utterly forgotten but NOT OBSCURE

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

by terming david byrne "obscure", alexmacpherson touches the exact, interesting nerve i think -- maybe even more than with his legendary "why SHOULD i have heard of john wayne?" argument

which is that in every generation (wait, that's how BUFFY starts!! -- er er focus) in every generation there are figures very well-known to all who have just VANISHED from mainstream radar by the next cycle

it's not that they're still popular but currently unfashionable; it's more that "what they meant" is no longer part of the pop discussion -- is that right?

so why has byrne vanished this way? or is it just not making "the right kinds of records" any more?

(disclaimer: i LOVED LOVE LOVED early TH and have i think every record they made --- BUT i went off them INCREDIBLY fast, round abt "true stories", and it took me years to rediscover any fondness)

Comments

I find this discussion confusing

[koganbot]

I find this discussion confusing for the following reasons:

(1) Please. David Byrne was never a household name anywhere. Ever. Jeesh.

(2) Influence and name-recognition belong to different species. May also belong to different genuses and families.

(3) The phrase "what David Byrne meant" is not self-explanatory; I have no clear idea whether "what David Byrne meant" is or is not part of the current pop discussion. Does "being part of the current pop discussion" mean being discussed on message boards? Does it mean being wrestled with by musicians, producers, and songwriters? Certainly can be both.

(4) Elvis Costello rose to prominence as the frontman of an act called "Elvis Costello." David Byrne didn't rise to prominence as the frontman of an act called "David Byrne." This could have something to do with why Lex had heard of Costello but not Byrne. (Obv. sometimes frontman's name can equal or overshadow band's; e.g. Janis and Big Brother, Courtney and Hole, Jim Morrison and Doors; but here we're talking about cultural gods and goddesses and devils and shamans; Byrne was never remotely close to this category.)

(5) Given Byrne's relatively low name-recognition and relatively nonoverwhelming impact in his time, I think he's probably stayed on pretty well both as a public figure and a musical influence.

Anyway, I once met a "curator" who referred to David Byrne as an important "composer." (I suggested to her that James Brown was a more important composer.) Talking Heads' music also got played in discos and at college mixers and on mainstream rock stations. This is a pretty wide cultural range. I don't think name recognition for "David Byrne" followed across this range. (Mostly would have stopped with the curator.) Where Byrne did have his greatest impact and greatest name recognition was among new wave rock bohemians and among dance-club bohemians. This is why it's surprising that Lex hadn't heard of Byrne. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the performers Lex has played and a lot of dancers he's played for have heard of Byrne. As Lex says, it's probably owing to chance that he'd heard of Debbie Harry but not David Byrne.

Hard to say what Byrne's actual influence was. He was a singer in a rock band that moved in an r&b/funk direction, but he sang in neither a rock-tough nor an r&b-soul voice. Rather he sang in the voice of a harried white civil servant. This is where he still has a large ongoing impact, even if the impact doesn't come with his name attached. Not that people are copying his voice so much as they're using various white dorkboy voices that they might not have felt free to use if Byrne and a few others (Mark Mothersbaugh? Fred Schneider?) hadn't jumped to white dorkboy voices back in the '70s. To give a few examples that might surprise you, when I hear Bowling for Soup's "1985" and the Jonas Bros.'s "Year 3000," I hear Byrne in the vocals' ancestry, though I doubt that anyone would say, "Oh yeah, Jonas Bros. and Bowling for Soup: Talking Heads imitators."

Re: I find this discussion confusing

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Haha I had no idea Janis Joplin was in a band at all!

I agree and am heartened by all of your post. I also still think the fact that DAVID BYRNE is a really ordinary name is a factor! If an article or person mentions Elvis Costello or Green Gartside or Ari Up or Exene Cervenka in passing these are names which will stick in my mind even if I don't have a particular interest in them. David Byrne is, like, one step up from John Smith. There are CURRENT bands I love whose singers' names I forget because they're boring!