those elements at the expense of abrasiveness, artiness or abstraction ("Girlfriend is Better," "Swamp," &c.) (but even then TH were never that abrasive/abstract/arty)

And even then, since when have abrasiveness, artiness or abstraction become reasons that groups remain unpopular? (Or for that matter, funk + world music + optimisim + pop != popular)

Dude, wait, I did not phrase that correctly. Sorry.

I mean: if you played that top 40 list of yours and slipped in a song from More Buildings in the set it would not seem that out of place. If, however, you played your top 40 list above and slipped in, say, City Hobgoblins in between How Deep Is Your Love and Stayin Alive, you would really notice the difference.

Before = quirky new wave band, minor chart success w/ "Burning Down The House", semi-famous weirdos, kind of like Wall of Voodoo after "Mexican Radio"

After = multi-platinum superstars, you couldn't go a day without hearing them 4x on the fucking radio for an entire year

The success of Stop Making Sense didn't hurt, either.

But that's obvious at the outset, and says nothing about how the bands in question related to the pop moment they shared.

It's easy to see that the Talking Heads were always more pop-inclined than the Fall. But the difference (in overall sound, aesthetics, cultural significance and audience) between More Songs About Buildings and Food and the Bee Gees is vaster still.

It's easy to look back and say, "Wow! The early Talking Heads sure were funky, weren't they?" And thereby to see their similiarity to the funk and disco pop acts of their day. While the observation is valid, it's hardly the only significant thing we might notice about the band.

David Byrne's lyrics and vocal approach were very much at odds with prevailing pop styles. The band was deliberately awkward, anxious, critical and even angry. They positioned themselves in opposition to perceived social norms. They were relentlessly intellectual and ironic. While their antisocial vitriol was usually constrained by an almost pathological emotional vacancy, it came through loud and clear.

The band was profoundly geeky and strange. They flaunted their cool/uncool alienation and sense of intellectual superiority. They expressed outright disgust with bourgeous values ("The Big Country"). I think the commonalities between the approaches of David Byrne and Mark E. Smith are just as valid, if not more valid, than the fact that the rythm section really liked to get down.

Well, among other things, the Heads positioned themselves in opposition not necessarily to the "norms" (or whatever) but quite specifically to the CBGBs crowd. Their "relentless" intellectualism was (to my knowledge) cultivated as a rebellion against Ramones-style scruffiness and ignorance ("cheeseburgers" or whatever).

But more importantly, all those attributes--the cool/uncool, the geeky/strange--were cultivated as image. I agree that much of that comes across in the music, but even so, just because the Heads were "smarter" than the Bee-Gees (which I think is a bad comparison--I think Kool & the Gang or Parliament are much closer in sound to TH) doesn't mean their music was closer to the Fall. And frankly, it's easy to listen to Heads records and say "Wow! Funky!" but that's because they were funk, and very consciously so. At the time, TH were listening to funk and disco and not Joy Division or whatever.

Really, I think all the proof you need is that fact that the Heads charted, and the Fall didn't. I don't know what "prevailing pop styles" were, or if there even was such a thing, but if there was, the Heads must have had something to do with it because they had hits.

While the Talking Heads may have chosen their stance in opposition to the rocker-cool and anti-intellectualism of the burgeoning NYC punk scene, they wrote songs that criticized mainstream American culture. "The Big Country", "Don't Worry About the Government", etc. Maybe if you were in the punk scene, you could see how anti-punk they were. But from outside that scene, they simply read as punk, weird, and antisocial.

Kool & the Gang were asking to be embraced by the world. That's the vibe. Both The Fall and (the early) Talking Heads, on the other hand, were standing at a distance from the world, judging it, and mocking its supposedly lame conventions and conventionalism.

That the Fall played a fragmented version of punk rock in doing this, while the Talking Heads chose funk and disco doesn't alter the fact that they were both operating in a very similar manner with regard to society and the audience.

Is that social stance MORE important than the music itself? Absolutely not. But the punk movement (and, by extention, the "post-punk movement) had a great deal to do with social stances.

What I'm trying to get across is that by "warming up" over time, the Talking Heads were eventually able to connect more directly with the pop audience.

In case you don't have a dictionary handy.

It's dead now, isn't it?