Remain in Light  

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"Talking HeadsRemain in Light used dense polyrhythms throughout the album, most notably on the song "The Great Curve"."--Sholem Stein

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Remain in Light is an album by American New Wave band Talking Heads, released to wide critical acclaim on October 8, 1980. It drew heavily on influences from African and Afro-Cuban music and was directly inspired by the Afrobeat of bandleader Fela Kuti.

Contents

Style

Featuring funky African rhythms, the album became an influential post punk, world music and New Wave recording. Remain in Light uniquely blended African-American, continental African and white American musical forms; Rolling Stone magazine's Ken Tucker noted at the time that there had rarely been "a larger gap between what black and white audiences were listening to."

Recording

Talking Heads added a number of musicians for the album and for the tour that year. The first appearance of the larger group was in August at the Heatwave festival where they played four of the songs before the album's release. Their set began with the basic quartet and then they added players and vocalists song by song until they filled the stage.

Singles

The single "Once in a Lifetime" sold poorly in the US upon its original release (although it reached #14 in the UK), but a quirky music video and its presence on the soundtrack to Down and Out in Beverly Hills helped make it a charting single and minor hit in 1986 (see 1986 in music).

Two follow-up singles were released—one in the U.S. ("Crosseyed and Painless") and one in the UK ("Houses in Motion")—but neither of them made the Top Forty in their respective countries.

Cover

The album cover and liner notes were created by the notable graphic designer, Tibor Kalman. Kalman based the cover artwork on the life story of Tina Weymouth, with a fleet of planes on the back cover representing her childhood as the daughter of a traveling USAF general, and digitally distorted faces of the band members representing her at-the-time current status as a member of the band and the electro-centric direction the band had taken.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Remain in Light" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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