Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food Poll

I searched out this thread to revive it and...apparently make the same comments I already made almost a year ago. Good lord I love this album. Things are puttering along nicely until musical satan descends upon the scene and possesses Talking Heads starting in the last minute of "The Good Thing":

So I say:
I have adopted this and made it my own:
Cut back the weakness, reinforce what is strong.

"Warning Sign" starts after exactly a bar of empty space, and is creepy as fuck. Putting aside the lyrics, listen on headphones with the volume turned up and witness the really subtle swirling backward vocals leading into each phrase. At first I tended to agree with the person upthread who thought that Eno's presence on this album was largely unnoticeable, but after about the billionth listen his influence is apparent. "Girls Want To Be With The Girls" is a fine song, but to be honest for me its primary value is to serve as the perfect setup for "Found a Job", which again starts after a 4 beat pause and makes people shit their pants.

I love MSABAF more and more with each year, and now it's my favorite. One of the best things about Talking Heads is that each one of their first four albums have been my favorite at some point, and each time I couldn't conceive of a way that it could be any other way. What a great band.

Gackazoid. Bottom seven songs are the whole entire reason this album rules. Single vote getter "With Our Love" is merely the greatest TH song ever & one of the greatest period (period). "Found a job" is the merest of conceptual clams next to the pink hearts exploding "girls want to be with the girls" but when they don't

fuh-huh-huh-huh-huckle-fuck-already

No wonder "Remain in Light" keeps winning polls as best Talking Heads record: because of this most utter fuckerottering tastelessness. If David Byrne comes from somewhere between Jonathan Richman and the Africanized future of pop music (that future that was expected, that future that didn't actually happen,) then the best songs on MSAB&F are the place where he owes nothing to nobody and, more importantly, where the Talking Heads as a band playing together show off their utterly original, dare-taking synthesis of KC & The Sunshine Band & Modern Lovers in the most utterly realized way. It's the second best record Eno was ever involved with after Another Green World.

{& this was the final VP pest at aye el ex}

I first discovered TH in a kind of bulk-buy of albums, starting with SMS and then acquiring all their albums in rapid succession. As such, I never really managed to separate a lot of the material form the first few albums - they all seemed to work together in a kind of temporal soup. But now I'm going through each album in chronological order, their career arc is starting to make much more sense and this is maybe song-for-song one of their best. I especially like the bassline towards the end of The Big Country.

Yeah and Warning Sign and Stay Hungry are both fab.

i love that every song on this got a least one vote. such a great album that i only discovered a few years back, probably 2008 or so.

probably going to spin this tonight because of this bump.

To help keep be focused, me and my guitar teacher have been going through the first three albums track by track. Some strange stuff going on here, especially as far as the song structures go. This is my fave of the first three.

Me focused, not be focused.

That's a great idea. I'd love to do something similar with bass guitar.

"warning song" = weirdest song about sex ever.

i've been listening to the 1975 cbs demos thing a lot recently, which interestingly has like all the songs from 77 and about half of this one it; angel, girls, stay hungry, with our love, warning sign. crazy that they had already written so many of their hits 2 years before the first album was even released. demo version of "thank you for sending me an angel" is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_R3WYryz3Y

yeah, i feel like that was pretty typical back, when back-to-back albums were common and people weren't burning off material on b-sides and side projects all the time -- lotta people built up a catalog before getting a record deal that it took 2 or 3 albums to use up.

typical back THEN

my cardboard fliptop double sire cassette of 77/msabaf from about 82 or 83 is now some rosebud level shit in my memory banks.

They'd been performing pretty much all of 77/More Songs live before 77 even dropped.

Yeah, there's a fan letter in the liner notes to Sand In The Vaseline wherein the writer lists their fave Heads songs (all from MSAB&F), cncluding "I hope you make an album."

loved how "Warning Sign" shows up on SITV.

i've been listening to the 1975 cbs demos thing a lot recently, which interestingly has like all the songs from 77 and about half of this one

Haven't played those demos in a while but aren't there actually more MSABAF songs on it than '77 songs?

I think it wasn't until "Fear of Music" that a lot of their stuff was jammed out in the studio and sort of assembled later, which partly explains the really weird structures, especially once you get to "Remain in Light." If you've ever seen a band cover (or been in a band covering) "Once in a Lifetime," it's almost impossible to tell where the "one" on the measure is.

I assumed that was down to listening to Fela Kuti

5. The Girls Want to Be With the Girls 1
7. Artists Only 1
2. With Our Love 1

robbed!

girls are getting into
abstract analysis; they want to
make that intuitive leap!
they're making plans with
far-reaching effects!

this is my most listened to Talking Heads album at the moment. also doing a Talking Heads poll sometime in the year 2020.

my cardboard fliptop double sire cassette of 77/msabaf from about 82 or 83 is now some rosebud level shit in my memory banks.

I had that cassette. And likewise about the rosebud effect.

it was fuschia and turquise you know.

or turquoise or whatever, with a big number _2_.

This has fast become like, my joint second favourite TH studio album.

the best thing about it is how short the gaps between the tracks are. a real sense of urgency.

both the first 2 albums are such GREAT guitar records. The way the guitars are arranged, the way they're played, the way they're recorded. I like the fourth world funk dream stuff that came after but their sound on the first records is even more special to me. Meat Puppets Up On The Sun has that same clean, interlocked ecstatic sound.

xpost just as rosebud for me was the special walkman I always played it on. It was the first walkman that was barely bigger than the tapes that went in it. Silver. My friend who was kind of a klepto stole it from me (I know he did). Its constant inhabitants were the 77/Buildings & Food 2fer and this weird Iggy cassette that mixed up tracks from New Values, Soldier and Zombie Birdhouse. And PiL generic.

This one! Rosebud...

http://www.oobject.com/12-vintage-walkmans/wm-10-foldout-tiny-walkman/5510/

I bought it with my paper route money

xxp i must check that Meat Puppets album.

It's not their only great album but it's the only one that has that particular sound. Definitely my favorite of all 80s US indie albums, even edging out double nickels and new day rising.

oh, yeah, i had that walkman too, precisely like that picture, gold and red!

my favorite talking heads album. this album is one of the greatest poems about america ever written, it so perfectly captures the spirit of american culture. "the good thing" is my favorite song on here, and one of my favorite talking heads songs overall.

perfect juxtaposition. listening to this on spotify right now, home depot commercial comes up. "more saving, more doing." could be an unused david byrne lyric.

take "the good thing". song was written in the late 70s, but it could be the religious hymn sung by silicon valley true believers in 2014. say what you want about david byrne, but he got it.

People who think "art rock" is Rush doing a Coleridge poem are bloody morons.

― Bad Banana On Broadway (kenan), Monday, February 16, 2009 2:23 AM (5 years ago)

MSABAF is a decent enough Talking Heads album, not my favorite. "Xanadu", OTOH, kicks all kinds of ass.

huh, it's funny, did some research on "the good thing" and it turns out david byrne's lyrics were inspired by old chinese communist party literature. i remember doing some research on authoritarianism in america, and found surveys and sociological papers that found that america was the most culturally authoritarian-leaning of the 1st world industrial nations, to an off-the-charts degree, in total contradiction of our own view as an individualistic culture, even before the bush/911 years.

guess it was a "happy" accident byrne's cribbing of authoritarian literature sounds so incredibly american. links up pretty well with this thread: Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism weird how we might have more in common with communist china than france or england.

I always thought there was a whiff of Japanese "happy corporate family" culture to lyrics like "The Good Thing" and "Don't Worry About the Government."

Ha! Musically, the verses Radiohead's 'Anyone Can Play Guitar' is identical to the verses of 'Warning Sign', except that Radiohead slowed it down.

This fuckin album.

Not even sure what I would have voted for. Maybe I'm Not In Love. Or The Big Country. But really the whole thing is pretty perfect.

Today, "The Good Thing."

his album is super-economic. no mucking about