6. Talking Heads: 77 (1977)

I can’t imagine I’m alone in having heard 77 way after I’d already fallen in love with the band, à la Stop Making Sense and the Eno-produced monoliths. I even had a T-shirt that simulated the album cover, that awful red presiding with the album title in bar-light neon green. When I bought it, I thought it was just the year Talking Heads had formed.

Years later, “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” arrived in my life via mix CD from a friend, and I was floored. I recognized David Byrne but wondered if he’d tried to cover the Jackson Five — and by chance something had gone horribly right. Weymouth’s bass playing was a lot worse than Jermaine’s, much less any of Motown’s hired guns. But that is the immediate early victory of Talking Heads. Post-punk, new wave, whatever you want to call them — in entering the house of music, they squeezed through the same doorframe as a spate of radicals performing downtown, borrowing and lending, all parties writing some pretty weird shit.

The ethos of punk musicians — bands that actually did worry about the government or claim to be psycho killers — initially manifested itself in their physical manhandling of (or perhaps disgust with) their instruments, a rejection of the way the world had asked them to play. With 77, Talking Heads only slightly build it back up: musicianship is back, though still deflated. Instead, song form gets the punk treatment and is left totally wacked out.

The high school-level playing on “New Feeling” and “Tentative Decisions” speaks volumes to the band’s initial refusal to play a certain kind of pop music, though to take from it liberally. “Love Buildings On Fire” (Read: Love Goes To Buildings On Fire) vastly predates unwavering, exuberant DFA anthems, where “Who Is It?” is barely a song at all, sounding more like a fun sonic experiment.

Make no mistake, though, there’s no lack of intellectualism at work. These songs are beautiful, revealing a predisposition to whimsy and a kind of psychically broken lyric that would pervade Talking Heads’ music: it takes a stab at the concerns of both pop music and the people that listen to it.

My building has every convenience 


It’s gonna make life easy for me 


It’s gonna be easy to get things done 


I will relax along with my loved ones