Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this seems a bit rarefied for the populist currents of rock culture, it should be remembered that Byrne and the Heads were one of the few new-wave bands to groove on black music and learn from it. Heads albums like Fear of Music (1979), Remain in Light (1980) and the stunning Speaking in Tongues (1983) have a heavy soul inflection and an African accent. When Byrne collaborated with Rock Producer and Theorist Brian Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), the results were like trance music programmed for a ghetto blaster...
Lately Byrne's music has been swimming in odd, winding tributaries close by the mainstream. He will defend his independent writing away from the band by saying, "Just because you say you love pop or rock or whatever it's called, that doesn't exclude liking other kinds of things." He says the True Stories score is "pop songs, and, for us, it sounds fairly conventional," but it might be best to tread a little carefully here...
...rock vocabulary, is slick suburban territory, the place where Billy Joel dwells, and it is no address for a low-key aesthetic incendiary like Byrne. By implying that Heads music is nibbling on pop- corn, Byrne is being provocative, as is his habit, and canny, as is his nature. The songs in True Stories are kickback good-times music, but Byrne means to do with this score what he and the Heads have always done: infiltrate a genre, work inside it and make it over before anyone realizes quite what is happening...
...submarine with a coat hanger. The Byrnes were politically active and socially liberal; Emma Byrne is a Quaker. Folk and Scottish music was played in the house, and the Byrnes seemed to be the only parents around who were not making speeches and threats about everything from loud rock to long hair...
...David would do anything to get attention," Weymouth says. "He'd do anything on a dare. He'd go to a party wearing a red taffeta dress." Byrne's taste in wardrobe tamed down as his musical inclinations became more focused. Frantz had fantasized about forming a rock band. He and Byrne provided music for a film a friend was making, Frantz recalls, "about his girlfriend being run over by a car." The way Weymouth remembers it, "By the end of the session, Chris said to David, because, you know, David didn't talk very much, 'Look, let's start...