“We make a pretty good team!” David Byrne, Jonathan Demme, and 35 Years of ‘Stop Making Sense’

Over at The Ringer, I wrote about the 35th anniversary of The Talking Heads’ amazing concert film Stop Making Sense and the ways in which David Byrne and Jonathan Demme’s overlapping, visionary sensibilities helped to explain America in the weird 1980s.

Shot for shot, pound for pound, you will not see many concert films that play out more like an ’80s exercise tape than Stop Making Sense. And for those of you who did not live through the ’80s, you must understand that exercise tapes were of great meaningful consequence at that time—like the Watergate tapes were in the ’70s. That too is a kind of expression of horror: The boomer-driven fitness craze of the era was the first shot over the bow in their we-will-never-die campaign. Say one generation of people smothers two generations of their offspring? What would you even call a thing like that? It’s a rock ’n’ roll genocide.