The View from TUS: Stop Making Sense
17 Jul
It’d been way too long since I’d seen Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads concert film by director Jonathan Demme. David Byrne has always been a serious musical hero of mine, and not just because of the music. He
and the Heads seem to consider everything they do across a whole spectrum – visual, physical, literary, at times just plain comedic or dramatic. Of course,
the music itself is brilliant. But it’s the million supporting things that happen around or in response to the music that take what the Heads do to the next level: the associative humor, the Chaplinesque dance moves, the projected words and images, the improvised and the choreographed, all smashing together in the particle accelerator to create and discover this wild wacky gorgeous joyous life-affirming, big-question-asking entertainment and edification (building pun intended).
In tribute, here’s Byrne’s (spot-on) movie-concluding parody of that strangest of all music world phenomena: the interview.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=dE-mxVxFXLg]
–Jesse
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