Word: rocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nothing new. In 1910 Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant Russian impresario and leader of the Ballets Russes, brought together Composer Igor Stravinsky and Choreographer Michel Fokine to create The Firebird; and Composer John Cage and Modern Choreographer Merce Cunningham have worked together frequently. Nor is it unheard-of for a rock musician to hang out with the classical avant-garde: Frank Zappa, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, has had his serious chamber works conducted by no less than Pierre Boulez. What distinguishes the SoHo artists is the familiar ease with which their works play off one another...
...Heads were a prominent part of a creative community that kicked avant- garde American culture into a newer, more accessible shape. Music, dance, performance art and rock all flowed together into a single swift stream, which Byrne navigated effortlessly (see following story). He also wrote scores for the spectacular theatrical ruminations of Robert Wilson (The Knee Plays, segments of Wilson's grand-scale project, the CIVIL warS) and the spirited, quirky choreography of Twyla Tharp. "He is very precise and very careful," Tharp says admiringly. "He doesn't waste things, but he is also capable of being very adventuresome...
This is a man whose first great song was called Psycho Killer. A man who is the formative force behind Talking Heads, one of the decade's most formidable bands, a group responsible for the sweetest, strangest, funniest rock to roll over the '70s and nestle into the '80s. A man who should be hanging close to the set, seeing to the details of directing his first feature film, not striking out on some weird nocturnal expedition in search of hymenopterous marauders. He may not resemble the manic murderer in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but he will never...
...modern emotional life, sang songs that turned grim tidings into deadpan jokes and disaffection into disarming social parables. Byrne's lyrics played four-wall handball with anomie and, floating all around the band's cunning and enterprising rhythms, moved the Heads past punk and over the crest of rock's new wave into a forefront they had sharpened up for themselves...
...growing). Kind of a downtown Our Town, you might say, full of high boho spirits and jokey asides that illuminate with fondness as often as they satirize without malice. But do not doubt it for a second: True Stories is the most joyous and inventive rock movie-musical since the Beatles scrambled through Help...