(“More awesome” is of course a completely subjective term, and you may apply it however you wish.)
They both started their musical careers in the '70s.
They both started as punk/New Wave pioneers, but they’ve both expanded way past that.
They’re both still producing music three decades later, though it could be argued that neither has ever lived up to his career high in the late '70s/early '80s.
Neither one has ever been exactly mainstream, though some projects have flirted with it.
All of which means I’m pitting them against each other in a meaningless but entertaining contest of artistic superiority – with your help.
Who do you think reigns supreme – and more importantly, why?
(Note: “Neither” is a perfectly acceptable opinion, but not a good response for this thread. Peddle your indifference elsewhere, please.)
For me, this comes down to a battle between a renaissance man and a specialist. David Byrne is good at more than just music, while Costello mostly sticks with the songs. Byrne takes photos, critiques PowerPoint, and makes movie.
But I’d argue that the best Costello songs are better than the best Byrne songs – the Talking Heads have nothing as great as “Pump It Up,” for example, great though many of their songs are.
I’ll take Costello’s “Pump It Up” and raise you the Heads’ “Crosseyed & Painless”. Now, that song was pumped up!
Byrne also runs his own indie-world-music label, Luaka Bop, and recently rigged the old Battery Maritime building in Lower Manhattan to function as a very large musical instrument, of sorts, that people could enter and play. That’s conceptual public art on a grand scale, yet accessible.
Plus there was that concert film, Stop Making Sense. Sure, Demme filmed it, but you know Byrne came up with the rest…
The decision: Byrne, by a K.O., racked up in a New York minute.
P.S.: Have any of you heard the latest Byrne/Eno collaborative album, which came out last month? How is it?
OTOH, Eno was more glaringly hot, in a sort of Warholian superstar way, than both Lutz and Krall, of whom neither ever glammed it up like Eno in his early Roxy Music glam phase, circa 1972 – in which Eno eerily anticipated Richard O’Brien’s “Riff Raff” character from The Rocky Horror Picture Show [orig. theater prod., 1974]. Advantage back to Byrne.
He was just… such… a transsexual from Transylvania, darling!
I love Talking Heads - 77 and Remain in Light are all time favourite albums, and Stop Making Sense is probably the best rock movie ever made. But David Byrne’s solo and collaborative output has been thin in the extreme, and True Stories was simply dull.
Declan McManus has it all over David Byrne. His are still the only songs that can make me cry - I must have heard Alison a thousand times and it still deeply affects me, as does some of his later stuff like The Favourite Hour. I think it’s the tone of his songs: bitter, rueful, regretful, sometimes achingly wounded; they just get me right where I live.
I don’t know much of Elvis Costello’s music, so it’s not a fair comparison, but I can’t not vote for David Byrne. Playing the Building was a lot of fun, and Stop Making Sense just kicks ass on every conceivable level- conceptually, stylistically, musically. Out of their early stuff, you get songs like Psycho Killer and Life During Wartime. Then you move into the more Eno-heavy stuff and get Crosseyed and Painless, Born Under Punches, Girlfriend is Better and so on. And mixed in there you get a Naive Melody. Byrne’s an outstanding artist, and he also gets bonus points for being a huge inspiration to my girlfriend.
I would just like to point out that Elvis Costello has collaborated at least once with Brian Eno (on ‘My Dark Life’ which is admittedly not in the heights of his repetoire).
Well, I am a massive fan of EC’s music, so of course I’m going to vote Elvis!
Well, of my 3 kids, 1 is named after an EC tune, and none are named after DB! (We debated about calling the youngest Psycho Killer, but decided otherwise…)
Given the obvious difficulty in comparing songwriting talent (especially since it’s near impossible to come to any definitive answer as to what either artists’ lyrics are all about anyway), one has to give the nod to EC because he’s far and away the better singer of the two.:o
