Talking Heads vs Steely Dan

Me now I'm an old fucker - Steely Dan

Sorry.

Me now I'm an old fucker - Talking Heads (Steely Dan are pretty good too 'though)

Steely Dan, hands down.

P.S. They suck too.

Talking Heads ignored by hipsters? Then how come they all love the fucking Dismemberment Plan?

Yeah, Fear of Music, blah blah blah, sorry not for me (and yes I've heard it).

talking heads might find themselves on planet wizz

rick derringer v. adrian belew
happy songs about perversions (everyone's gone to the moview v. angry songs about domestic pets (animals)
hated by former sidemen v. hated by former band members
outsold by former sidemen (doobie brothers) v. outshined by former band members (tom tom club single is classic)
lyrics obscured by slick music v. music obscured by slick oversized suit
fear of performance v. greatest live show movie ever
obviously wrote songs on acid v. obviously on acid

dammit- i refuse to choose when i can have both*

*philosophy on music/food/sex

*philosophy on music/food/women

Bah on old v. young. Music as lifestyle choice. Just choose the better band.

I'm so heartened to see most people are weighing in on the Dan side. I thought the conventional wisdom was Talking Heads were this really important band or something. Can't stand them. David Byrne, bite me. Loved Steely Dan as a kid, still like 'em now. Although I went to see that reunion tour in the early 90's ("First tour in two decades!" or whatever) and it was pretty bad.

Christoff, from whence comes this flatly wrong perception that Becker/Fagen didn't know how to play their instruments? They were a duo. They needed to hire others to make the records.

Also, give me the two Donald Fagen solo records. Big hits on the steppers scene.

i still don't think i get it. their voices are so sickly sweet. this stuff could easily be on the smooth jazz station.

if i wanted to hear sappy white boy 70s soul, i'd much rather listen to Todd Rundgren.

it's still Talking Heads for me anyday.

It is played on smooth jazz stations.

okeh, here's my 2 rusty kopeks
and i'll devide them equally, actually

for tho' i didn't have anything much against the two dildos' Two Against Nature -- slick solid smoothathon, more than okay -- the last time i checked Katy Lied & The Royal Scam, the former tasted absolutely foul, more loathsome than yer average german loaf cake that's like eons past its sell-by date
...naturally, didn't partake of the other one after that
(and i won't now, no way am i gonna take off Tomasz Stanko's Matka Joanna - what for, just to sniff one more useless dildo?! o no)

dontcha fret, my brief for giving Head' my other kopek will be, for the time being, well brief
And She Was -- on top of being a brilliant lttle ditty a-brimming with boundless joy, it's also one of the two best transplants of Richard Brautigan titles into pop music evah
(suck on this, burrou'ers)

i will, tho, drag out the rest of my Heads rekkids tomorrow. just in case

Bah on not developing your musical palate and spending your whole life stuck in a rut of only listening to the stuff you liked when you were a teenager!

You are clueless.

I only post here because the prevailing aesthetic seems to be all music is worthy of consideration. I never liked Talking Heads growing up, I still don't like them. I've got a pile of cd's next to me here at the puter from the likes of Soul Oddity, Burzum, the Bilders, Milton Nascimento, Grateful Dead, Charles Hayward/Nick Doyne-Ditmas, Blue Orchids, blah blah fuckn' blah.

David Byrne could bite me as a teenager. He can sure as hell bite me now.

Anyway, enjoy that big white sportcoat/whatever-the-fuck!

I listened to the Talking Heads when I was a teenager, and I still prefer Steely Dan (which is not to say I hate the Talking Heads). Of course, I heard Steely Dan as a child, so maybe that's even worse: I can't get past the music of my childhood. In the long run, the sound of 70's pop music probably shaped my expectations about music more than my self-consciously adventurous listening during the 80's (which included my high school and college years).

I went to Bard College, btw.

Not at all Mr. Diamond (not Mr. Ross Diamond I don't suppose?), just trying to point out point out playfully that there are many more and better reasons for one's musical tastes to change as one gets older than merely "lifestyle choice" as you (perhaps cynically?) suggest - please refer to my original post about my own tastes if in doubt about my motives here!

well i stand by the euology to And She Was,
but meanwhile tried to give a fair hearing to the below unholy un-trinity too

and to my january-13-03 ears
T'Heads, More Songs About... consistently verges on the tedious
& Fear Of Music, tho' far from euphoria-producing, is still sort of listenable ('air' and esp. 'drugs' could as well be Bowie songs from the same period, not surprisingly)
& the dildos's Royal Scam, hm... is quite easy to not notice even in the headphones but, in its lukewarm manner and all, it appears to've aged less badly than T'Heads' More Songs

no chance i'm gonna pick up again any of them any time soon!

Me when I was 20 - punk = good + pretty much everything else sucks (hmmmm = "lifestyle choice"? OK, maybe!)

Me now I'm an old fucker - punk = good, but so are an awful lot of other things!

"Nothing But Flowers" is Byrne trying to have it both ways: he fetishizes consumer culture, but constructs narrators who both lament an imagined loss of that culture and romanticize that end

"The Last Mall" is incredibly vague: it expects that you already know the trope, so you don't need many of the details filled in. So it gets over on style - here's a shading, here an implication, you know what we mean, check out these horn charts. Which is why it's the much more ominous song: it's the Last Mall, the one you already knew was coming, the one you've been "waiting" for in several senses of the word. "Roll your cart back up the aisle" no fewer that three distinct moods all at once (hortatory/imperative/2nd-pl.-indicative!) Steely Dan wins as usual.

Personally, both clasic, no basis for comparison.

This is probably my least favorite song on the new record and I've probably given it more thought so far than any other cut! For real, I considered it pretty minor and throwaway at first, but Darnielle's post is really making me reevaluate my opinion.

Countdown to Ecstasy has had a rennaissance of late, since I picked up the CD reissue.