There is no doubting that the top New York City hotels are the best of the best.  Given the location, in the greatest city in the world, how could it be any different?  Here, the world’s best designers, chefs, architects, and artists gather, or have gathered at time or another, to soak up the energy and to contribute their share of talent.  It’s a buzzing place, and the hotels are a reflection of this, except with a large dose of relaxation and rejuvenation.  With a combination of world-class amenities, mixed with a studied practice of hospitality learned from all the cultures in the melting pot, there is a sense here of being close to the heartbeat of the world.

New York could be the pulse of the world, for all we know, and with bands like the Talking Heads, the pulse is exciting.  And an experiment in rhythms, too.  The Talking Heads performed as a group for the first time on June 8, 1975, at NYC’s famous CBGB, and they opened for the Ramones, no less.  An auspicious beginning, but not quite the beginning.  The band members started hooking up a few years before that, as art school students in Rhode Island, and they started to play together using some of David Byrne’s early songs, like Psycho Killer, as beginning tracks, to learn each other’s musical directions.  From the beginning, the rhythms were a combination of infectious punk beats and rock and roll rhythms that had their roots in African rhythm.  David Byrne, whose life-long interest would become apparent in subsequent years, often mentions the African influence in his music from the beginning.

The other members of the Talking Heads were Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison.  Their run as a band together was a little over a decade, enough to record some of the most influential albums in punk, post-punk, art-punk, new-wave, alternative music history.  Whatever they were playing, it was definitely abstract.  They certainly had artistic allies in New York, with groups like  Blondie and Television, and visionary artists like Twyla Tharpe, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Wilson working as contemporaries.  The experiment that was the Talking Heads, then, was a rather successful one, and one that David Byrne could later draw on as his music has taken on a more consciously African sensibility and approach.  True New Yorkers, and true world artists.