David Fricke, Rolling Stone, 6/9/83

Speaking in Tongues: Talking Heads Arty Party

Speaking in Tongues, Talking Heads’ first studio
album in three years, is the album that finally
obliterates the thin line separating arty white
pop music and deep black funk. Picking up where
their 1980 Afro-punk fusion Remain in Light left
off, this LP consummates the Heads’ marriage of
art-school intellect and dance-floor soul. Imbued
with an adventurous spirit that’s as close to
Television’s Marquee Moon as it is to Michael
Jackson’s Thriller, Grand Master Flash’s "The
Message" and Nigerian high-life music, Speaking
in Tongues gives new meaning to the word crossover.

The impish "Making Flippy-Floppy," the second
track on side one, is an immediate tip-off that
something new is going on here. "Everybody, get
in line!" commands singer-guitarist David Byrne,
as the Heads step straight into a brassy strut
counted off by a scratchy guitar figure and Chris
Frantz’ martial drumming. Ominous synth-bass
effects undulate beneath the surface of the beat
before Byrne cuts into a bright, saucy chorus that
would make Prince envious. Wobbly, whining
synthesizers and a walking bass-and-piano line
keep up the funk, while violinist L. Shankar
shoots the whole affair into a strange Far Eastern
space with his brief raga-like solo.

The Heads have never cut the funk into finer,
more fluent pieces. Nor have they ever displayed
such a sense of purpose and playfulness (check out,
for example, the murky boogie and Byrne’s comic John
Lee Hooker growl in "Swamp"). One detects here the
influence of Frantz and his wife, bassist Tina
Weymouth: on holiday from the Heads, they took
the third-world forms and urban-funk gestures of
Remain in Light and dressed them up with pop spangle
and good humor on their Tom Tom Club LP.

Jerry Harrison’s experiments with polyrhythmic
keyboard layers on his solo LP, The Red and the
Black, have also been incorporated into Speaking
in Tongues. Along with P-Funkster Bernie Worrell
and reggae keyboard specialist Wally Badarou,
Harrison fortifies the beat with alien color and
contrapuntal muscle without complicating it.

But it is David Byrne’s propulsive score for Twyla
Tharp’s 1981 dance piece The Catherine Wheel that
may be the most important influence on Speaking in
Tongues. The severe constraints of matching music
to movement--of making music inspire expressive
movement--forced Byrne to write and arrange his
Catherine Wheel score with both crisp dramatic
precision and provocative imagistic flair.

The nine songs on Speaking in Tongues--the group’s
first self-produced studio album--demonstrate that
same precision and flair in remarkable combinations.
On the surface, "Girlfriend Is Better" is a brassy,
straightforward bump number sparked by Byrne’s
animated bragging ("I’ve got a girlfriend that’s
better than that/She has the smoke in her eyes/She’s
comin’ up, goin’ right through my heart/She’s gonna
give me a surprise") and by the kind of rapid,
zigzagging synth squeals so common on rap and funk
records. But the edgy paranoia smoldering underneath
("We’re being taken for a ri-i-ide again," a double-
tracked Byrne brays woefully at one point) is colorfully
articulated by guitar and percussion figures that
burble along in a fatback echo, sounding like a sink
backing up.

"I Get Wild/Wild Gravity," Byrne’s unsettling account
of isolation and disorientation, alludes to the funky
voodoo reggae of Grace Jones and is heightened by arty
dub intrusions and electronic handclaps. "Burning Down
the House" is busier in its rhythmic design: tumbling
drum breaks punctuate Frantz’ authoritative pace, while
springy synthesizer pings and the desolate chime of a
keyboard solo rebound off Byrne’s brisk acoustic-guitar
strumming.

But the complexity of these songs doesn’t keep any of
them from being great dance tracks. They are all
rooted in a shrewd yet elastic sense of rhythm, thereby
avoiding the brittle, plastic feel of such glorified
disco troupes as the Thompson Twins or Spandau Ballet.
And unlike, say, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Byrne’s
academic safari with Brian Eno, Speaking in Tongues is
an art-rock album that doesn’t flaunt its cleverness;
it’s obvious enough in the alluring hooks, deviant
rhythms and captivating mix of reliable funk gimmicks
and intellectual daring.

The real art here is the incorporation of disparate
elements from pop, punk and R&B into a coherent,
celebratory dance ethic that dissolves notions of
color and genre in smiles and sweat. A new model
for great party albums to come, Speaking in Tongues
is likely to leave you doing just that.