Word: fatboys
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David Byrne and Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, are an odd couple to begin with: one an ex-Talking Head and lateral-thinking pop singer, the other a star club DJ and dance-music producer. So the news that the two were collaborating on a disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos, the widow of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was something of a head-scratcher. Peculiarity, though, is Byrne's specialty, and the recorded version of Here Lies Love is a winning twist on the "album musical" tradition. Twenty-two different singers (including the likes of Tori Amos...
Listening to “Here Lies Love” means first coming to terms with the bizarre reality of this album: David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, and a host of guest singers narrating the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, First Lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. It’s an alt-rock opera about a woman most well known for the appalling excess of her collection of 3,000 designer shoes. As if that weren’t bewildering enough, it fails to cover the most well-known events of its subject’s life...
Luckily, the music—even closer to pure pop than Byrne’s Talking Heads work—is fantastic. Fatboy Slim brings a processed, electronic-tinged danceability to a collection that evokes the disco funk of New York’s Studio 54, where Marcos was famous for dancing with celebrities like Andy Warhol. Warhol is actually name-dropped on “Dancing Together,” which features a mix of crashing drums and a funky bass line that make it the album’s closest approximation to both disco...
Disco isn’t much of a stretch for Fatboy Slim’s dance music production style, but together Slim and Byrne explore an impressive range of genres. “A Perfect Hand” presents a guitar and piano simplicity that would be at home on a Bruce Springsteen album, with lyrics to match. Steve Earle, the only male vocalist on the album besides Byrne himself, growls, “There are many ways to win a game / And skill is not enough,” inviting the listener to imagine the pressure put on Marcos...
...problem with “Here Lies Love” isn’t any lack of musical or lyrical complexity. If anything, Byrne and Fatboy Slim prove that they could make a fun, complex album—or, for that matter, a rock opera—on just about anything. The problem is that the near complete success of “Here Lies Love” only begs the question of why a more identifiable, emotionally compelling subject was not chosen. If Byrne set out to prove he could find the artful musicality in a seemingly distasteful figure...