❉ Same as it ever was… With renewed interest in Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense’ soundtrack, Ty Matejowsky considers one of its highlights in its various iterations.
“Just as water can both sustain and extinguish life so too does Talking Heads speak to humanity’s inescapable impermanence in Once In A Lifetime, revealing in no uncertain terms how primal forces and fears shape the modern condition...”
Few cuts from Talking Heads’ remarkably diverse discography prove more enduring if also highly transcendent than Once In A Lifetime from 1980’s art-funk masterpiece Remain in Light. Both the Brian Eno-produced single and its live Stop Making Sense (1984) soundtrack counterpart found Billboard success, charting in 1981 and 1986 respectively, the latter ranking much higher than the studio original thanks to its opening/closing credits appearance in director Paul Mazursky’s comeback film Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). For music fans and critics alike, the song represents a creative high-water mark, recognised as much as the band’s crowning artistic achievement as one of the most important popular recordings of the last 50 years.
Amid absurdist lyrics and resonant imagery obliquely referencing the empty pursuit of conspicuous consumption, singer David Byrne ponders some of life’s core existential questions – “How did I get here?” “Am I right? Am I wrong?” All of this over the infectious world-beat polyrhythms and deep groove interplay laid down by lead guitarist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and assorted other studio/stage musicians. To wit, that’s producer/co-writer Eno alongside guitarist Adrian Belew and singer Nona Hendryx augmenting the band’s signature art-school funkadelia on the seminal 1980 recording, adding just enough sonic quirk, asymmetrical slink, and Fela Kuti-inspired frenetics to elevate an already heady jam-based listening experience into something both awe-inspiring and accessible.
On its own, the song approaches the sublime, plumbing subconscious fears and certitudes about the purifying cleanse inherent to water’s elemental nature. Such sentiments finding evocative nonverbal expression through the repetitive cascading synth sounds that permeate this playful piece of avant-garde experimentation. Arguably, if notions of “water flowing underground” somehow renders all human affairs inconsequential, they also embody a baptismal promise of ritualised catharsis, offering something like divine deliverance within an immersive fluidity that remains largely obscured from our everyday senses.
Just as water can both sustain and extinguish life so too does Talking Heads speak to humanity’s inescapable impermanence in Once In A Lifetime, revealing in no uncertain terms how primal forces and fears shape the modern condition, suffusing our existence with a nebulous dread that no amount of accruing social status or material gain can adequately address much less permanently rectify. With so much of concrete day-to-day experience mired in inane mundanities – “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was” – expertly crafted songs like Once In A Lifetime wield a transformative sway that easily elicits feelings of mystical salvation or something thereabouts when delivered effectively.
Indeed, if the song’s abiding mystique lies in its vocal intensity and idiosyncratic blend of post-punk, funk, and afrobeat elements into a hypnotic mix of innovative musical alchemy – one that emerges as something far greater than the sum of its parts – Once In A Lifetime assumes added meaning and urgency when audiences experience its two most visually arresting iterations. That is, the original 1980 Byrne-directed and Toni Basil-choreographed music video and the soul stirring performance filmmaker Jonathan Demme captured at a four night Los Angeles residency on the 1983 Speaking in Tongues tour in Stop Making Sense, widely regarded as the best concert movie ever made.
❉ ‘Talking Heads – “Once in a Lifetime” from the album ‘Remain in Light’ (1980). Talking Heads website.
❉ Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He has published various pieces with We Are The Mutants, The Middling Spaces, and Sports Literate. His book Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary (University of Alabama Press) came out in 2022. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ty-matejowsky-86026a92/
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