‘I Zimbra’: the song that set the Talking Heads apart
In late 1970s New York, the jacket of choice among music lovers was largely leather, with a popped collar and worn to the beat of a gritty punk soundtrack. The wide shoulder pads and slick suits were reserved for wall street bankers who were rubbing their hands together at the oncoming prosperity of free-market 1980s New York. It certainly wasn’t part of the counter culture to adorn the same attire as money-making bankers. That was at least until David Byrne and Talking Heads made it cool.
Despite their captivating emergence with Talking Heads ‘77 it was on their third album Fear of Music that they established themselves as a sonic tour-de-force, spearheading instrumentational experimentation. As the decade turned, the tropes of punk rock that ruled supreme in the previous decade had become tired and somewhat commercial. The emergence of New York’s disco movement combined with a yearning for something more sophisticated in rock created a void in which Talking Heads could fill.
“We were rock musicians who were looking for a way out of what had become a very predictable formula for playing and performing rock and roll,” Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz wrote in his memoir Remain In Love. “The African music we liked had the energy and the passion of rock and roll, but with one big difference: It was not based on Chuck Berry Licks”.
Their 1979 album built upon a structure of poly-rhythmic jams that didn’t necessarily adhere to normal pop hooks and chorus structures. Instead, it embraced looping rhythm sections that removed the so-called predictability of rock and roll performance. This, combined with Byrne’s soaring vocals and Andrew Belew’s synth-laden guitars, thrust rock into a more polished and dense soundscape.
Much of this experimental innovation was led by Brian Eno, who himself had been poking at the boundaries of structure with his own band Roxy Music. However, while Eno’s contribution lived largely in the production quarters of the album, he made one lyrical suggestion that elevated a song to new heights.
The album’s lead track ‘I, Zimbra’ welcomes the listeners with African percussion rhythms before warping them in augmented synthesisers to place them in the future facing New York City. Eno suggested the band adapt the words of a 1916 sound poem called “Gadji Beri Bimba” by the German poet Hugo Ball, who was a big name in the Dada art movement.
The Dada art movement centred largely around World War I and the subsequent societal disillusionment, which was ultimately expressed through art that rebelled against the established structural rules. Given the sonic palette of this record and Talking Heads’ unpopular decision to marry disco sensibilities with modern rock, it was a fitting vocal approach to help spearhead the band into rebellious territory without compromise.
The song was a successful inclusion on their subsequent 1980 tour and ultimately informed the palette of their wildly successful follow-up album Remain In Light. With Eno on board once more for the project, and ‘I Zimbra’ soundtracking their newfound ability to merge disco and rock, they would step into the studio a confident band who were on the cusp of recording an era-defining album.
