Once in a Lifetime bursts into life with a cymbal crash and a bass slide, and then we’re off on its unique journey: twinkling keyboards, clicking hi-hats and toms in surprising places, and that famous two-note bass riff. In keeping with the simple progressions of the album’s other tracks, the song is built of just two alternating chords; but unlike the rest of the album’s clipped paranoid funk, Once in a Lifetime ebbs and flows with a forward, organic, easy rhythm.
That “forwardness” is important. I love Once in a Lifetime because it captures, with shocking precision, a certain thought that occurs to me from time to time, which is: wait, what on earth am I doing? Or, as David Byrne puts it in the first verse: “well, how did I get here?” It’s that moment of blinding clarity that hits us all from time to time— a sudden and frightening objectivity, a sense of being completely and totally awake for the first occasion in months, years. You look around, take stock of all you’ve achieved, and realise that in some terrible way none of it truly belongs to you. I’ve experienced this a few times now, usually at times of critical change. (Leaving home for the first time is a memorable one. “This is not my beautiful house!”) I don’t think I’m alone, and the song has many fans.
As you may have noticed by now, many of my favourite songs work by combining musical mood with lyrical theme. The way Once in a Lifetime sounds so musically warm and expansive (the floating keyboards and polyrhythmic drums) and somehow naïve (the call-and-response chorus melody, the flute-like synths afterwards) is a critical part of what makes the lyrics work. In the wrong song (see later) those words could have been crushingly dark and hopeless— I mean, is this guy trapped in his beautiful house with his beautiful wife for the rest of his life?— but the catchy, upbeat music and Byrne’s warm and eccentric spoken-word delivery make this instead a song of optimism. After all, it is not just about being trapped, but also about the promise of escape: “Where does that highway go to?” wonders Byrne. I think it’s about challenging complacency, about the necessity of fear— because without that fear, you take stuff for granted, and life becomes meaningless without you even noticing. In that sense, ironically, Once in a Lifetime is life-affirming. The most life-affirming song I know, in fact.
Most people know the video. It’s one of the great icons of MTV (back from when music videos were the new thing and MTV actually used to play them) and of 80s pop-culture in general. It’s dated now, of course, and what must once have been really-quite-neat bluescreen technology— David Byrne superimposed across watery backgrounds or duplicated across the screen— now looks tacky and simplistic. But that, naturally, is all part of its appeal for me, and I’m not talking about nostalgia. The dated aesthetic, frozen in time and place, contributes weirdly to the vibe and the message of the song, of being trapped, frozen, stuck. And in a strange way it is consequently timeless.
But it goes without saying that the star of the show is David Byrne himself. After seeing the man perform live a few weeks ago and soon after digesting an awful lot of live footage on YouTube— I particularly recommend the Rome concert— I have decided after some reflection that David Byrne is the coolest man who has ever lived. And he has never been cooler than he is in the Once in a Lifetime video.
When I first started getting into Talking Heads, it was with some disappointment I discovered that David Byrne’s “50s Midwestern geek” look (suit, bowtie, spectacles, tidy haircut) was created for the Once in a Lifetime video and is not how Byrne generally goes about in life— another terrible lie of the MTV generation. Somehow Byrne makes what should be a clichéd aesthetic fascinating, inscrutable, meaningful, mesmeric. A lot of that is down to his famously erratic dancing, his puppet-like movements, fitting and shaking and collapsing, twitching to the beat. From time to time he recoils as if something big has struck him, or an idea has occurred to him, or drummer Chris Frantz has hit him instead of the tom-tom. (I don’t say this in jest: it really is as if the weight of the music itself has hit the twitching-puppet Byrne with sudden force.) The suddenness and unpredictability of his moves, apparently derived from a patchwork of sources from evangelists to epileptics, mirrors the sudden realisation of the song’s lyrics.
The image, then, is of a man who is somehow not a man but a figure to which things are done. He is pushed around, picked up and dropped, toppled. He is apparently subject to the (sometimes violent) ebb and flow of life itself. But, importantly, he doesn’t seem to be a victim. He’s fine with all this. He stares at us with wide-eyed, inhuman calm. There is no fear or pain or panic in this guy, or apparently much of anything at all, which would make him uncanny or unpleasant under normal circumstances, but for some reason he isn’t. And through all this he seems to be communicating something, something urgent and important but hard to discern. It’s kind of like the Red Room in Twin Peaks, but less creepy (though no less awesome). You wake from the dream with a sense of renewed clarity, but can’t say why.
David Byrne himself appears to “wake from the dream” in the video’s closing moments, appearing in two brief shots sans glasses and bow tie, mouthing the backing vocals, moving his head subtly to the beat, his eyes shining, human again. This is the “real” David Byrne. I find these two shots, the total inverse of the rest of the video, mysteriously moving, I suppose because they temporarily deconstruct the Byrne we’ve been seeing the whole time and offer a kind of momentary relief— a reality check, I guess. Which, really, is what the whole song is about, isn’t it?
I will close this entry by linking to a pair of fascinatingly dreadful cover versions of the song. I wouldn’t feel this necessary if I didn’t think that, in their own perverse ways, both covers reveal something about the music they mutilate. Here’s a version by the Exies, an emo/alt-rock band from LA:
And here’s the Smashing Pumpkins’ version, which is, incredibly, arguably worse:
What I find most interesting about these covers is that neither of them even attempt to emulate the music of the original track. Aside from the verse-chorus structure, nothing of the song’s musicality– its melodies, instrumentation, even its chord progression– remains in either cover. Not that I believe that covers should attempt to simply recreate songs, but the degree to which both bands have deviated here is quite amazing considering the original song is comprised of exactly two chords. (Again, I should specify that I wouldn’t have a problem with this if both covers weren’t so stirringly awful.) I suppose this just illustrates the song’s hidden and surprising complexity; it may only be two chords, but have you tried sitting down with a guitar and working them out? It’s harder than you think.
Still, it’s hard to take the cynicism with which both covers treat the source material. It’s difficult to imagine the Exies have even heard the original song, such is the degree by which they catastrophically miss the point, and in their generic emo ninnying they seem essentially harmless. But Billy Corgan, that fallen rock legend, has no excuse for rewriting the lyrics. “And you may ask yourself: am I who I think I am, or am I what they want me to be?”, he asks dispassionately, taking the open-hearted message of the song and warping it into a ghastly blunt instrument. I almost wonder if it’s ironic. “You might ask yourself: who is this guy talking to me? You may ask yourself: what does he know about me and my life?” My God! What have I done?
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