You may find yourself watching this crazy Talking Heads video. And you may find yourself trying to understand what on the earth is going on. And you may find yourself heading towards here to read this review. And you may find yourself getting some enlightenment...I hope. Once in a lifetime! And we try.
I might be wrong but this is Talking Heads very first video, a little earlier before MTV come to the scene and show what video clips was all about and how they could make an impact to audiences. Therefore, all what's wrong with this clip can't and won't be thrown here (OK, my only complaint is that it's an edit version of the actual song). While David Byrne's song reflects a pounding and immortal existentialism about the question we make while going through life ("How did I get here?" among others), the video presents the man himself dressed in a 1950's style (those huge glasses) making some spasmodic dance and movements, lip-synching the song against those old chrome-key background - revolutionary then, strange to look at it now. Sweating, nervous, out of control...but it's all we need to see when he gives us the lyrics, a desperation that won't go quietly, everything that pounds into our brain when we had lived long enough to understand the ways life go without we notice.
I might be looking far too objectively to the video and that's not the ideal. You can watch it and still find it positively amusing, hysterically funny because everything Byrne does here is out of this world. Million dollar question: the 1950's thing was a look back at the American Way of Life and how it turned out to be in the following decades, so there we have Byrne's appearance as if he was transported 30 years later to ask himself what happened or it's just something the band liked? After all, how many 1980's groups looked back to the 1950's style/fashion/culture to introduce to the then current audiences? Several groups.
Good classic clip that despite the age hasn't lost its charm. Letting the days go by...9/10
