About The Song
“Wild Wild Life” is a song by American rock band Talking Heads, released as the lead single from their seventh studio album True Stories. It was the band’s third and last top 40 hit on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Cash Box called it “quirky and typically fun.” Billboard said that Talking Heads “put a minimal post-new wave accompaniment to a bouncy singalong tune.”
The video for the song won “Best Group Video” at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1987. Taken from the film True Stories, with some additional content, it includes band member Jerry Harrison parodying Billy Idol, Kid Creole, Ralph Macchio’s character in The Karate Kid, and Prince. “My favorite T. Heads video, the most fun to make,” Harrison recalled in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads. “I always wondered what Prince thought of it.” The rest of the band also appears in various costumes.
The video is set in a 1960s ambienced cabaret bar, where a frantic series of unannounced performers lip sync to the song, imitating such singers as Madonna and Prince as disjointed images play across a wall of video screens behind them. Byrne wrote about this scene:
The song itself becomes a vehicle that can say anything they want it to. Some gestures and movements are obviously derived from well-known sources: television shows … movies … and, most recently, rock videos. Odd to think that some lip-synchers are imitating characters in videos, who are really musicians imitating other characters.
Actor John Goodman, prior to his fame in the sitcom Roseanne, appeared in both the film and MTV versions of the video. Goodman was also featured on the B-side’s “People Like Us”, a song that also appeared in the film.
Video
Lyrics
I’m wearing a fur pajamas
I ride a hot potato
It’s tickling my fancy
Speak up, I can’t hear you
Here on this mountain top, oh-oh-oh
I got some wild, wild life
I got some news to tell you, oh-oh
About some wild, wild life
Here come the doctor in charge, oh-oh-oh
She’s got some wild, wild life
Ain’t that the way you like it, oh-oh?
Living wild, wild life
I’ll wrestle with your conscience
You wrestle with your partner
Sitting on a windowsill
But he spends his time behind closed doors
So check out mister businessman, oh-oh-oh
He bought some wild, wild life
On the way to the stock exchange, oh-oh-oh
He got some wild, wild life
Pick it up when he opens the door, oh-oh-oh
He doing wild, wild life
I know it’s the way you like it, oh-oh
Living wild, wild
Peace of mind
It’s a piece of cake
Thought control
You get on board any time you like
Like sitting on pins and needles
Things fall apart
It’s scientific
Sleeping on the Interstate, oh-oh-oh
Getting wild, wild life
Checking in and checking out, oh-oh-oh
I got ’em, wild, wild life
Spending all of my money and time, oh-oh-oh
On too much wild, wild life
We wanna go and we go where we go, oh-oh-oh
Ah, doing wild, wild life
I know it, that’s how we start, oh-oh-oh
Got some wild, wild life
Take a picture here in the daylight, oh-oh
And it’s a wild, wild life
You’ve grown so tall, you’ve grown so fast, oh-oh-oh
Wild, wild life
And I know that’s the way you like it, oh-oh
Living wild, wild, wild, wild life!