Saturday's Tune: I Wanna Dance With Somebody

I was never a huge fan of 80's pop and I contend that nothing good came out of the 80's from a cultural point of view. Hair styles were awful, clothing was horrible, drugs were bad, aids would kill you if you even thought about sex (or so we believed). My list of grievances against the 80's is long indeed. You couldn't, of course, avoid hearing Whitney Houston on the radio. I always find it terribly tragic when someone, regardless of their talent, finds life so intolerable that they self-destruct. Last weeks news of her death saw her songs played a lot more on the radio, and my local, community radio station played a cover of I Wanna Dance With Somebody by David Byrne who himself, was an 80's icon with The Talking Heads (Psycho Killer, Burning Down The House, etc).

Today's tune, then, continues the series (being more than one qualifies it for a series as far as I'm concerned) of non-electronic music on Saturday's Tune (on Sunday). A really great video to watch as well. Well done to the poster.

I really like David Byrne's comment that I found on his Wiki Page:

Here was another piece in the Times today about yet another 20 percent drop in CD sales. (Are they running the same news piece every 4 months?) Jeez guys, the writing's on the wall. How long do the record execs think they'll have those offices and nice parking spaces? (Well, more than half of all record A&R and other execs are gone already, so there should be plenty of parking space). They, the big 4 or 5, should give the catalogs back to the artists or their heirs as a gesture before they close the office doors, as they sure don't know how to sell music anymore. (I have Talking Heads stuff on the shelf that I can't get Warner to release.) The "industry" had a nice 50-year ride, but it's time to move on. Luckily, music remains more or less unaffected — there is a lot of great music out there. A new model will emerge that includes rather than sues its own customers, that realizes that music is not a product in the sense of being a thing — it's closer to fashion, in that for music fans it tells them and their friends who they are, what they feel passionately about and to some extent what makes life fun and interesting. It's about a sense of community — a song ties a whole invisible disparate community together. It's not about selling the (often) shattered plastic case CDs used to come in.