Talking Heads Once in a Lifetime Video Review

Songfacts®:

• This song deals with the futility of not being happy with the things y'all have. Similar trying to remove the water at the bottom of the body of water, there's no way to end life from moving on. The forces of nature (like the body of water) proceed you moving most without your conscious endeavor - like a ventriloquist moving a boob.

  Head Caput David Byrne shed some light on his lyrical inspiration when he told Time Out: "Most of the words in 'Once in a Lifetime' come up from evangelists I recorded off the radio while taking notes and picking upwardly phrases I thought were interesting directions. Maybe I'm fascinated with the heart class because information technology seems so different from my life, so distant from what I do. I can't imagine living like that."

  Some of these evangelist recordings likewise made their fashion to a 1981 anthology chosen My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by David Byrne and Brian Eno.

• This stalled at #103 in February 1981, only when MTV launched that August, they played the video a lot, giving the vocal much more exposure.

  David Byrne's choreography in the video was done by the Toni Basil, who had a hit as a vocaliser with "Mickey." It was a very odd video, and for many viewers it was the first wait they got at the Talking Heads (or at least Byrne - the full band didn't appear in a video until "Called-for Down the House" two years later).

  Equally you lookout man David Byrne spasm like a malfunctioning robot interspersed with gesturing in Martian sign language, ponder this excerpt from the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, in which Toni Basil fills in some details about the choreography for this video: "He [Byrne] wanted to research movement, but he wanted to research movement more as an actor, as does David Bowie, as does Mick Jagger. They come to motion in another fashion, not every bit a trained dancer. Or not actually interested in trip the light fantastic steps. He wanted to research people in trances - different trances in church and dissimilar trances with snakes. And so we went over to UCLA and USC, and we viewed a lot of footage of documentaries on that subject. And so he took the ideas, and he 'physicalized' the ideas from these documentary-mode films."

  Basil adds: "When I was making videos - whether information technology was with Devo, David Byrne, or whoever - there wasn't record companies breathing down anybody's neck, telling them what to do, what the video should expect like. There was no paranoid A&R guy, no crazy dresser that would come in and decide what people should exist wearing, and put them in shoes that they can't walk in, everybody with their own agenda. We were all on our own."

  Basil also directed and choreographed the video for the Remain In Light rail "Crosseyed And Painless," which features dancers from a crew called The Electric Boogaloos. None of the ring members appear in information technology.

• Some critics have suggested that "Once In A Lifetime" is a kind of prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s. David Byrne says they're wrong; that the lyric is pretty much about what it says it's about. In an interview with NPR, Byrne said: "We're largely unconscious. You know, we operate one-half awake or on autopilot and end upwards, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to inquire ourselves, 'How did I get here?'" >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Lauren - Lakeland, FL

• Brian Eno produced this song and wrote the chorus, which he besides sang on. David Byrne wrote the verses, which he talk/sings in an intriguing narrative manner. Remain In Light was the fourth Talking Heads album, and the tertiary produced by Eno, whose artistic bent and flair for the unusual were a great fit for the group.

  Unlike their previous anthology, the songs on Remain In Light were more often than not written in the studio (Compass Point, the Bahamas) and all credited to the four band members plus Eno.

• A surprising number of musicians cite "Once In A Lifetime" as one of the all-time songs ever recorded. Hither are three:

  Charlotte Church, who named it the starting time song she brutal in love with. "The first fourth dimension I heard it, my listen was blown," she told NME. "There's and so magic in that vocal. I think David Byrne is an absolute G."

  Nick Feldman of Wang Chung, who loves the "near randomly clinking keyboard burblings, the wonderful bass line and rhythm section groove and David Byrne's slightly preacher-like vocals." He told Songfacts: "When my personal life started to unravel many years afterwards, the lyrics to this song all the same resonated for me. Byrne's mesmeric and intense physical performance in the video to this track still compels today, and compliments and reflects the music it is interpreting."

  Glen Ballard, who produced and co-wrote hits for Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews and Aerosmith. "That song can't be touched," he said in a Songfacts interview. "I listen to information technology like once a calendar month because everything most information technology is then perfect."

• The video bankrupt new basis when information technology was exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art as role of a 1982 exhibition called "Performance Video." The exhibit helped explicate to parents what their kids were watching on MTV. Information technology explained how the "Once In A Lifetime" video "expands upon the song'due south complex interweaving of moods and images too every bit Byrne'south interest in African music and percussion."

• When Talking Heads toured to support their next album, Speaking in Tongues, in 1983, Byrne did the movements from the video when he performed the vocal. Not simply that, he added movements to other songs they performed on that tour as well, making for some very unorthodox visual expression. Audiences were used to seeing pyro and flashing lights, but had never seen annihilation like the full band running in identify ("Burning Down the House") or Byrne turning himself into a homo corkscrew ("Life During Wartime"). The experience was so striking it got the attention of director Jonathan Demme, who filmed a few of the shows and turned it into the acclaimed concert film End Making Sense.

• This was used in the airplane pilot episodes of That '80s Show (2002) and Numb3rs (2005). It was used twice on The Simpsons ("Days of Futurity Hereafter" - 2014, "Trust But Analyze" - 2016) and in these series:

  The Deuce ("Morta di Fame" - 2019)
  Existence Erica ("Existence Adam" - 2010)
  Chuck ("Chuck Versus the Suburbs" - 2009)
  WKRP in Cincinnati ("Existent Families" - 1980)

  It also shows up in these movies:

  Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
  Secret Window (2004)
  Rock Star (2001)
  Alice and Martin (1998)

• The live version from Stop Making Sense was used in the opening sequence of the 1986 motion picture Downwards And Out In Beverly Hills, which shows a homeless Nick Nolte pushing his grocery cart of possessions around Los Angeles and doing some dumpster diving. His character is in a archetype, "How did I get here?" situation, simply shortly his fortunes have a plow. This version of the song was re-released as a single that year and charted at #91 in America.

• The Exies released a haunting version of this song in 2006, releasing a video to go with it. It has also been covered by Not bad Pumpkins and sampled by Jay-Z on his vocal "Information technology'south Alright."

• Phish covered the unabridged Remain In Light album on Halloween, 1996 at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta. Information technology took upwardly the entire second gear up of their show and featured guest brass players. The functioning is considered one of the best Phish "anthology-cover" attempts. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Jeff - Kendall Park, NJ

• Republic of benin superstar Angélique Kidjo covered this song forth with the rest of Remain in Lite in 2018. She explained to Mojo: "I wanted to bring the resilience of the Africans, and the joy, despite everything they throw at us."

• On May 5, 2018, Kidjo sang "Once In A Lifetime" with David Byrne at Carnegie Hall. She told Mojo: "It was not rehearsed or planned. I think if I idea nigh it I wouldn't have been able to sing one note."

• In his 2019 Broadway product American Utopia, David Byrne evokes this song a few times, doing the movements associated with it and at one indicate asking, "How did I get here?" He does the vocal in the play likewise, and on Feb 29, 2020, Byrne performed it on Saturday Night Live with his cast members. Later that year, American Utopia was released on HBO as a film.

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Source: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/talking-heads/once-in-a-lifetime

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