{"id":12800,"date":"2017-12-04T20:19:52","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T04:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=12800"},"modified":"2017-12-04T20:23:40","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T04:23:40","slug":"trump-vs-talking-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2017\/12\/04\/trump-vs-talking-heads\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump vs. Talking Heads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nSuregWhlWk\" frameborder=\"0\" gesture=\"media\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Art is an attitude. Art is a viewpoint. Art is subversive. Art is a burst of creativity and energy.<\/p>\n<p>Punk rock eviscerated prog rock and corporate rock when those became too contemplated, when they were made for a market instead of the art itself.<\/p>\n<p>Your goal is to make people think. To confront them with the unexpected. To wow them.<\/p>\n<p>Art is conception more than execution.<\/p>\n<p>Art engenders discussion. It&#8217;s part of the human condition, you want to tell people about it.<\/p>\n<p>If you were paying attention to the Talking Heads you were not prepared for &#8220;Remain In Light,&#8221; with its new sounds, its refusal to give the public what it was looking for, more songs about buildings and food. And I love &#8220;Life During Wartime&#8221; from &#8220;Fear of Music,&#8221; but not as much as &#8220;Once In A Lifetime,&#8221; with its bubbling from the deep intro, obtuse lyrics and subliminal chorus.<\/p>\n<p><em>Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Letting the days go by, water flowing underground<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Into the blue again after the money&#8217;s gone<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is disconnected from society yet a comment thereupon. The best art is other but in being that it is central.<\/p>\n<p>And you may ask yourself&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>HOW DO I WORK THIS?<br \/>\nWHERE IS THAT LARGE AUTOMOBILE?<\/p>\n<p>And you may tell yourself&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE!<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s the element of disorientation, having lived in the same world as everybody else yet it now no longer makes sense.<\/p>\n<p>And then at 3:24 comes that buzzsaw guitar, or something that sounds like it, an ugly noise that feels so right, and David Byrne is chanting as he goes down the rabbit hole:<\/p>\n<p><em>Same as it ever was<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Same as it ever was<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Look where my hand was<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Time isn&#8217;t holding up<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Time isn&#8217;t after us&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The song is going down the drain and you want to cast aside all your accoutrements, your life itself, to go down the pipe with it. That&#8217;s a hit record, not one that goes to the top of the chart, but one that changes our viewpoint, our preconception, that we can never forget even though we&#8217;ve only heard it once. When the album bleeds into the next track not only are you disappointed, you&#8217;re empty and soulless.<\/p>\n<p>So now we&#8217;ve got this Swedemason, unknown to me previously, mashing up this incredible Talking Heads song with images of Trump reciting the exact same words and the dissonance is riveting.<\/p>\n<p>How did he come up with this?<\/p>\n<p>This is what we used to ask our artists. Before we were supposed to listen to them recite their hardships and sponsorships.<\/p>\n<p><em>And you may find yourself<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Living in a shotgun shack<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There seems to be no floor in America anymore, they want to take away the safety net, get ready for free fall.<\/p>\n<p><em>And you may find yourself in a beautiful house<\/em><br \/>\n<em> With a beautiful wife<\/em><br \/>\n<em> And you know you may say to yourself<\/em><br \/>\n<em> HOW DID I GET HERE??<\/em><\/p>\n<p>David Byrne was not thinking of Donald Trump when he wrote these lyrics, but he seems prescient thirty five years later, then again great art is timeless.<\/p>\n<p>Virality comes after conception. If you&#8217;re making it to be famous, you&#8217;re on the wrong track, but if you capture something deep inside the audience, they cannot help but tell others about it.<\/p>\n<p>And Trump may ask himself<br \/>\nAm I right? Am I wrong?<br \/>\nAnd he may say to himself<br \/>\nMY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE!<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Art is an attitude. Art is a viewpoint. Art is subversive. Art is a burst of creativity and energy. Punk rock eviscerated prog rock and corporate rock when those became too contemplated, when they were made for a market instead of the art itself. Your goal is to make people think. To confront them with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-3ks","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12800"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12804,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12800\/revisions\/12804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}