YMMV / Remain in Light

• Awesome Music: Considered Talking Heads' masterpiece and one of the best albums of The '80s, if not of all time.
• Epic Riff: The three-note guitar riff in "Crosseyed and Painless", and the seven-note bass riff to "Once In A Lifetime", which are cousins of each other.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The first single from the album, "Once in a Lifetime", flopped in the U.S. but was a hit in the U.K. It only became Talking Heads' Signature Song when the video was put into heavy rotation on MTV.
• Genre Turning Point: The album's use of African rhythms, along with Peter Gabriel's third self-titled album released the same year, helped popularize World Music.
• Memetic Mutation: "Once in a Lifetime" has more or less become Talking Heads' equivalent of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", in that not only is it the band's Signature Song, but its popularity transcends the music community and has been a consistent subject of references, pastiches, and parody both online and in mainstream popular media. Time will tell if we reach the point where crowds of people can recite the song by heart in unison. Much of the song's popularity has to do with a combination of its surreal yet highly relatable (and quotable) lyrics as well as its famously Surreal Music Video, which has become an especially popular subject of parody online.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The videos for "Once in a Lifetime" and "Crosseyed and Painless" were choreographed and directed by Toni Basil, who later had a hit with "Mickey." Her video for "Mickey" had her against a similar white backdrop to "Once in a Lifetime."
  • Adrian Belew (who previously worked with Frank Zappa and David Bowie) played guitar on the album and joined the group to tour it. A year later he would become the frontman of the reunited King Crimson, whose comeback album Discipline was greatly influenced by Talking Heads.
  • Percussionist Jose Rossy, who contributed to the album, would later join the jazz fusion band Weather Report.
• Special Effect Failure: The bluescreening in the "Once in a Lifetime" video is glaringly poor, with visible artifacting and image distortion on and around David Byrne. However, this has lent the video a sort of Narm Charm, with the amateurish look of it being a big part of the appeal.
• Tough Act to Follow: It seemed inevitable that Talking Heads would have a difficult time trying to follow up an album as rapturously acclaimed as Remain in Light. While nobody (aside from critics in regards to True Stories) will say that their later albums are outright bad, the general consensus is that the band was simply never able to top Remain in Light.
• Values Dissonance: The penultimate track, "Listening Wind", portrays anti-American terrorism sympathetically by depicting it as being one man's retaliation against American colonization. David Byrne himself stated that he's unsure if he could perform it live nowadays, in the age after The War on Terror, though that didn't stop Peter Gabriel from covering it.
• Values Resonance: "Seen and Not Seen" looks prescient with the pressure to maintain a perfect image on social media.

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