Talking Heads

I wrote this in 2011, before the third Transformers movie came out, and I was still stuck on Revenge of the Fallen. As stated, it is my favorite movie to watch while baked. It doesn’t bother with an introduction, it just throws you directly into the whorl. There are twin robots that talk like street pimps and make people argue. The mother of Shia LeBeouf, or as I call him, “Fast Forward”, eats a pot brownie and goes bonkers. The bad guys are nasty and mental, resulting in spectacular sequences like the following:

The Fallen is a multiversal* demigod who can teleport, and lift a battalion of tanks with a sweep of his freaky arm. (*Meaning he exists across billions of possible universes.) He was intending to drain the sun of energy, until the noble Optimus Prime pulled a legit Fatality on him, tearing off his face and crushing his spark chamber [heart] with his bare hand.

It was all just an excuse to post this image.

This is not a movie for sober people. This is a movie for arrested adolescents such as myself to get ripped and cheer at. It has a blender that turns into a robot that shoots lasers out of its dick. There’s a drone disguised as a college girl with an eight-foot metal tongue. I saw it at midnight when it first opened, so the Fallen was de-faced around 2am, and I thought I might be having a fever dream.

From “Thrills: A Retrospective”, BIUL #2

Alright, enough of that shit.

The biggest issue with Talking Heads is that David Byrne is a dick. He gets the royalties, the other Heads don’t. He won’t reunite with them or work with them. Artfags are such drama queens.

It’s a shame, because together with the “fifth Head” Brian Eno, they were capable of this kind of alt-rock alchemy:

When the label “alternative music” was applied to the Talking Heads, it meant something; they were the alternative to the bloated rock that dominated radio in 1980. The lyrics and art conveyed a more cerebral image than the average pop combo. I tried not to make a pun.

Outside of the Heads, Byrne’s best work was with Eno, notably My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, the demarcation line before Byrne went overboard with the “world music”. Brian Eno has done so much work solo and with Robert Fripp that I literally became tired doing research on it all. Go look it up yourself.

The other really great Heads song unfortunately happens to be really sad:

The concert film where Byrne wears the big Steve Harvey suit is Stop Making Sense. I worked with a friend as an audience member for Family Feud a couple years ago, and Harvey was the host. We were in the studio for long hours, with no lunch, and I slowly became convinced that Richard Pryor faked his death and had Rick Baker develop a new face and body. Pryor put on the suit and became Steve Harvey. The more I gazed at Harvey, the more convinced I was.

It’s the eyes, they’re a dead giveaway. I mean no disrespect to Richard Pryor or his incredible evocation. It’s a tremendous make-up job; you can barely tell where the bald cap and the chin are attached. The commitment to the character of “Steve Harvey” is admirable work. Pryor was a contemporary of Andy Kaufman, and I think it’s high time people knew that he surpassed him as a prankster.

Why are you looking at me like that?