Talking Heads - Double Groove (outtake 1980)
Here’s an outtake from Remain In Light (the greatest album of all time, for the record). The outtakes attached to the 2005 are basically formless, proof-of-concept recordings with fittingly matter-of-fact names like “Fela’s Riff” and “Double Groove”. This outtake is probably too “happy” for an album like Remain In Light, but it’s funny that the vocals are an unintelligible ensemble: The grooves speak themselves, right? It’s also funny that this unfinished Talking Heads song would sound right at home on an Animal Collective EP.
My relationship with music has become more and more spiteful over the years. I hate mix tapes and the making of them becuase it inevitably leads to an inadequate (or worse, overwhelming) amount of appreciation for their creation from the recipient (or they totally misunderstand why you put that Jens Lekman song on there). I hate the radio, which once gave me such joy, but now is a wasteland. I hate the mp3 era, which has mortally wounded the album (Girls and Beach House excepted) and, for me, random, chance-taking concertgoing.
But mostly, I’ve aged to that bitter, bitter time when I hate that a song like this can - despite the poverty, the frustration, the loneliness, the whole fucking “L.A.” of it all - can make me dance in my chair and forget all this horseshit. If there’s anything that I’ve learned in my time, it’s that forgetting the horseshit will make you step in it again and again, but dammit if Talking Heads don’t make me bob my head and stare at the setting sun, happy, somehow content, marvelling, scraping it off my shoe, marching ahead, dancing ahead.
Happy.
