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The Pretenders are a great classic four-piece rock lineup with a great vocalist. Most of the competing material here comes from the great two first albums before the guitarist and bassist died. Chrissy twice re-built them into other great four-piece lineups, before finally yielding in the late eighties and letting the brand dissolve into rotating-door membership.
The Heads, on the other hand, feature a bassist forced into the role and taught on the spot because she was the drummer's girlfriend, a bassist who is constantly covered up for by session players on recordings. Their best albums feature (1) a lineup augmented by King Crimson members throughout, and (2) a lineup augmentd by Bernie Worrell and his funky friends througtout.
Look at Stop Makin' Sense, a fantastic perfromance document. But it's a story of a four-piece band of white folk, pushed over the top into excellence as they bring out the black supporting musicians, (back-up singers Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry (The Brides of Funkenstein), Worrell, percussionist Steve Scales, and guitarist Alex Weir.
This isn't to denigrate the Heads. I loved and love them. Whence I was young, I tooled around in a car named "Swamp," after the Talking Heads song. I only mean to point out that as to the charge of who is pretending, the Pretenders are a lot cleaner the Heads.
That's not even getting into the art of composition, in which David Byrne always had absurdism to fall back on --- a tool which is sometimes a revelation, other times a copout, but a copout Chrissie Hynde never took.
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