Shedding new light on Talking Heads' "Remain in Light"
by Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., April 24, 2001) - Vernon Reid remembers exactly what it was like hearing the Talking Heads's landmark 1980 album, "Remain in Light," for the first time. "I think I heard it on a radio station," said Reid, the guitarist and composer best-known as the founder of rock band Living Colour. "I was like, what the hell is this? I was intrigued completely by the sound of it.

It just sounded so different from other things around it." That fascination with "Remain in Light" stuck with Reid, and now, two decades later, he is leading a band that will pay tribute to the Talking Heads' innovative blend of punk, funk, African percussion and electronics in "Same As It Ever Was" at Mass MoCA on Saturday, April 28, at 8. Reid will be joined by vocalist Nona Hendryx, who sang on the original recording, and spoken word artist Carl Hancock Rux. Call 662-2111 for more information. While Talking Heads and other like-minded artists had been experimenting with some of the innovations that came to full fruition on "Remain in Light," including the dense layers of overdubbed keyboards, guitars, percussion and electronics, and the non-linear song structures, none had the lasting impact that the album enjoyed.

"It was a record that was ahead of its time, and it was radically different from other pop music around," said Reid, who joined Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, a cutting-edge jazz group, in 1980, and formed an early version of Living Colour three years later. Living Colour's first album, the critically acclaimed "Vivid," came out in 1988.

"It was an evolution of the coming together of African music, electronics, funk and a kind of post-punk new wave, a culmination of things that had already been in the air," said Reid, adding that it took more than a decade for artists like Portishead, My Bloody Valentine, Massive Attack and Moby to integrate fully the innovations of "Remain in Light."

While the Talking Heads's previous album, "Fear of Music," hinted at the shape of things to come, "Remain in Light" was a headfirst dive into polyrhythmic funk that left any vestiges of the new-wave group's punk minimalism behind.

Reid notes that the album's real predecessor is "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," a relatively obscure album credited to Talking Heads's songwriter/vocalist David Byrne and producer Brian Eno. The album was constructed mostly of found sounds pasted atop African-influenced polyrhythms.

Reid is fascinated by "Remain in Light"'s thematic obsession with alienation and technology, which he also sees as being ahead of its time, if not downright prophetic. He points to "Listening Wind," which seems to forecast the mind set of a 21st century suicide bomber as an example of the album's foresight. And "Once in a Lifetime" anticipates "the whole culture of consumption, the whole dot-com culture."

"I think the album on one level is about self-alienation, about the collision between technology and African rhythm and funk," said Reid. "It' s about identity, about not having a clear sense of identity, and being cool with that instead of necessarily being alienated and feeling bad about that, turning that into something positive -- if I don't know who I am, then I can be anybody."

Indeed, the narrator of the song "Crosseyed and Painless" -- one of several numbers that gained Talking Heads a wider audience in the critically-lauded concert film, "Stop Making Sense," directed by Jonathan Demme - talks about changing his shape while "trying to act casual." "Seen and Not Seen" describes a character whose face changes shape through sheer concentration on images in the mass media.

"The record revels in that," said Reid, who finds the themes of masks and changing identity redolent of African tribal ritual. "Instead of alienation turning into dark angst it turns into celebration, the dance. It becomes the ritual function. You become whatever the mask represents."

In "Once in a Lifetime," the album's most popular song, the narrator, in the guise of an evangelist, directly addresses the listener, saying "You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack/And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself - Well… how did I get here?" And just as the music consists of different rhythmic and melodic riffs that circle around each other, so do the lyrics alternate narrative style within each song. Even the lyric sheet prints alternating verses in boldface and italics, as if they are coming from two different narrators.

But Reid warns against taking the lyrics too literally or reading too much into them. "The words don't have to necessarily mean anything but the feeling behind it is what's important," he said. "And that's the real thing the record brings to the table -- the words are important as a kind of stream of consciousness, a way of expressing the inexpressible, but not necessarily having them mean what they mean.

"It's a successful artistic statement based on non-linearity and the collision of things that aren't necessarily supposed to be together." By the late-'80s, David Byrne and Paul Simon -- who recorded his own pop album heavily influenced by African music, the landmark "Graceland," in 1986 - had come under intense criticism for practicing a form of "cultural colonialism" by appropriating African influences in their music. Reid, a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, an organization devoted to breaking down the walls between r&b and rock music for black musicians, doesn't buy the charge.

"I don't feel that way at all," said Reid. "When the records work they work, when they don't they don't. 'Graceland' is a masterpiece.

"I think the collision of values is what has made American music. Jazz did not come about from agreement with the dominant culture about the value of black art. "You have to step to what you're moved by. The idea that you can't do that because the karma police are going to come out and get you…. Everybody's influenced everybody else.

"The problem was when the influence of black musicians was denied and discounted. But rock and roll is about folk music from all over the world colliding with the blues."

The idea for the "Same As It Ever Was" program grew out of several similar tributes that Reid has curated with producer Danny Kapilian at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at New York's SummerStage. Reid staged a version of Prince's "1999" album in December 1999, and also assembled a band to play Joni Mitchell's "Hejira"-era jazz-folk.

Reid said the idea to reconstruct classic albums grew out of a conversation he had with Kapilian about rock as repertory. "We were talking about rock as theater, particularly things of the Seventies and the Eighties. There's a lot of rich material there. The one I'm really kind of psyched about, after this I want to do a blues and gospel take on [Pink Floyd's] 'Dark Side of the Moon.'"

Reid says his group doesn't play "Remain in Light" note-for-note. "I work with a great bunch of musicians, and we just have fun with it," he said. "We're not trying to sound exactly like the record. There's something powerful they did … and I want it to have the thrust of that record. "Some things will sound similar -- we use the bass lines and things -- but simply because of the fact that it's other people, it's going to be different. The songs are good songs. It comes down to that."

Still, one has to wonder, is it possible to recreate the Talking Heads without David Byrne's idiosyncratic vocals and stage personality? "If the criticism is…. you need this freaky guy on stage to deliver them, I disagree…. We're not doing Beatlemania. There's nothing more insulting… Somehow, something in me related to that music. And it's not just about David Byrne. It's as much about the rest of that band as it is anything."

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 27, 2001. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2001. All rights reserved.]