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What made Heads songs like this so insinuating -- so persistent, so haunting -- was not just their edginess but their off-kilter humor. A verse full of imminent violence could almost scar you with surprise, scare you from laughing. Then a chorus ("This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,/ This ain't no fooling around"/ This ain't the Mudd Club, or CBGB/ I ain't got time for that now") comes bouncing in to turn everything inside out and dare you not to.
Byrne and the band are still looking for laughter and surprise, but the tune is different. Nowadays it has a larky uptempo swing that sounds like a roadhouse Saturday night and goes like this:
I'm wearin'
Fur pajamas
I ride a
Hot potata'
It's tickling my fancy
Speak up, I can't hear you . . .
I got some news to tell ya,
Woahoho
About some wild, wild life
Wild Wild Life, currently jollying up Top 40 radio, could be the Heads' happiest hit yet. It is, additionally, the musical cornerstone for True Stories, perfectly capturing the sense of wonder that infuses the film. If True Stories hits American films the way Talking Heads hit music, things are going to be different around here. It's going to be a wild, wild life.
"David is one of those people who has forced us to redefine what we mean by popular culture and serious culture, commercial art and noncommercial art," says Philip Glass, who has known and worked with Byrne since 1975. "He so resolutely does his own work regardless of whether it is commercial or noncommercial, and with so little regard for the canons of either of those fields, that he creates something uniquely his own."
If all 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.
Pop, in 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.