Who would have thought that real estate could create such a wellspring of emotion? Yet there it is, with all the deeply-felt conviction of a naturalized citizen singing the national album of his adopted country, David Byrne sings, "My building has every convenience, it's gonna make life easy for me/ It's gonna be easy to get things done / I will relax along with my loved ones." Thus, we have the soaring apex of "Don't Worry About the Government," one of the stand-out tracks on Talking Heads' first album, Talking Heads: 77.
Why, one might ask, would anyone want to listen to a song, much less an album, about buildings? Obviously, "Don't Worry About the Government" isn't really about how exciting it is to move. In the song, he praises civil servants, laws he considers his favorites and his "loved ones," whatever that means. Much in the same way social outcasts in high school fetishizes comic books, Dungeons and Dragons or Magic cards, Byrne's first-person character takes all the unrequited love he can't direct to other people and transposes it to some nameless building off of the highway.
The intentionally badly hidden social awkwardness runs through Talking Heads: 77, like in "Book I Read," when Byrne rhapsodizes about how he was moved by a book, only to reveal that "the book I read was in your eyes."
In "No Compassion," others are pushed away, as if to make the album's mood of near-panic over social relations complete. "Talk to your analyst, isn't that what they're paid for?" is the inevitable message (in retrospect) to the song, which is an ode to staying aloof even when people reach out to you.
Musically, the album is bare and precise. Eschewing distortion and noise, Talking Heads: 77 lacks both distracting noise and epic orchestral overkill. The hooks are infectious, if simplistic -- the first track, "Uh-oh, Love Comes to Town," has a guitar line that could have been lifted from the Jackson 5. In "Psycho Killer," by far the most-recognized track, the impact of the song is accomplished with Byrne's tense lyrics, the driving bass line and incessant drumbeat. Instead of bowling the listener over with volume and noise like their CBGBs contemporaries, "Psycho Killer" is like musical thumb screws -- it gets tighter and tighter until you just can't stand it any more.
Some context: Talking Heads: 77 was released, surprisingly enough, in 1977, culminating a run at Manhattan's CBGBs, where Talking Heads shared the stage with early punk acts, including The Ramones, The Voidoids and Patti Smith. By taking a completely different approach from those groups to the same alienation, Talking Heads, along with their lesser-known compatriots Television, laid the groundwork for the New Wave that followed. Although it's nearly impossible to dance to anything on Talking Heads: 77, Gang of Four, New Order and Joy Division all owe their clean musical style and nervous energy first captured on that album.
To all the MP3 pirates out there, a warning: it's not worth sampling Talking Heads: 77 song by song. Depending on which file lands on your drive first, you end up with the impression that the album is cutesy postcard copy ("Who Is It") obnoxious ode to self-improvement ("Pulled Up") or perhaps a paranoid freak-out, like "Psycho Killer."
Trust me: it hangs together quite well. Compared to later Talking Heads albums, Talking Heads: 77 sounds like a breath of fresh air, capturing the band before Brian Eno came in and overproduced the albums that followed. The bottom line is this: if you own any new wave or punk albums at all, there is no good reason not to own Talking Heads: 77.
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