The band Talking Heads are about to reissue their groundbreaking second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, which was first released in 1977. The Super Deluxe Edition from Rhino comes as the band celebrates its 50th anniversary.
It’s a good moment for the Talking Heads to re-emerge, because they have always represented the creative vitality of pop music — and the ability of New York, and America, to revitalize itself. The band’s ethos fits the Trump era and the new pro-American populism.
In his new book Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock, Jonathan Gould argues that when the Heads emerged in 1970s New York the city, and the country, were hungry for hope and positive energy. The punk rock scene was fun and energetic but also limited.
“[Singer] Richard Hell was essentially a style icon masquerading as a rock singer,” Gould writes, “while the Dead Boys, who had arrived in New York from Cleveland over the summer, were tuneless Stooges acolytes with an alarming penchant for Nazi paraphernalia.” An ad by the Heads’ label Sire announced, “Don’t Call It Punk.”
Gould notes that “in a proud but demoralized metropolis that was hungry for ways to celebrate itself, the New York press, from the Times to the Voice to the SoHo Weekly News, hailed the release of Talking Heads: 77 as the work of hometown heroes.” One reviewer, after seeing the band live, derailed them as looking like “Republicans, playing courteously toned-down music.” Another described them tongue-in-cheek as “the great Ivy League hope of pop music.”
Writing in Sounds, British journalist Vivien Goldman praised the vibe of bassist Tina Weymouth: “Tina’s haughtiness when faced with people who give her a hard time is more threatening than screaming or yelling; it’s born of a deep-down awareness of position and privilege, both natural and social.”
Weymouth’s cool response to the hysteria of a lot of the punks is similar to the way conservatives have learned to respond to the hysterical Left. Conservatives don’t yell back at the Left as much as calmly reassert the value of patriotism, hard work, literacy, and talent over DEI.
While Gould and the music writers at the time who praised the Talking Heads went to great lengths to separate the band from punk rock, it’s important to remember that the best punk rock of the 1970s and 1980s was about questioning liberalism as much as any socialist vision of “social justice.”
In a piece in the Washington Examiner, Daniel Wattenberg, who had been part of the New York punk scene in the 1970s, describes it well: “New York punks were unapologetic about their comfortable suburban origins, playful and irreverent in tone, and pretty affirmative about modern American life. Indeed, in many ways, New York punk represented a first skirmish within American popular culture with the then-gathering forces of political correctness.”
This was true of the scene when I was a college student in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. My favorite band, the Replacements, ridiculed androgyny and blasted corporate MTV as fake and boring. The Dead Kennedys, sneered at rich, clueless liberals in “Hop with the Jet Set”:
“We’ll save the whales
We’ll watch them feed,
Buzz around them in boats
‘Til they won’t breed
Just here for the ride
Then we hop with the jet set tonight.”
Johnny Ramone of the Ramones once said: “People drift towards liberalism at a young age, and I always hope they change when they see how the world really is.” Ian Curtis, the singer of the seminal band Joy Division, voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Tony Hadle, the singer of Spandau Ballet, also supported Margaret Thatcher and continues to support what he calls his “one nation conservatism.”
David Bowie and other rock stars befriended the writer William S. Burroughs, who was called “the godfather of punk” and whose politics were all over the place. Burroughs, a favorite of the Talking Heads, would be on the cancel list today.