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The Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s

#07: Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime

In his paper “‘Living Turned Inside Out’: The Musical Expression of Psychotic and Schizoid Experience in Talking Heads’ Remain in Light”* Michael A. Brog claims that the cover of Remain in Light, with the blotched over and obscured images of the band, “suggests both splitting and obliteration of identity”, providing listeners with a first warning of the experience that follows. I’ve always found the cover striking, of course, but like the Polaroid mosaic of More Songs about Buildings and Food, it always struck me as a joke: “Seen and Unseen” is about willing yourself into physically changing your appearance to meet an ideal and waking up one day unable to recognize the person you’ve become. The cover is an airbrushed glamor shot Talking Heads-style: a gross parody that exposes the latent self-mutilation of image politics.

As I’ve mentioned several times in passing here, Remain In Light is the greatest album of all time. Like any statement about the “greatest” something, this is a contentious opinion, but it’s not a controversial pick either because Remain In Light is such a singular statement of presence, intent and vision that it’s an unambiguous classic. Remain is not perfect; it has fillery tracks, yes, but the above-mentioned “Seen and Unseen” for example has enough thematic value and musical quirk to contribute to the album’s distinctive gestalt. The problem for me is that this album is ineffably great and significant; how do I talk about the album in a mere blog post? Liveblog it. Gameplan: Write everything I can during one listen of the album.

But isn’t this post about the song “Once In A Lifetime”? Yes, but that song is the centerpiece of the album, and you can’t deprive it of its context! The first three tracks make up a worldbeat orgy wherein Byrne (1) wrestles with violence and goes crazy, (2) confronts knowledge and raps about facts, and (3) relates the curve of our planet to the curves on a woman and forges a postpunk creation story: “The world moves on a woman’s hips”. The meaning of life? I’d buy it, although the stray oracular insight comes at the peak of side one’s manic polyrhythmic freakout—is it Byrne or the character talking? Or is that question redundant?

Side two forms a cool-down period, but it’s entropic—“the heat goes on” of track one does not go on, and we end in a cold void. “Once In A Lifetime” finds Byrne performing the role of televangelist. Christgau called it the greatest song Byrne will ever write when he reviewed the album. The character is not too removed from the talking head that Byrne and Eno sample the following year on My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’ “America Is Waiting”—in fact, I’ve started to think of Byrne’s performances on Remain as a precursor to the junk culture “mash-up” of Bush of Ghosts: Instead of sampling the multitude of signals around him, Byrne just embodies the impulses: relaying and repeating messages, modulated and distorted, flipping channels and frequencies, one of a million signals seeking our attention. That the albums ends with—wait for it—an impersonation of Joy Division is not ironic; it’s kind of the point. “The Overload” is the inevitable defeat, necessary because it completes the course of entropy, but it’s also a final stray signal. It’s actually quite funny: a warped and blinded tribute to Joy Division gives the Talking Heads their own end-of-the-world album-Closer.

Speaking of signals, Remain In Light gets of a lot of praise for being defiantly world music and bridging the black-white rock gap. After the anxiety and insularity of Fear of Music, however, the Talking Heads had nowhere else to go but outwards into world music and raw noise. The album does both, but they keep the adventurer spirit in check. “House In Motion” explores the existential vertigo of constant travel and visual stimulus, while “Listening Wind” reveals how cultural piracy and touristic appropriation engender terrorism: To make “world” music defines and exploits a source, and an authentic homage might demand questionable sympathies. This is the final frontier, but take some care with the music!

And this is why Byrne seizes the opportunity and forges a motivational sermon about water on “Once In A Lifetime”. The character is too good to waste on pithy observations or satire, but even though the song does both. The water is a metaphor for “go with the flow”, and that’s the message of the song. It’s a celebration of life and living, but it also celebrates how materialism and middle-class aspirations are problems we all share. Life can have no meaning, but when has that not been the case? I don’t know who I am anymore, but that happens to everyone! Words of inspiration from postpunk’s greatest doppelganger.

*The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol 62, Num 2, June 2002.