Rei Momo

Rei Momo by David Byrne

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Three years after Paul Simon's Graceland, the most identifiable member (by far) of the Talking Heads ventured way beyond his band's terrain with his solo debut. With Rei Momo, David Byrne inaugurated his plunge into Latin American music, doing so with a variety of styles, from son to salsa to merengue to samba, each lit with horn charts and piles of rhythm. The album, like Graceland, inspired some critiques (many of them vehement) of Byrne's cherry picking of styles, which smacked a bit of postmodern exotica. The album certainly genre hops, mixing national styles with lyrics that gnash about Latin American political and human rights concerns. Released a decade prior to the late-1990s fascination with native Cuban popular music, Rei Momo sheds light on the background for the explosion of interest in Buena Vista Social Club as well as the meteoric rise of Latin pop, which shares Byrne's border-agnostic mesh of all available styles. More than anything, though, Rei Momo stands as one of Byrne's most inspired outings, perhaps even as an early pinnacle of his now-lengthy solo career. --Andrew Bartlett

The former Talking Head's first real solo album (not counting collaborations with Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, and Brian Eno) is one of the more charming examples of cultural cannibalism to date. Byrne's now nearly old-fashioned concern with the rootless, consumer-driven insubstantiality of everyday life assumes a goofy irony when sung quirkily over deep Afro-Latino grooves and throbbing choruses cowritten and performed with salsa greats like Willie Colon, Johnny Pacheco, and bassist Andy Gonzalez. Byrne's best songs, "Make Believe Mambo" and "The Call of the Wild," are highly pleasurable if rather anxious demonstrations of the limits of taking the entire world as artistic fodder. His 1989 album sometimes sounds as though he were merely checking items off a list, like a dissatisfied customer trying on countless pairs of shoes in hopes of finding a perfect fit. --Richard Gehr