Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

in History, Music | June 25th, 2025

Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to learn that that song is an outtake, recorded but never quite completed in the studio and available for years only in bootleg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a product of the sessions for what would become Infidels. Released in 1983, that album was received as something of a return to form after the Christian-themed trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.

Of the material officially included on Infidels, the greatest impact was probably made by the album’s opener “Jokerman,” at least in the punk rendition Dylan performed on Late Night with David Letterman. Not that every Dylanologist is a fan of that song: in the Daily Maverick, Drew Forrest calls it “random and incoherent,” drawing an unfavorable comparison with “Blind Willie McTell,” which is “sure to be remembered as one of Dylan’s most perfect creations.”

The sources of that perfection are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, nearly 50-minute long Polyphonic video above on this “unreleased masterpiece,” whose origin and afterlife underscore how thoroughly Dylan inhabits the musical traditions from which he draws.

Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in several versions, but the one most listeners know (officially released in 1991, eight years after its recording) features Mark Knopfler on twelve-string guitar and Dylan himself on piano. Melodically based on the jazz standard “St. James Infirmary Blues” and named after a real, prolific musician from Georgia, its sparse music and lyrics manage to evoke a panoramic view encompassing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very history of American music and slavery. Though Dylan himself considered the song unfinished, he came around to see its value after hearing The Band work it into their show, and has by now performed it live himself more than 200 times — none, in adherence to the protean character of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.

“Tangled Up in Blue”: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

Hear the Uncensored Original Version of “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (1976)

The Religions of Bob Dylan: From Delivering Evangelical Sermons to Singing Hava Nagila With Harry Dean Stanton

How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

in Music | June 23rd, 2025

Photo of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Kathinka Pasveer via Wikimedia Commons

You may hear the phrase “electronic music” and think of superstar dubstep DJs in funny helmets at beachside celebrity parties. Alternatively, you may think of the mercurial compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the musique concrete of Pierre Henry, or the otherworldly experimentalism of François Bayle. If you’re in that latter camp of music nerd, then this post may bring you very glad tidings indeed. Ubuweb—that stalwart repository of all things 20th-century avant-garde—now hosts an extraordinary compilation: the 476-song History of Electronic/Electroacoustic Music, originally a 62 CD set. (Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kontact,” Henry’s “Astrologie,” and Bayle’s spare “Theatre d’Ombres” further down.)

Spanning the years 1937–2001, the collection should especially appeal to those with an avant-garde or musicological bent. In fact, the original uploader of this archive of experimental sound, Caio Barros, put these tracks online in 2009 while a student of composition at Brazil’s State University of São Paulo. Barros’ “initiative,” as he writes at Ubuweb, “became some sort of legend” among musicophiles in the know.

And yet, Ubuweb reposts this phenomenal collection with a disclaimer: “It’s a clearly flawed selection,” they write:

There’s few women and almost no one working outside of the Western tradition (where are the Japanese? Chinese? etc.). However, as an effort, it’s admirable and contains a ton of great stuff.

Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection

It’s a fair critique, though Barros points out that the exclusions mostly have to do with “the way our society and the tradition this music represent works” (sic). And yet, as disciplinary boundaries expand all the time, and histories broaden along with them, that description no longer holds. It would be a fascinating exercise, for example, to listen to these tracks alongside the history of women in electronic music, 1938–2014 that we posted recently.

Also, there’s clearly much more to electronic music than either celebrity DJs or obscure avant-garde composers. Many hundreds of popular electronic composers and musicians—like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rockmore—fall somewhere in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and serious composition, and their contributions deserve representation alongside more experimental or classical artists.

All that said, however, there’s no reason you can’t curate your own playlist of the history of electronic music as you see it—drawing from the astounding wealth of music available free at The History of Electroacoustic Music. Or consider this collection a fully immersive course in “traditional, western avant-garde electronic music” from “the area of Europe-America,” as Barros puts it. As that, it succeeds admirably.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014)

The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Elementary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” & Other Rock Hits: A Cult Classic Recorded in 1976

in Music | June 20th, 2025

In 1976 and 1977 an inspired music teacher in the small school district of Langley Township, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, recorded his elementary school students singing popular songs in a school gym. Two vinyl records were produced over the two years, and families were invited to pay $7 for a copy. The recordings were largely forgotten — just another personal memento stored away in a few homes in Western Canada — until a record collector stumbled across a copy in a thrift store in 2000.

Enthralled by what he heard, the collector sent a sample to a disc jockey at WFMU, an eclectic, listener-supported radio station in New Jersey. The station began playing some of the songs over the airwaves. Listeners were touched by the haunting, ethereal quality of the performances. In 2001, a small record company released a compilation called The Langley Township Music Project: Innocence & Despair.

The record became an underground hit. The Washington Post called it “an album that seems to capture nothing less than the sound of falling in love with music.” Spin said the album “seems to sum up all the reasons music is holy.” And Dwight Gamer of The New York Times wrote that the music was “magic: a kind of celestial pep rally.” Listeners were moved by the ingenuousness of the young voices, the strange authenticity of performances by children too young to understand all of the adult themes in the lyrics. As Hans Fenger, the music teacher who made the recordings, writes in the liner notes:

The kids had a grasp of what they liked: emotion, drama, and making music as a group. Whether the results were good, bad, in tune or out was no big deal — they had élan. This was not the way music was traditionally taught. But then I never liked conventional “children’s music,” which is condescending and ignores the reality of children’s lives, which can be dark and scary. These children hated “cute.” They cherished songs that evoked loneliness and sadness.

You can learn the story of Fenger’s extraordinary music project in the 2002 VH1 documentary above, which includes interviews and a reunion with some of the students. And listen below for a few samples of that touching quality of loneliness and sadness Fenger and others have been talking about.

David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’:

One of the most widely praised songs from Innocence & Despair is the 1976 recording of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” In a 2001 interview with Mike Appelstein for Scram magazine, Fenger explained the sound effects in the recording. “When I first taught ‘Space Oddity,’ ” he said, “the first part I taught after the song was the kids counting down. They loved that: they’d go ‘TEN!’ They couldn’t say it loud enough; the countdown in the song was the big winner. But as soon as they got to zero, nothing happened. So I brought this old steel guitar. Well, one of the little guys whose name I’ve forgot, I put him on this thing and said, ‘Now listen, when they get to zero, you’re the rocket. So make a lot of noise on this. He’s fooling around with this steel guitar, and I didn’t even think of this, but he intuitively took out a Coke bottle from his lunch and started doing this (imitates a bottle running up and down the fretboard). I just cranked up the volume and turned down the master volume so it was really distorted. And that was the ‘Space Oddity’ sound effect.”

The Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room’:

The children recorded “In My Room” by the Beach Boys in 1977. Fenger told Appelstein it was the ultimate children’s song. “It’s the perfect introspective song for a nine-year-old,” he said, “just as ‘Dust in the Wind’ is the perfect philosophy song for a nine-year-old. Adults may think it’s dumb, but for a child, it’s a very heavy, profound thought. To think that there is nothing, and it’s expressed in such a simple way.”

The Eagles’ ‘Desperado’:

Several of the recordings feature soloists. A young girl named Sheila Behman sang the Eagles’ “Desperado” in 1977. “With ‘Desperado,’ ” said Fenger, “you can see it as a cowboy romantic story, but that’s not the way Sheila heard it. She couldn’t articulate metaphorically what the song was about, but in that sense, I think it was purer because it was unaffected. It’s not as if the kids were trying to be somebody else. They were just trying to be who they were, and they’re doing this music and falling in love with it.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

David Bowie Predicts the Good & Bad of the Internet in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Something Exhilarating and Terrifying”

David Bowie Songs Reimagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: Space Oddity, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Color at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival

in History, Music | June 18th, 2025

It was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that Bob Dylan famously “went electric,” alienating certain adherents to the folk scene through which he’d come up, but also setting a precedent for the kind of quick-change musical adaptation that he’s kept up into his eighties. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, however, all that lay in the future. Yet even then, the young Dylan wasn’t shy of making controversial choices. Take, for example, the choice to play “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song that — however redolent of the mid-nineteen-sixties when heard today — would hardly have been topical enough to meet the expectations of folk fans who regarded the music’s topicality as its main strength.

At the top of the post, you can watch colorized footage of Dylan’s performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man” at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival; the original black-and-white clip appears below. Consider the resonances it could have set off in the minds of his youthful, clean-cut audience: Rimbaud? Fellini? Lord Buckley? Mardi Gras? Confessions of an English Opium-Eater? Dylanologists have suggested all these sources of inspiration and others. It is possible, of course, that — as Dylan himself once said — the lyrics’ central image is that of guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who played on the song as recorded for Bringing It All Back Home, a musician then known for his ownership of a gigantic tambourine.

Despite its lack of references to the issues of the day, “Mr. Tambourine Man” reflects its historical moment with a clarity that few songs ever have. (Some would say that’s even truer of The Byrds’ cover version, a radio hit that came out just a month after Dylan’s original.) Dylan himself must have sensed that it marked not just the peak of an era, but also that of his own compositional and performative efforts in this particular musical style. Though he did attempt to write a follow-up to the song, its failure to cohere showed him the way forward. Dylan still plays it in concert today, and to enthusiastic reception from his audiences, but in such a way as to reinvent it each time — knowing that he both is and is not the same man who took the stage at Newport those sixty years ago, and that “Mr. Tambourine Man” both is and is not the same song.

Watch Bob Dylan Make His Debut at the Newport Folk Festival in Colorized 1963 Footage

How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Compare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Complete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Performance at the Newport Folk Festival

“Mr. Tambourine Man” & Other Bob Dylan Classics, Sung Beautifully by Kids

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful

in History, Music, Religion | June 18th, 2025

Religions take the cast and hue of the cultures in which they find root. This was certainly true in Tibet when Buddhism arrived in the 7th century. It transformed and was transformed by the native religion of Bon. Of the many creative practices that arose from this synthesis, Tibetan Buddhist music ranks very highly in importance.

As in sacred music in the West, Tibetan music has complex systems of musical notation and a long history of written religious song. “A vital component of Tibetan Buddhist experience,” explains Google Arts & Cultures Buddhist Digital Resource Center, “musical notation allows for the transference of sacred sound and ceremony across generations. A means to memorize sacred text, express devotion, ward off feral spirits, and invoke deities.”

Some of these features may be alien to secular Western Buddhists focused on mindfulness and silent meditation, but to varying degrees, Tibetan schools place considerable value on the aesthetic experience of extra-human realms. As University of Tulsa musicologist John Powell writes, “the use of sacred sound” in Tibetan Buddhism, a “Mantrayana” tradition, acts “as a formula for the transformation of human consciousness.”

Tibetan musical notations, Google points out, “symbolically represent the melodies, rhythm patterns, and instrumental arrangements. In harmony with chanting, visualizations, and hand gestures, [Tibetan] music crucially guides ritual performance.” It is characterized not only by its integration of ritual dance, but also by a large collection of ritual instruments—including the long, Swiss-like horns suited to a mountain environment—and unique forms of polyphonic overtone singing.

The examples of musical notation you see here came from the appropriately-named Twitter account Musical Notation is Beautiful and typeface designer and researcher Jo De Baerdemaeker. At the top is a 19th century manuscript belonging to the “Yang” tradition, “the most highly involved and regarded chant tradition in Tibetan music,” notes the Schoyen Collection, “and the only one to rely on a system of notation (Yang-Yig).”

The curved lines represent “smoothly effected rises and falls in intonation.” The notation also “frequently contains detailed instructions concerning in what spirit the music should be sung (e.g. flowing like a river, light like bird song) and the smallest modifications to be made to the voice in the utterance of a vowel.” The Yang-Yig goes all the way back to the 6th century, predating Tibetan Buddhism, and “does not record neither the rhythmic pattern nor duration of notes.” Other kinds of music have their own types of notation, such as that in the piece above for voice, drums, trumpets, horns, and cymbals.

Though they articulate and elaborate on religious ideas from India, Tibet’s musical traditions are entirely its own. “It is essential to rethink the entire concept of melody and rhythm” to understand Tibetan Buddhist chant, writes Powell in a detailed overview of Tibetan music’s vocal and instrumental qualities. “Many outside Tibetan culture are accustomed to think of melody as a sequence of rising or falling pitches,” he says. “In Tibetan Tantric chanting, however, the melodic content occurs in terms of vowel modification and the careful contouring of tones.” Hear an example of traditional Tibetan Buddhist chant just above, and learn more about Tibetan musical notation at Google Arts & Culture.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

The World’s Largest Collection of Tibetan Buddhist Literature Now Online

Free Online Course: Robert Thurman’s Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (Recorded at Columbia U)

Leonard Cohen Narrates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Featuring the Dalai Lama (1994)

The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985)

in Music, Politics | June 16th, 2025

Image by Mario Casciano via Wikimedia Commons

Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of the evils of popular music—especially punk rock and metal, but also pretty much everything else. The descriptions in these paranoid tracts of the bands I knew and loved sounded so ludicrous and hyperbolic that I couldn’t help suspect that each was in fact a work of satire. They were at the very least anachronistic, yet ideal, types of Poe’s Law.

Such may be your reaction to a list published in 1985 by the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization formed as the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League in 1918. (Find it below.) Consisting of thirty-eight punk, rock, metal, disco, and New Wave bands, the list is not at all unlike the materials printed around the same time by certain youth organizations I came into contact with.

The mechanisms of state repression in the Soviet Union on the eve of perestroika overmatched comparatively mild attempts at music censorship made by the U.S. government, but the propaganda mechanisms were similar. As in the alarmed pamphlets and books handed to me in churches and summer camps, the Komsomol list describes each band in obtuse and absurd terms, each one a category of the “type of propaganda” on offer.

Black Sabbath, a legitimately scary—and politically astute—band gets pegged along with Iron Maiden for “violence” and “religious obscurantism.” (Nazareth is similarly guilty of “violence” and “religious mysticism.”) A great many artists are charged with only “violence” or with “sex,” which in some cases was kind of their whole métier. A handful of punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers—are cited for violence, and also simply charged with “punk,” a crime given as the Ramones’ only offense. There are a few oddly specific charges: Pink Floyd is guilty of a “distortion of Soviet foreign policy (‘Soviet aggression in Afghanistan’)” and Talking Heads endorse the “myth of the Soviet military threat.” A couple hilariously incongruous tags offer LOLs: Yazoo and Depeche Mode, two of the gentlest bands of the period, get called out for “punk, violence.” Kiss and the Village People (above), two of the silliest bands on the list, are said to propagate, “neofascism” and “violence.”

Sex Pistols: punk, violence
B‑52s: punk, violence
Madness: punk, violence
Clash: punk, violence
Stranglers: punk, violence
Kiss: neofascism, punk, violence
Crocus: violence, cult of strong personality
Styx: violence, vandalism
Iron Maiden: violence, religious obscuritanism
Judas Priest: anticommunism, racism
AC/DC: neofascism, violence
Sparks: neofascism, racism
Black Sabbath: violence, religious obscuritanism
Alice Cooper: violence, vandalism
Nazareth: violence, religious mysticism
Scorpions: violence
Gengis Khan: anticommunism, nationalism
UFO: violence
Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet agression in Afghanistan”)***
Talking Heads: myth of the Soviet military threat
Perron: eroticism
Bohannon: eroticism
Originals: sex
Donna Summer: eroticism
Tina Turner: sex
Junior English: sex
Canned Heat: homosexuality
Munich Machine: eroticism
Ramones: punk
Van Halen: anti-soviet propaganda
Julio Iglesias: neofascism
Yazoo: punk, violence
Depeche Mode: punk, violence
Village People: violence
Ten CC: neofascism
Stooges: violence
Boys: punk, violence
Blondie: punk, violence

The list circulated for “the purpose of intensifying control over the activities of discotheques.” It comes to us from Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which cites it as an example, writes one reader, of “the contradictory nature of Soviet life, where as citizens participated in the ritualized, pro forma ideological discourse, this very discourse allowed them to carve out what they called ‘normal meaningful life’ that went beyond the state’s ideology.” A large part of that “normal” life involved circulating bootlegs of ideologically suspect music on improvised materials like discarded and stolen X‑Rays. The Komsomol eventually wised up. As Yurchak documents in his book, they co-opted local amateur rock bands and promoted their own events as a counter-attack on the influence of bourgeois culture. You can probably guess how much success they had with this strategy.

See the full list of thirty-eight bands and their “type of propaganda” above.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

The Soviets Who Bootlegged Western Music on X‑Rays: Their Story Told in New Video & Audio Documentaries

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

The History of Soviet Rock: From the 70s Underground Rock Scene, to Soviet Punk & New Wave in the 1980s

Young Patti Smith Rails Against the Censorship of Her Music: An Animated, NSFW Interview from 1976

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket Symphony

in Music | June 13th, 2025

This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil. Dennis, the first of the Wilsons to go, died young in 1983 — but not before offering this memorable assessment of the family musical project: “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing.” That was a bit harsh: Dennis may not have been a virtuoso drummer, but Beach Boys enthusiasts all credit his faintly despairing songs with enriching the band’s signature emotional landscape. Brian may have written “God Only Knows,” but he did so with his brother Carl’s voice in mind. And could even Brian’s other masterpiece “Good Vibrations” have made the same impact without the participation of his much-resented cousin Mike Love?

Still, without Brian’s orchestration, the other Beach Boys’ voices would never have come together in the powerful way they did, to say nothing of the contributions of the countless studio musicians who played on their recordings. Before “Good Vibrations,” never had a pop song owed so much to so many musicians — and, at the same time, even more to the fertile and unconventional sonic imagination of just one man.

Laboriously crafted over seven months in four different studios, it came out in October of 1966 as the most expensive single ever produced. Its then-epic length of 3:35 filled Capitol Records with doubts about its radio viability, but that turned out to be an astonishingly brief running time to contain the sheer compositional intensity that soon got the song labeled a “pocket symphony.”

“Good Vibrations” and its myriad intricacies are scrutinized to this day, most recently in video essays like the ones you see here. On his Youtube channel Polyphonic, Noah Lefevre calls it “dense enough that you could teach an entire music course on it.” David Hartley grants it the status of “probably the most complex song ever recorded,” and even “the first song ever created using copy and paste.” Long before the era of digital audio workstations, Brian Wilson used wholly analog studio technology to string together “feels,” his name for the disparate fragments of music in his mind. His method contributed to the symphonic construction of “Good Vibrations,” and his willingness to follow the mood wherever it led resulted in the song’s distinctive use of an Electro-Theremin. Despite all this, some listeners still question his centrality to the Beach Boys’ music; for them, there will always be “Kokomo.”

How the Beach Boys Created Their Pop Masterpieces: “Good Vibrations,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson & Beatles Producer George Martin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Greatest Song Ever Written”

Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations”

Enter Brian Wilson’s Creative Process While Making The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

Paul McCartney vs. Brian Wilson: A Rivalry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, and Other Classic Albums

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Online

in Music | June 6th, 2025

On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder if a reunion—41 years after their last tour—might finally be in the offing. As one fan put it, “If this is a tour announcement, I am going to freak out!” Alas, we didn’t quite get that. (Maybe next time!) Instead, we got the first official music video for “Psycho Killer.” Directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan, the video helps commemorate the band’s first show at CBGB 50 years ago. You can watch the video above, and footage from CBGB in 1975 her e.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

A Brief History of Talking Heads: How the Band Went from Scrappy CBGB’s Punks to New Wave Superstars

Hear the Earliest Known Talking Heads Recordings (1975)

How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant

Talking Heads Featured on The South Bank Show in 1979: How the Groundbreaking New Wave Band Made Normality Strange Again

CBGB’s Heyday: Watch The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Bad Brains, Talking Heads & Blondie Perform Live (1974–1982)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Elementary School Kids Sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” & Other Rock Hits: A Cult Classic Recorded in 1976

Watch Bob Dylan Play “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Color at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival

Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful

The Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985)

The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket Symphony

Talking Heads Release the First Official Video for “Psycho Killer”: Watch It Online

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search