The Great Curve: A song so immense it generates its own gravitational field.
— Johnny_Segment on Reddit.
I popped into Walmart after work yesterday. My mood was low, even though it was Friday afternoon. A Friday with something other than rain forecast for Saturday. We’ve just endured five consecutive rainy Saturdays. Instead of thinking about what triggered my depression (is this the right word?), agitation (?), I ignored it. Instead, I fired up my Radio Jeff playlist on Spotify, twenty-three hours and four minutes of my favorite music randomly shuffled for my enjoyment.
A Talking Heads song, The Great Curve, came on. I came late to listening to Talking Heads. My older brother was an instant fan when they released their first album in 1977. I had no time for them. In 1977, at fourteen, the only band I listened to was the Beatles. When Talking Heads played Saturday Night Live in 1979, I went to the kitchen to get ice cream.
Talking Heads didn’t capture my interest until my college dormmate began playing their 1982 live album The Name of this Band is Talking Heads. Specifically, their song the Great Curve grabbed me. It took me years to understand this, but one of my favorite rock music conventions is when a song builds to a tight climax and then explodes in release. Some good examples of this are the Doors’ LA Woman, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody does this a couple of times, and I even harbor a secret love of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off for her talky/shouty part near the end of the song.
The Great Curve, I think is the best example. The song builds with a complex African groove and scrapy guitars for almost three minutes. Just past the halfway mark, framed as if it’s maybe the whole point of the song, singer David Byrne screams out:
World moves on a woman’s hips
World moves and it swivels and bops
World moves on a woman’s hips
World moves and it bounces and hops
Looking online, there are countless interpretations about the meaning of this song. Many reference Mother Earth as ‘the woman.’ Or the need for nurturing womenkind to take over global leadership roles. One in-depth analysis gets quite a bit more from the song than I do:
“The Great Curve” touches on various themes such as the passage of time, the elusive nature of truth, the unpredictability of life, and the individual’s struggle to find purpose. Through cryptic lyrics and evocative imagery, Talking Heads delve into these universal themes, leaving room for personal interpretation and introspection.
Credit: The Meaning Behind The Song: The Great Curve by Talking Heads – Old Time Music
Urm… maybe. In 1982, the same year the live version was released, Debbie Parsons, the girlfriend of my manager at the pizza joint where I worked, walked across a shopping center parking lot in tight jeans and a sheer off-white shirt. Her long mocha hair springing while her purposeful walk that set her body in motion. After appreciating the image for a moment, I looked around the busy parking lot. All action ceased. Every eye was glued to Debbie. She stopped the world on a busy Saturday afternoon. The world moves on a woman’s hips…
So is that it? Could the song be that simple? Are they singing about a hot woman? I’ve never doubted it. After the lyric I copied above, David Byrne sings: A world of light, she’s gonna open our eyes up. And that’s exactly what Debbie Parsons did that afternoon. She brought Congressional Plaza to a standstill and woke everyone up from their mundane shopping errands. Every time I hear the song, my brain retrieves that image.
Driving home from Walmart, when The Great Curve faded to silence, the opening notes of Neil Young’s Like a Hurricane ground out of my speakers. After a two-year hiatus, Neil’s ban of Spotify ended. The ban he started because Spotify wouldn’t remove Joe Rogan from their platform. Neil gave up. He acknowledged that Apple Music and Amazon Streaming are broadcasting the same sort of right-wing crap. If he wants to be available to his fan base, he needs to share the platforms with content he despises. And just like that, my bad mood evaporated. A couple good songs, a happy surprise, and my mind balanced out.
If you’d like to read the rant I wrote when Neil Young abandoned Spotify, click HERE.
I freely admit my self-consciousness when spooling out eight hundred words about a rock song (especially when I include my own sketchy and questionable analysis). If you’re still reading, thank you for your indulgence. And listen to this song, it effing rocks.
The Great Curve by Talking Heads—not the live version I wrote about but the studio version from the album Remain in Light that came on my car stereo yesterday.