Various Artists : Naive Melodies
In the same way that the musical dialogue between German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk and early American hip-hop served as a foundational, cross-cultural exchange, it’s easy to visualize how influential Talking Heads were on Black music. They infused Fela’s ideas, gospel inflections, and funk techniques into their oddball new wave pastiche. Larry Levan frequently played ”Once In A Lifetime” at Paradise Garage to much fanfare. Legendary WBLS DJ and program director Frankie Crocker would play the Heads alongside Blondie and “Voices Inside My Head” by The Police, and so on. The Heads shepherded a movement of punk/alt-rock bands who saw reggae, funk, proto-hip-hop, and ensuing African highlife as the new plateau that rock should subsume itself in.
So it’s quite safe to say that some folks, more than others, have been holding at the ready for that Talking Heads tribute album, engineered with an Afro-diasporic slant. Pssst—we been knowin’ for a minute. Heads still get props in the community, cause they didn’t try to imitate. They went out, got the authentic sound, and added that layer to their quizzical fabric, which has endured and been lauded and elevated in praise all these years. Who do you think old Big Suit Byrne was trying to bust a move to in the emblematic 1984 Jonathan Demme concert film Stop Making Sense?
My money is on the late great Bernie Worrell. I mean, what former quasi-punk band hires a pivotal member of Parliament-Funkadelic, the architect and mainly sole player on the lovely alien frequency slice of bump to go that is ‘’Flash Light” to boost the Heads’ sound for live gigs? You guessed it, those same courageous art hustlers. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison, who met and formed a band while attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Byrne, who donned a big suit for the centerpiece act of the idyllic rock film by Demme, “Girlfriend Is Better,” in an attempt to make his head smaller, but somewhere in the buttermilk he got baptized by Bernie, the synth Gawd, who put this little art-rock petri dish into another cosmic realm. Those lines on “Girlfriend Is Better” soaring and speaking back to Weymouth’s bass lines, fuel the synergic mojo throughout the film. Add to it the amazing Black female voices coming from backing singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, guitarist Alex Weir, and percussionist Steve Scales. All African American musicians, giving cultural ground to the discography and a bit of that cross-cultural, joyful connection subtext for Demme to play with.
Naive Melodies, a tribute and a surreal, wild trip through the Talking Heads discography read through the lens of Black experimentalism, serves these popular songs proper respect by way of avant-garde reinterpretations, polar-opposite readings of the originals, and, in some cases, updates the root sentiment. Curated by Drew McFadden, the wizard behind BBE’s acclaimed Modern Love (a David Bowie tribute album), this nouveaux assemblage, which includes Liv.e, Rogê, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Aja Monet, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Theo Croker, Kenny Dope, Rosie Lowe, Pachyman, W.I.T.C.H., and more keeps a shifting hand on the band’s output, pressing listeners to let go of old assumptions and trust that the spirit of this storied new wave band will return through some lively, unrestrained takes.
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s orchestral reading of “Heaven,” which opens the album, finds the right mix of string charts steering the melody with grace, while celestial harp runs put this selection in a breathtaking assembly. Pachyman’s “Sugar On My Tongue” gives us Talking Heads by way of the birthplace of dub, via Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legendary Black Ark studio techniques. WITCH delivers a maybe-just-a-bit too agro version of “Once In A Lifetime,” but it is their own.
While Georgia Anne Muldrow delivers a singular reinterpretation here, “Girlfriend is Better” remade in her own vision, with low-slung bump for mind meditation, as she sings, “we got an answer that’s better than that,” you’re transported to something far more cultural. Pertinent. It’s rire indeed, but of a different ilk. But if you’re searching to capture the beautiful chuggy-weirdness that made those Heads the archetype unit for nervous funk? Leave it to Kenny Dope, one-half of Masters at Work, and yes, the shit-talking (shit-posting) out the side of her neck, genre-defying vocalist Róisín Murphy.
Their collaborative retweak of “Born Under Punches”, half house music paydirt, the other half, some “soupy, tricked-out psych-funk workout.” This is about the only track on the comp that’s channeling the Big suit, big-headedness spirit, not technique, of the fabulous Talking Heads. Drop all the politics for about nine minutes and indulge in the extended version that Dope and Murphy (sounds like a ’70s cop show or late ’90s DJ Kicks Mix) get at something so true, so humid, so rightly built from that erratic twitchy cannon of song. Is it that updated reworking of exploring Black music via a 21st-century compass? Yes, and also inserting hysteria, along with dub, samba, soul, and jazz. Or insert any friggin reason happening in this country right now, any reason you want, cause it’s gonna work.
By reducing the bpm’s and increasing the thundering low-end boom, and then, for what it’s worth, letting Murphy cook. “Stop calling me a boomer, I’m a Gen Xer, and I will have my say,” captures Murphy speaking to and about herself, and in this context, saying several different things at once. Packing that meta-commentary hyperbabble—knowing exactly what she’s doing and talking about— into something that just builds, thumps, and moves at that other frequency.
Hey man, sometimes it’s hard to quantify vibes; you just know ’em when you feel ’em. But this rework? A chess move for the dancefloor and a proper salute to the band who build a legacy on that edgy timbre.
Label: BBE
Year: 2026
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