Songs of '83: "Burning Down the House"

Talking Head's greatest radio hit, which debuted on the Billboard charts 40 years ago this week, both is and isn't a creature of 1983. The review in Rolling Stone called it a song that "obliterates the thin line separating arty white pop music and deep black funk," and there's so much truth to that. Talking Heads--thanks primarily to the weirdly misanthropic musical genius of David Byrne, but it's not like the other great musicians in that band (Chris Frantz, Jerry Frantz, and most of all Tina Weymouth) didn't contribute a lot as well--is one of those relatively few American bands that have become almost mythological. A bunch of upper-middle-class art students enraptured by New York City's punk scene, who began to transcend punk with a cosmopolitan, racially and psychologically and technologically disparate mix of influences, styles, beats, and lyrical pretensions almost from the moment they began playing in punk clubs in the mid- to late 1970s. (Arguably they were post-punk before anyone else even realized the scene was over.) 

Central to their musical accomplishment, as I wrote in my first entry about the radio revolution--or realization--of 1983 in the United States, was a kind of multiracial futurism, what Byrne called an "'American cool-African-futuristic-trash-aesthetic." No wonder the sounds and rhythms of the multiracial and sexually diverse discos appealed to them. The story of "Burning Down the House" is well known, beginning with drummer Frantz's attendance at a Parliament-Funkadelic show which got him shouting "burn down the house!" during a later rehearsal jam with the other Talking Heads. But honestly, if it wasn't P-Funk's awesome energy, it probably just would have been something else that eventually inspired them to come up with a bit of pop alchemy that Top Ten American radio couldn't contain. Their attraction to mixing arty, partly-synthesized beats with funky, sexy, spiritual Black tunes wasn't a new thing; they'd had a minor hit with their cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" back in 1978, a pop concoction which in retrospect shows that the Heads were going to be as important to defining where post-punk and post-disco radio would eventually go as anything David Bowie, the Police, Prince, or any other major artist of 1983 did. That line which Rolling Stone mentioned was bound to be broken by the band, and with this masterpiece 40 years ago they did.

You can enjoy the art-house video to the song, of course, but much better is the live rendition captured by Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense, easily the greatest concert video over made. 1983's shadow is a long one indeed.