Words, rhythm and playful freedom.

In 1981, while Talking Heads had already secured their place in the new-wave pantheon, their rhythm section —Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz— took a creative detour to explore something more spontaneous. That detour became Tom Tom Club, recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, and launched with “Wordy Rappinghood”, a track blending electronics, funk, spoken-word rap and pure playfulness. From its opening sound —the clack of a typewriter— the song makes its theme clear: words, their worth, and their contradictions. “What are words worth?” repeats the chorus, half joke, half philosophical question.

(L-R) Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, David Byrne and Jerry Harrison at BAM Harvey Theater in New York City on Sept. 13, 2023.

The song’s most charming origin story comes from a family moment. Walking on a Bahamian beach with her sisters Lani and Laura, Tina heard one of them humming a tune remembered from her school days in France, the children’s chant “A Ram Sam Sam”. That playful melody instantly caught Tina’s ear; she brought it into the studio, weaving it into the track’s chorus as a bright, almost childlike counterpoint to the song’s verbal wordplay. The result is a multilingual, percussive collage where English and French lines tangle together, “mots pressés, mots sensés, mots qui disent la vérité”, to celebrate and question the meaning of language itself.

In the photo, Tina Weymouth.

“Wordy Rappinghood” is both critique and celebration: it laughs at the excess of words while proving their irresistible rhythm. Musically it’s a playful hybrid, Caribbean-flavored grooves, minimalist synths, and a beat that foreshadowed the dance-floor culture of the 1980s. The song climbed European charts and became a club staple, establishing Tom Tom Club as unlikely innovators: intellectual yet fun, abstract yet deeply human.

Four decades later, “Wordy Rappinghood” remains a small pop revolution, a reminder that words matter, but sometimes the best ones are those

that make you move.