Do you like Talking Heads? Writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland once proposed that question as the truest test of whether you belong to the cohort named by his novel Generation X. Coupland's contemporary colleague in letters Jonathan Lethem summed up his own early Talking Heads mania thus: "At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me." What makes the band that recorded "Psycho Killer," "This Must Be the Place," "Once In a Lifetime," and "Burning Down the House" so appealing to the bookish, and especially...
