The American Dream has a lot of back alleys, and he was showing those things, and I felt like, here's a guy trying to talk to me about something I had seen firsthand.

Byrne's lyrics spoke to the artifice of the American landscape. It presented this facade that everything around us is solid and real and going to be here forever, even though we know we created it. David Byrne's parents lived there for a while. It was a planned community with man-made lakes. The town that I grew up in was called Columbia, in Maryland. I feel like they saw Brian Eno, their producer, as another instrument. If Talking Heads were around a cool idea, they would make it their own. If you listen to a Talking Heads bass line, you think the song's going one way, and then you listen to the drums and you think it's going a different way, and then you listen to David Byrne's lyrics and you're like, 'This is a completely different song from what I thought it was going to be.' And then the guitars come in, and then the ambience comes in - it's like several songs all blending into one. I was a kid, but I still thought, 'I should have been involved in that record!' It's amazing. Remain in Light was this combination of ambient music and strong lyrics and incredibly inventive percussion and bass parts. The first song I really liked was 'Once in a Lifetime.' MTV had just started to sink its claws into people, and that song was like an anthem for coked-up adults trying to make sense of their world. Talking Heads was the first band I remember telling my punk friends about, saying, 'Yo, check this out! This four-chord thing we're doing? We're missing out on something!'

When I was a kid, I was really into hardcore punk. As you read this book, remember: This is what we have to live up to. But at its best, it is still the sound of forward motion. In these fan testimonials, indie rockers pay tribute to world-beating rappers (Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig on Jay-Z), young pop stars honor stylistic godmothers (Britney Spears on Madonna) and Billy Joel admits that Elton John “kicks my ass on piano.” Rock & roll is now a music with a rich past. The essays on these top 100 artists are by their peers: singers, producers and musicians. The resulting list of 100 artists, published in two issues of Rolling Stone in 20, and updated in 2011, is a broad survey of rock history, spanning Sixties heroes (the Beatles) and modern insurgents (Eminem), and touching on early pioneers (Chuck Berry) and the bluesmen who made it all possible (Howlin’ Wolf). In 2004 - 50 years after Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios and cut “That’s All Right” - Rolling Stone celebrated rock & roll’s first half-century in grand style, assembling a panel of 55 top musicians, writers and industry executives (everyone from Keith Richards to ?uestlove of the Roots) and asking them to pick the most influential artists of the rock & roll era.

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