Day 72: Once In A Lifetime

Once in a Lifetime by The Talking Heads.

“My God, how did I get here?” Another song I probably saw on MTV first in high school and was my first introduction to The Talking Heads. This version is from the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, but was released first on Remain in Light in 1980.

David Byrne’s choreography in the video was done by the one-hit-wonder Toni Basil (“Mickey“). It was a very odd video, and for many people it was the first look they got at the Talking Heads. As you watch David Byrne spasm like a malfunctioning robot interspersed with gesturing in Martian sign language,
…Toni Basil fills in some details about the choreography for this video: “He [Byrne] wanted to research movement, but he wanted to research movement more as an actor, as does David Bowie, as does Mick Jagger. They come to movement in another way, not as a trained dancer. Or not really interested in dance steps. He wanted to research people in trances – different trances in church and different trances with snakes. So we went over to UCLA and USC, and we viewed a lot of footage of documentaries on that subject. And then he took the ideas, and he ‘physicalized’ the ideas from these documentary-style films.”

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/talking-heads/once-in-a-lifetime