So, not that many people have been reading these posts (2 for the last one I wrote. A WHOLE TWO. One was my boyfriend; who was the other???? SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW ME PERSONALLY IS READING SHIT I AM PUTTING OUT ON THE INTERNET OMG I AM FAMOUS)
Annnnnnnnywayyyyyyyy...
There aren't that many of you all out there, but the two people who have read the last posts I did about '15 Albums That Meant Something To Me' may have noticed that they are usually associated with a specific time and place. In this respect, 'Stop Making Sense' is a trend-bucker. It sort of forms a refrain throughout my life: In fact, I can't remember a time when I *didn't* know that album - it's always, always sounded familiar to me. Trying to imagine what it was like to hear it for the first time is a bit like trying to remember what it was like to learn to write: except even vaguer and stranger, because no one ever *teaches* you to listen to Talking Heads, although if I had my way and also magically became education secretary despite not really being very pro this whole 'parliamentary politics' endeavour, I would probably make laws to ensure that this did happen. Anyway, it's always been familiar because it was one of those pieces of music that my parents had on tape and played in the car on long journeys, so until about 2001 I mainly associated it with the M4 (visiting grandma) the M1 (visiting other grandma) and the M11 (going on middle-class holidays.) Actually, there's a weird beauty to parts of the M11 route - mainly the fens- that works surprisingly well with the edgier tracks on 'Stop Making Sense' - try being 7 (in fact, it being your 7th birthday) and your parents getting you up while it's still dark to beat the traffic out of London and then falling asleep wrapped up in a duvet and being woken up with the sun full in your face in the middle of flat-as-piss-on-a-plate East Anglia BY THE LIVE VERSION OF PSYCHO KILLER WHICH IS JUST DAVID BYRNE AND A TAPE RECORDER. Plus you're about to stop at Little Chef to receive birthday donuts AND a copy of the Walt Disney Robin Hood film on VHS. Perfeck.
The coup-de-grace for me, though, and the real reason why this album makes it on here as opposed to any of the other parental car-based cassettes, is because when I finally got around to buying my own copy of the album (on CD this time) it was an extended version with an extra six songs tagged onto the original album track-list. So there I was, happily nodding along to 'Psycho Killer' and 'Burning Down The House' and then I went to the toilet and then I came back and WHAM BAM IT WAS 'THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (NAIVE MELODY)' AND SUDDENLY I WAS IN LOVE. IN LOVE. I've never, before or since, felt the shock of something so utterly and devastatingly beautiful emanating from something so familiar. It was so unexpected. I don't have children, but it felt like what I imagine it must feel like the first time you see a child of yours and for a minute you don't recognise them because you have suddenly grasped, in your bones and stomach, that they're not a child any more - they're an adult, and they're beautiful. Generally, you know, I don't go for beauty in music. I care about energy, and conviction, and sex, and intelligence. If it doesn't make me want to dance, or fuck, or cry, or inscribe the lyrics into my flesh (cf John Darnielle) then, for the most part, it can go hang. But this song, and this album, is beautiful, undeniably. It has the quality of something uncanny about it, for me. It keeps coming back, in slightly different forms. That's partly to do with the proliferation of different versions of the songs - firstly from covers (recent once include The Arcade Fire and MGMT, as I'm sure you know) and secondly due to the fact that, because Stop Making Sense is a live album, different versions of most of these tracks appear throughout the Talking Heads oeuvre. But I think for me there's something a bit more going on here. This album reminds me that even when you think you've got a band, or an album, or even a song, pinned - when you really think that you've wrung all the juice from it that you're ever going to get - you're wrong, basically. Music will always, always have the power to come back and bite you on the arse. And that, actually, is what you want it to do.
Here endeth the lesson.
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