Retro Video of the Week: "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads

Tomorrow will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Talking Heads' fifth studio album, Speaking in Tongues.  Though the band had been critical darlings prior to this album, Speaking in Tongues was their commercial breakthrough, reaching #15 on the Billboard album chart (still their highest-charting album) and going platinum in the U.S.  It also reached the Top 10 on the album charts in Canada, Germany, Iceland, and New Zealand.

The album produced the band's biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100:  "Burning Down the House," which reached #9.  It also proved to be one of the rare singles that appealed to rock audiences and dance club audiences, as it went to #2 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart and #6 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.  Internationally, it reached the Top 10 on the pop charts in Canada and New Zealand.

Produced and directed by lead singer David Byrne, the video for the song is predictably weird, with shots of the band playing the song in a sometimes empty concert hall and/or playing to what appears to be a screen with film of an audience, and sometimes a child replaces Byrne.  Then there are shots of children, geriatrics, or appropriately aged humans' faces transposed with the band members' faces on an otherwise black screen.  And there are shots of fire projected against a suburban house.  And, of course, there is weird, disturbingly synchronized dancing.

This song brings back a particular memory from college.  In April 1997, my freshman year at IU, the Evans Scholars fraternity house burned down.  Thankfully no one was hurt.  A friend of mine was a member of the house.  He said that guys at the neighboring SAE house -- whose reputation at the time was that they were the druggiest house -- were lighting off bottle rockets.  It was a beautiful spring Bloomington day, so the window of the Evans Scholars' formal lounge was open.  A bottle rocket -- perhaps errantly, perhaps not -- went into the open window and landed in a garbage can, setting the contents on fire and quickly spreading.  While the Evans Scholars watched as their house was engulfed in flames, on the other side was Sigma Nu, who was blaring "Burning Down the House" out of their windows.  God, I miss college.