Remain in Light

Tributee: Talking Heads. Since Ang?lique Kidjo had famously covered songs by rock artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Santana before, her reconstruction of Remain in Light should not come as a complete surprise. What is truly unexpected is to realize how brilliant a match Kidjo and the Talking Heads masterpiece make. One of the greatest and most influential rock albums of all time, Remain in Light still sounds implausibly avant-garde 40 years after its release, its originality, fantastic performances, and overall sonic weirdness so intimidating that most people would have deemed it uncoverable. Not so for Kidjo, who clearly approached this record with different ears than the average Western listener. Even if Byrne, Eno, and the Heads all immediately acknowledged how the album was directly inspired by Fela Kuti and Afro-beat, Remain in Light is not the sound of touristy mimicry or cultural appropriation. In fact, much to the merit of all those involved, it sounds like a 100% Talking Heads album. It was easier to comment upon the African influence in passing rather than pinpointing it, even more so back in 1980 when Western audiences' awareness of what would eventually be labeled world music was very limited. Kidjo, on the other hand, has mentioned that when she first listened to "Once in a Lifetime" back in the day, she immediately recognized elements related to her musical upbringing. Many decades later, when she decided to tackle the entire album, first for a 2017 Carnegie Hall concert and later for this studio recording, Kidjo adopted a method she was perfectly suited for. Accompanied by a cohort of stellar musicians (chiefly among them Tony Allen, the Afro-beat drum master par excellence), Kidjo turned the album inside out, revealing the African exoskeleton in all of its glory and dimming the electronic and ambient textures -- the Eno factor, if you will. Listening to her Remain in Light, one has the impression someone has gone over the entire music sheet with an Afro-beat highlighter, stressing every vamp, every call-and-response and interlocking rhythm pattern. The true wonder of her version is that it does not remotely sound like an ethnomusicology master class or a precious lab experiment, the way most symphonic re-creations of rock albums do. Much like the original, when "Born Under Punches" kicks in, her Remain in Light comes bursting out of the gates in a rollicking, irresistible wave of musical joy that only stops when the album is over, leaving the listener in a state of blessed disbelief. Inconceivably, her first half of the album (the "futuristic funk side") may even be superior to the original. It is certainly more exuberant, thanks to Kidjo's regal voice, as far apart as it gets from Byrne's paranoid whine. True, the last third (the "embryonic Radiohead side"), where the African influence is less prominent, is not as successful. This is not the fault of Kidjo, who admirably decides to take even more chances and diverge further from the original, but rather because the main strength of the Talking Heads album's second half laid in the way it slowly increased the levels of claustrophobia and anxiety to an almost unbearable level, and Kidjo's main strategy of adding warmth and vitality to Byrne's dehumanized visions runs in the opposite direction. It is also striking to note how Kidjo was drawn in by the lyrics as much as the music, claiming in interviews that she considered the fractured psyche depicted in many of the songs, a consequence of the struggle between an overpowering technological world and humanity's primal instincts, to be entirely relevant in a contemporary context, and specifically in the African context. On this topic, it is hard to conclude whether Byrne's bizarre prescience should be deemed impressive or downright scary. To conclude, Remain in Light 2018 is an unqualified triumph on many fronts. As a piece of music, of course, but also as a reminder of how groundbreaking the album was, how exceptional Talking Heads were, and last but not least, how great Ang?lique Kidjo is. While lavishly praised as a singer, said praise sometimes has been delivered in that condescending tone reserved for world music stars considered primitive forces of nature rather than cutting-edge contemporary artists. Remain in Light demands praise for Kidjo's creative vision, for her supreme skills not merely as a performer but as a conceptualist and cultural interpreter. Kidjo, who early in her career was criticized by small-minded African and world music purists for daring to look beyond her continent, approaches rock music in much the same way rock artists have been approaching African music since the 1980s, and the results are just as wonderful and revelatory. With Remain in Light, Kidjo turns the tables on Western music and demonstrates that there is no reason whatsoever why the relationship should still be an exploratory incursion rather than a full-fledged two-way conversation. ~ Mariano Prunes