1983: Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
To witness someone speak in tongues is a surreal experience. In a rapturous state, an individual will mumble, burble, or make some otherworldly sounds, seemingly divined from unknown forces. For the speaker, the vocal incarnations are an unconscious gift. Faith channels mystic forces and the believer becomes a holy mouthpiece. However, for the unenlightened, this phenomenon defies reason and credibility. Daily life conditions us to seek cause from effect, so when we are confronted with an unmoved mover, logic is thrown into disarray. Sound is incongruent with meaning.
For David Byrne, the act of speaking in tongues was an inspiration. The title of Talking Heads’ fifth studio album, according to Byrne, was an artifact of his fascination with preachers. “When people go into trances, they garble in a strange language… I’ve seen it in movies; I’ve seen it face to face as well. It was a woman in a church, and she was talking in a fairly excited tone of voice, and all of a sudden these phrases came out of her.”
“I think my words make about that much sense sometimes,” he joked during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. “Well, they make sense, but not if you try and figure them out.”
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After Talking Heads’ sonically adventurous album Remain in Light, the group went on a two-year hiatus, pursuing separate projects. Byrne made The Catherine Wheel, a soundtrack for a ballet by his choreographer girlfriend Twyla Tharp, bassist Tina Weymouth and her husband/drummer Chris Frantz released their first album as Tom Tom Club, and guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison released his first solo album, The Red And The Black. Tensions were reportedly high during the band’s stint with producer Brian Eno on Remain in Light. The band produced the next Talking Heads album with all songs credited to David Byrne/Chris Frantz/Jerry Harrison/Tina Weymouth. In the book Talking Heads by David Gans, Frantz explains that, “[On Speaking in Tongues] we [didn’t] have the extra aggravation of Eno always trying to make something weird or saying, ‘That’s too ordinary. We have to do it this way to make it weirder.’”
From its album cover to the music, Speaking in Tongues presents itself as a looser and more fun record than its predecessors. Limited-edition copies of the album featured plastic envelope packaging with clear discs designed by artist Robert Rauschenberg while the standard edition was painted by Byrne. Painted onto old white sleeves from test pressings, Byrne’s design is a whimsical swirl of pastels with four photographs of what he called a “drunk chair.”
Once the listener opens the packaging and plays the record, the true experience of Speaking in Tongues is revealed. The opening track, “Burning Down The House,” drifts in from silence and declares Talking Heads’ commanding presence. Seeing as the album was the band’s commercial breakthrough, it is fitting that it begins with their first and only American top 10 hit. The song inspires letting go, while a curious mix of synthesizers and guitars make it both strange and appealing. It is also the premier funk crossover song for suburbia. Byrne lifted the chant from Parliament Funkadelic and with it came the “Tear the Roof off the Mother Sucker” attitude.
The rest of Speaking in Tongue’s first side builds off of the energy of “Burning Down The House.” The preeminently silly “Making Flippy Floppy” and slippery “Girlfriend Is Better” infuse more distinct synthesizers and characteristically new wave solos. Byrne’s distinct vocals carry fractured melodies with style and swagger — it’s difficult to hear the lyrics “stop making sense” without envisioning Byrne’s slender frame enveloped in a giant white suite. However, on “Slippery People,” Byrne shares vocal duties with The Staple Singers, who play the roll of congregation for a gospel-style call and response. “What’s the matter with him?” Byrne demands over and over. If, at this point, it feels like madness is beginning to swallow the record, the choruses’ promise that “He’s all right” may offer comfort.
On Side Two, the songs are more varied and, ultimately, more comforting. The album closes with “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” a beautifully simple yet effective love song. The title’s origin refers to the fact that everyone apart from Frantz plays instruments on which they’re not proficient, repeating a “naïve” melody. Though it lacks a cohesive narrative, isolated lines are poignantly intimate and honest. It is touching to hear Byrne croon, “Home – is where I want to be/ but I guess I’m already there.”
Between fits of ecstasy and moments of reflection, Speaking in Tongues lives up to its name. One can ruminate on the album’s lyrics, but ultimately the group matches mode and function to make an impression. And as far as the music is concerned, Talking Heads’ expansion on new wave and funk is as inventive and catchy as anything in their catalogue. To dissect specific meaning from Speaking in Tongues is to separate the album from its inherent message: stop making sense and start listening.
1992: Kitchens of Distinction - "On Tooting Broadway Station"
Who needs chemicals when you have Julian Swales in your band? If you want to infuse your music with “emotional or cosmic uplift and depth” — the stated aim of Kitchens of Distinction’s existence, according to the liner notes in the Capsule compilation — it helps to enlist a guy who can sculpt a sound that does not solely dazzle with gloss and ornamentation.
Swales not only knows how to connect his effect pedals, he manipulates them compellingly — the listener won’t just have mental impressions of, say, riding on a sparkling pinwheel as it sinks into the Challenger Deep, but might actually feel like he or she were doing so. (The aforementioned sensation struck me while listening to “Blue Pedal.” And yes, I’m aware that it could seem cheesy to you, so feel free to listen to it on your own time and see if you can conjure up something better.) Or, like on “Hammer,” the listener might feel flogged, lacerated, vivisected, or outright flayed alive by Swales’ closing two-minute-plus feedback squall, before two last screeches slam the remains of the listener into a wall, a great metallic wall as long as the Large Hadron Collider, where it reverberates from the collision for a full 30 seconds. (Torture and particle accelerators? That’s practically the basis for a Howard Brenton play. Suck on that!)
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As for the track above, “On Tooting Broadway Station,” we have bassist and frontman Patrick Fitzgerald kneeling down and weeping like Elizabeth Smart (the author/journalist revered by Morrissey, not the Utah abductee) in the titular South London tube stop over a gentle melody from Swales and a steady mid-tempo beat from Dan Goodwin. Fitzgerald punches “the concrete floor/ until my fingers bled” and later on takes time to note that his fingers have been bandaged up. He swears to cut his estranged lover out of his heart and admits a few lines later that he has done so, but soon makes it obvious that he’s not over the man in question at all. Fitzgerald suggests that the man’s clothes be burnt along with “everything he owned and the empty chamber left” and pouts that he’ll carry on without the man “as this hollowness that drags in my voice.” He then vows to “burn it all” in a “benedictory fire” and demands, “Give me his charred heart/ And give me his fillings/ And God, give me God to forgive me!” before ultimately dismissing (or rather, celebrating) his lover as his “John of Arc.”
Julian Swales compounds these declarations with a succession of notes, chords, and assorted atmospherics that swoop skyward, careen back down, and then swoop even higher than before. The resultant wave of sound evokes a towering wall of fire. The gentle opening melody and first chorus amount to mere kindling compared to the conflagration underway; when Fitzgerald sings about wanting his lover’s charred heart, it feels almost like Swales has single-handedly restarted the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires. Once Fitzgerald stops singing, the volume increases and the song itself morphs into a firestorm. And what does that mad fool Swales do? He casts the listener deeper into the firestorm that Fitzgerald started. Upon being engulfed, a crescendo ensues, and it’s obvious that he aims to incinerate the skies. There’s little point in razing the world to the ground when that happens. (Bakuninites, take note.) No mortal should have that sort of power, but Mr. Swales tries his damnedest to remake the world into something akin to Canberra in 2003 with his guitar. And as the song starts to fade out — on the studio version, not the live take above — you can hear Swales begin to scorch the stratosphere.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that could have a greater cathartic impact on the mind than such an impression. If it was emotional uplift they wanted, Kitchens of Distinction succeeded in ways that hardly anyone has matched before or since, and they not only achieved it here, but also in the dozens of other songs scattered throughout their discography.
2000s: Queen Kong - "Enough for the Whole World (to fall in love)" "The Rules"
The Gaelic translation of Queen Kong’s hometown means ‘the big swamp,’ and I like to think they started out as ‘the thing from the swamp’ — meaty, muscular, and more than a little mad at being woken up. Queen Kong were spawned a long time ago around the turn of the Millennium in the faraway city of Cork, Ireland. Although the band’s later incarnation was at least two-thirds female, in the beginning they had more of the Y- chromosome, (which in some circles would suggest they were less evolved). Back then, they were also hairier and a bit more ‘metal’. They coalesced over time in a volatile solution of Mike Patton, G.G. Allin, and Bowie. With their travelling circus up and running, they acquired a gimp, leather chaps, holey tights worn as tops, and songs that combined pop choruses with rap interludes about making out on piles of body parts.
As the years passed in anything-but-silence, they crawled up the island of Ireland running on the kind of fuel Captain Planet’s arch enemies used to dump in dolphin sanctuaries. They moved to the country’s capital, Dublin, and began making and performing catchy, cool pop songs like “Enough for the Whole World (to fall in love)” and “The Rules.” The gimp was fired and Amy Stephenson grew into a diva (though a very polite one it has to be said), turning up to shows with band mates Dave Murphy and Ruby Moore in either dresses made of plastic bags that looked like couture or nothing much but a few strategically positioned stickers, maybe a bra for good measure.
“Enough for the Whole World” and “The Rules” represent the band’s last stage of evolution after the digital surface of their music had been cleaned until it sparkled, as if by a housewife vacuuming to something suitably deranged. By around 2005 it was clear that Queen Kong had finally hatched the ruthless, polished fem-bot the Irish scene would come to know and fear.
Lyrically, QK were often weird, as in “Approximation”: “The military lets you wear your own cosmetics/ I wish that I had a face like Samuel Beckett.” In “The Rules” and “Enough for the Whole World,” the weirdness took the form of a comic feather duster kind of tease: “I look to you, cos you’re a company man” (“The Rules”) and “When you’re in love…everything laughs/ like an actress remembering her lines” (“Enough for the World”).
Exemplary and scary, like a beautiful hall monitor, “The Rules” was streamlined and gorgeous. The lyrics seemed to mock the idea of feminine submission while fondly, patronizingly, petting and stroking it.
The bizarre aspects of the band’s lyrics and performance were often entwined with humour, a sense of the comic as well as the majestic extravagance of emotional pop. In “Enough for the Whole World,” Amy Stephenson acts the luvvie pro on stage for kicks. This enjoyment and sense of mischief was typical of the band’s live performances, though harder to pick out in “The Rules,” which sounds more remote — Queen Kong were always fierier on stage, while on record they gave shovelfuls of snowy vocals and icy bleeps — but it’s there in everything they did. In a time of chimpanzees (namely mediocre Irish New Wave bands with caterpillar sideburns), Queen Kong was a monkey; a weird, hairless monkey, technologically advanced but still passionate. A human monkey in fact. It’s a damn shame they released so little that’s still available (besides “The Rules”/ “Here is Home with You’re Only Massive”), but the best way to obtain sightings of the beast is probably through checking out their MySpace page, as well as the surviving YouTube videos of their live performances (hence, the brilliant “Enough for the Whole World,” below). Queen Kong were a little known Irish band that left behind few collectibles for the world to keep, and though they may have emerged from a small scene, their name fit them well. They grew into a chest-beating giantess with tremendous energy, mourned especially by those who had the pleasure of seeing them live.
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1960s: Various Artists - Singapore A-Go-Go
It’s something hearing music from another place and time, and especially when it’s nothing like you’d expect it would be. Sublime Frequencies do a great job of not only raiding the stash of some other country’s uncle’s sock drawer, but also illustrating that there are freaks everywhere. Just about everybody has an uncle, and uncles keep things in their sock drawers, even in Singapore. Singapore: where they made a pasty patty out of Michael P. Fay’s rump with a cane! Wouldn’t you think them so uptight for not digging a little American graffiti? Why? How could they ever excel in the realms of “forgotten” psychedelic pop music?
Well, just like Burma and Thailand before it, we’re proven again that The Shaggs and the Deerhoofs and the Jandeks of the world are ubiquitous. Who said freak folk is dead? It just grew up and turned into something from the past, man. Let that freak flag fly.
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Dig.
1978: Iannis Xenakis - "Mycenae Alpha"
By 1977, Iannis Xenakis had developed the (start using computer voice) UPIC. Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu. Put simply, you drew on a tablet linked to a computer, which then produced sounds based on an X (duration) and Y (pitch) axis. In the late 70s, Xenakis’ sounds were limited to pretty raw wave forms being run through custom envelopes, but his work on the UPIC still revealed interesting new ways to think about scoring music. Watch the vid and it will all become clear.
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So… do you guys like my new song?
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click to enlarge
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Dear readers, email your best song-drawings to delorean@tinymixtapes.com and I’ll post ‘em here.
1968-76: V/A - Next Stop... Soweto
Current cultural trends denote a sharp increase in the number of good-time party-pop bands as of late, and I think we can all understand why. Trendy-type parties call for trendy-type party music, do they not? I guess trendy-type parties are on the rise. It’s interesting though, to observe how party-pop bands such as Matt & Kim are essentially attempting to recreate the atmosphere originally tailored by the old South African Soweto scene. The edgy tempos employed by the dorm-plaguing likes of Matt & Kim et al. are outstandingly similar to those utilized by, say, S. Piliso & His Super Seven. Granted, Jive artists generally rely less on a well-produced 4/4 rhythm than their modern electronic rivals, but the party-time mood is there. The mood was there from the start in that old Soweto community.
But wait, what’s that you say? You don’t know what Soweto is? How about Jive? Zulu? Well, then. Here’s why you should do yourself a little research:
• Jive, or Mbaqanga, offers relatively uncharted sensations to those of us who don’t reside near its origin. Spritz a couple South African names into your casual conversation to quickly impress your friends!
• Do you enjoy listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland? Thought so.
• Vampire Weekend.
• How much MGMT do you think a person can really listen to without wanting to off themselves?
• You think I don’t have a YouTube video? Because I do:
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Looks like you should get started on your Soweto research. Fortunately, it just so happens that Strut plans to provide you with a great introduction. Starting March 2, you can get your pretty little hands on a copy of Next Stop… Soweto, a superb Mbaqanga sampler. How convenient.
