'Remain in Light' by the Talking Heads (1980)
Take a look at these hands. The hands of a government man. How did we get here? The days go by. How did we get here?
The Great Gatsby is the greatest manifesto on the failure of the American dream. Does that big house, do those five cars, really bring you happiness? It is the story of a man who came from nothing, joining the Army and falling in love with a rich girl. She obviously didn't know he was just living in a tent, and he projected an air of wealth about him in order to impress her. They fall in love. For a while, every day seems like bliss. Then, the Great War, World War One, which the book calls 'that great Teutonic migration' intervenes and he leaves. She waits for him but eventually marries off to another rich man. Gatsby is filled with determination to regain her love, to regain her, and so he gains a fortune and eventually becomes rich enough to win her back. He stands outside his house and looks across the sound to her house and a green light at the end of her dock. That green light represents everything he's been chasing his entire life. By the end of the book we realize that the green light is behind him, in the past, and the image of the girl he has in is head is gone, destroyed by time, and as he realizes that what drove him his entire life was nonexistent, nothing but memories of the past and how people were, he gives up on life. In the end he was just a dog chasing his tail. There are other characters in this book like that. There is the man that Daisy, the object of Gatsby's desire, marries. His name is Tom and he is a rather big man, and he used to play football in college. The book describes him as wandering the world, always in search for that one last football game.
Other pieces of American artwork express these themes. Citizen Kane tells the story of a rich man who searches for Rosebud, which I won't spoil it and tell you what it is, but it is the representation of his lost childhood innocence and he spends his entire life trying to relive those years. In 'The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, a mother spends her days trying to reunite her family for 'one last Christmas in St. Jude', their mid-western hometown, with an image of her family back in the good old days where everything was okay and her babies were all with her. All of these characters are trying to recreate their presents into a past that only exists in their minds. It's a uniquely American theme and I find it tragic in a way. In comes 'Remain in Light', which I think is in that tradition.
Unprecedented. There was no album like 'Remain in Light' before it hit the scene. There really wasn't even a lead up to it, a logical progression to the album, it just appeared. I mean, no other album from this band was as united as this. And sure, they explored the tech aspect of music before, but those were just stabs in the dark. Even the claimed influences didn't really prompt this album. For instance, with the last song, they claimed to be influenced Joy Division without ever hearing a Joy Division song before making the song, they just looked at press releases and made a sound of according to what Joy Division was described as and tried to translate that into sound. A weird sort of story, but it shows just how unique this album was, even when it borrowed from other bands, there's a good chance they'd never even heard the band and just based that borrowed sound off of a one paragraph summation of that sound. How can you translate words into music? The Talking Heads tried to do that. Unprecedented.
Who'd have thought that the artsy, nerdy, literary band of the CBGB crowd would toss their hat into the ring of higher art, trying to create something akin to 'The Great American Album', and coming pretty damn close? Out of all the albums I've heard, this probably comes closest, and I think is in the same league of Gatsby and Kane,, in the same spirit as them. It combines a sort of techno-anxiety, the anxiety of punk combined with the sensibilities of new wave, a theme similar to the great American works of art like Kane and Gatsby, all in eight tracks and forty minutes. Seen and Not Seen demonstrates these themes greatly, but only after you have that theme in mind first, then things that don't make sense all of a sudden connect. However, this is all speculation, because unlike all those other pieces, this is very vague about it's themes, and the only times it really solidly conveys a theme is during 'Once in a Lifetime', maybe the best song on the album. Can 'The Great American...' even be achieved? If it could, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Orson Welles and the Talking Heads got pretty damn close.
Wasting away, that was the policy. Molding your face according to some ideal. Same as it ever was. Letting the days go by. Take a look at these hands. The hands of a government man. These hands speak. I've lost my shape. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.