Thursday, December 3, 2015

Leftovers: It's Elemental/Once In A Lifetime


purchase [Once In A Lifetime]

The Element: Water redux

I really thought Retropath was headed down the right path when he started out to list the entire table of elements. I was seriously looking forward to the full 118.

Then again, considering the amount of time and energy involved in his somewhat quixotic endeavor, I was more inclined to simply complete the table of medieval elements along the lines of what J. David referred to.

Back at the time of the “It's Elemental” theme, I posted Hot Tuna's "Water Song" (Which I have since learned to play!). Without making distinction on the theme of the element of water - since the two songs are in rather different musical categories, I now realize I might well have posted Talking Heads' “Once In a Lifetime”.

For almost a decade, back in the 90s, I collected and re-re-listened to David Byrne and the band. I later relished Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Arcade Fire (although I haven’t seen anyone else group them with Talking Heads, I think so) as re-incarnations of the Talking Heads’ genre.


Still, Talking Heads would still take my category prize as the elemental band of its style. And critical to that catalogue would be “Once In a Lifetime” – not least for its relevance to “Plato and Aristotle’s” Elements: there's water running all the way through in its original MTV version here:


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