Life During Wartime
If you were the kind of music lover who liked your lyrics on the cerebral side without sacrificing rhythm, attitude, or danceability, Talking Heads delivered. They made you think, but they also made you move. And somehow, no matter how strange or off-kilter the lyrics were, they always seemed to make sense. Take their 1979 song “Life During Wartime.” At the time, it may have sounded like it was simply tapping into the punk and new wave zeitgeist, but it felt like something more than that—a funky cautionary tale, paranoid and urgent, about a country coming apart at the seams. I still remember bringing home Fear of Music and dropping the needle on it for the first time. Even the album itself felt hip and unsettling at once: black, embossed, industrial-looking, like a slab of diamond-plate metal. It looked like something salvaged from a future nobody was quite ready for. And then there were the songs—“I Zimbra,” “Air,” “Electric Guitar,” “Citie...
