Making Flippy Floppy

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Talking Heads, "Making Flippy Floppy," (download until 1/17/09), from "Speaking in Tongues."

For some reason, I'm finding myself coming back to tunes which I think are objectively mediocre but come together in a way that makes them great. This is one of them. Every single variable in the tune, from the melody, to the arrangement, to the words, is, by classic Talking Heads standards, fair to middling. Admittedly, the Heads made truly great music with alarming frequency between 1979 and 1983, and that raises both the ceiling and the floor. Most people would give their eyeteeth to write a tune like this one.

The Talking Heads are open at some level to all the same critiques I leveled at Tom Waits and Beck, tangentially. At the same time, though David Byrne has had a very chequered career since this record--in hindsight, "Little Creatures" is both derivative and weak, and seemingly a very forced change of pace, and then it's downhill from there--somehow the band, and it was a band, was able to draw on a variety of sources and make them their own.

David Byrne does not get let off the hook, and particularly the racial hook--which I didn't even wield with Tom Waits, I'm aware, could've, should've--but there's also the fact that one can make really good music while maintaining awful racial politics. David Byrne and Brian Eno both deserve any crap they get for their criminal exoticization of black people, and black music. It's worst on "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," which is at the same time the best record they made together, truly, though I'd add it's the best record only in its originally released form, not with the added tracks of the reissue, with "Qu'ran" and not with "Very, Very Hungry."

I would think that at least Brian Eno (am I being unfair?) and possibly David Byrne had read the Amos Tutuola novel of the same name--at least I hope they did. How many of the white, college-boy hipsters who read the book, let alone bought it, remains in my mind in little doubt: about a tenth of a percent. I actually did--brilliant novel, included in my edition with Tutuola's first, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard," which I preferred. Tutuola was sort of disowned for admittedly good reasons by a lot of educated Africans because of his imperfect grasp of formal English (as opposed to Chinua Achebe, who for my money is the model of English prose from the mid-twentieth century), and his editors reviled for more or less marketing him as an exotic, essentially savage African, untouched by civilizing influence and thus "authentic." Accepting all this, Tutuola's imagery is about as astonishing as any I've read, and he's very clearly conscious of his place in the linguistic world.

There certainly is a problem with this music, with this project. I'll cite a line--and in defense of the artists, this is not a quote from them, but from the critic--from the allmusic.com review of "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts":

The songs on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts present myriad elements from around the world in the same jumbled stew, without regard for race, creed, or color.

There you go. Colorblindness, the surest sign of a white liberal. The Talking Heads are very liberal in this sense. Now some people are getting tense. Don't worry, my great, human, white friends, you're ok. But next time you're hanging out with one of your friends of color, just ask them if they can afford to be colorblind in America. Then, if you are really a friend, you won't be hurt. In fact, you should be proud that you're a white person that, if you can listen, is moving toward a solution.

This is the thing, though: the music is good. This tune would be great, too, if it weren't on the same record with other things that are better, as unsound as that logic might be. And it doesn't hold a candle to "Once in a Lifetime," for sure. We must be suspect of any band that hires P-Funksters for an album and tour, forms a sound that not only uses those players but requires them, and then proceeds to move on. This doesn't reduce, however, that a record with Bernie Worrell on it is always worthwhile. Everything he touches turns to gold.