The Test Tube and the Scale

  Have we ever really caught up with Talking Heads? Remain In Light, and its delphic sibling, Speaking In Tongues, have been narrating a dual adventure in world and American myth and prophecy since, respectively, 1980 and 1983. Both records are a layered profusion of ideas that by design resist self-referring cohesion; instead of making a direct appeal to listeners’ emotions, the songs invite objectivity and skepticism, those blunt instruments of intelligence that interpret reality’s countless details. Because global concepts are in an unstoppable state of flux, always changing, the songs themselves are always changing, too, not simply because individual listeners have matured or declined into new perspectives but because the facts of the world are irremediably altered with each passing moment, thus regenerating context and resonance. Late on Remain In Light’s second side, David Byrne recites the lyric, “He has the knowledge of the wind to guide him on,” a reiteration of the side o...

  The most memorable erotic pop tunes—Monkey Man, Sister Ray, Dr Feelgood, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You—close the door on reality, confining the listener within narrowly descriptive     bounds from which only     the breathlessness of succor will issue. In 1977, Donna Summer gave us I Feel Love; four years later, Joan Jett released her cover version of Crimson and Clover. Both records portray the sexual power of surrender; Summer, by assigning it the values of longevity and ecstasy, then demonstrating in real time how its application on a public, dance floor setting could confuse the hierarchies of privileged and marginalized classes in a contradictory age of hedonism and fiercely     contested social and cultural oppression. Jett, likewise, gives herself over to studio performance without holding anything back; her delivery is all surrender, but she also signals a form of seductive aggression, asserting that eroticism may be the ultimate point to Crimson ...

  Some of the sexiest American singles released between the years 1976-1980 were by Heart, the Wilson sisters led rock quintet from the Pacific Northwest. The storytelling magnetism of those     environs, and its deleterious effect upon a tightly woven group of inhabitants, has been explicated with surrealist, mythic precision by David Lynch and Mark Frost in their television and film epic Twin Peaks. It’s true that Heart’s musical output goes nowhere near the empyrean heights and depths of Twin Peaks but an intensely experienced female sexuality—both transgressive and redemptive—informs both bodies of work. Heart’s breakthrough debut record, Dreamboat Annie, was a startling success, released     in the celebratory year that America commemorated   its bicentennial anniversary. Having just written the final chapters on the Vietnam War and Watergate crises, and a full three years before the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, the country attempted to foster a rare ...