The rock bands David Byrne thought were better than Kiss: “Stuff like that”
Aside from all the obvious reasons why Talking Heads became the biggest and most revolutionary band to emerge from the heat of New York’s new wave scene, one of the major talking points has long been the origin of their name. But it’s also a fairly simple theme, one that still resonates today: the pretence of technology and the media.
It’s also something that heavily suited David Byrne’s interests and approach, from his fixation with world music to the ways he found the world confusing and disorienting. Whether hinging on the perils and consequences of civil unrest, the unsettling nature of technological advancements or simply finding your place when nothing else made sense, Byrne’s game was always about spotlighting these pockets of dissociation, with a sort of trepid unease that poked fun at societal paranoia while calling attention to its deeper causes.
In the music, this might have manifested in the odd lighthearted self-deprecation (“Well, how did I get here?”) to something more hard-hitting (“Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks? / They won’t help me survive”). It also became something far more visceral, bolstered by the countless influences Byrne drew from to curate his perfectly off-centre world, like incorporating different facets of different cultures, representing the deeper fragments of his own psyche and how off-kilter it all felt.
Or it came across in the way his words always seemed to pour out like an unedited diary entry or improvised monologue about the state of the world and all its inhabitants, or how those at in authority lack empathy (“Take a look at these hands, you don’t have to mention it / No thanks, I’m a government man”). But this was also a conscious choice born accidentally out of a momentary writer’s block when Byrne leaned into his own spontaneity, building his worlds around feeling, even when the words themselves seemed nonsensical.
Most of this also came from being immensely switched on, beyond what was expected at the time, with eyes on things that most would have probably deemed too far-out to be incorporated into mainstream rock or even some areas of new wave. “I really like Booker T & the MGs’ records from a while ago,” Byrne explained in 1978, “I really like James Brown”.
He added, “I really like that group Parliament and Funkadelic, and stuff like that. I like them, but I don’t like Kiss, although some people might think there was some sort of similarity. I got the new Randy Newman record; I liked that. I’ve been listening to a lot of foreign stuff like music from Japan and Bulgaria, and things like that.”
In all fairness, it’s easy to understand why someone like Byrne would immediately dismiss a band like Kiss. Unlike the others, they likely seemed a little too focused on theatricality to do anything of worth for him, who was much more into the intricacies of artistic expression in more subdued, albeit deep and eccentric ways. For him, it was all about layers, not standing out with commercial elements without much confidence to venture into experimentalism.
Byrne’s approach to the role of the frontman was also fundamentally different, almost using his awkwardness and quirks as familiar mannerisms that set him apart from the rest, rather than trying to adopt something that was far more garish and established as the norm for someone occupying centre-stage. He opted for that quintessential avant-garde oddity, the one that celebrated its own flaws because they were there with purpose, entirely intentional in their ability to both charm and unsettle.
