Wild Wild Life: Difference between revisions

1986 single by Talking Heads

“Wild Wild Life” is a song by American rock band Talking Heads, released as the lead single from their seventh studio album True Stories. It was the band’s third and last top 40 hit on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

Critical reception[edit]

Cash Box called it “quirky and typically fun.”^[3] Billboard said that the Talking Heads “put a minimal post-new wave accompaniment to a bouncy singalong tune.”^[4]

Music video[edit]

The video for the song won “Best Group Video” at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1987. Taken from the film True Stories, with some additional content, it includes band member Jerry Harrison parodying Billy Idol, Kid Creole, Ralph Macchio‘s character Karate Kid, and Prince. “My favorite T. Heads video, the most fun to make,” Harrison recalled in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads. “I always wondered what Prince thought of it.” The rest of the band also appears in various costumes.

The video is set in a 1960s ambienced cabaret bar, where a frantic series of unannounced performers lip sync to the song, imitating such singers as Madonna and Meat Loaf as disjointed images play across a wall of video screens behind them. Byrne wrote about this scene:

The song itself becomes a vehicle that can say anything they want it to. Some gestures and movements are obviously derived from well-known sources: television shows … movies … and, most recently, rock videos. Odd to think that some lip-synchers are imitating characters in videos, who are really musicians imitating other characters.^[5]

Actor John Goodman, prior to his fame in the sitcom Roseanne, appeared in both the film and…