For years, the only Rhode Island School of Design alumnus worth yammering on about was mustachioed actor/comedian Martin Mull. We really thought that Gimble fella from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was hilarious enough to carry his own show, which he did, briefly (the classic and oft-forgotten Fernwood 2-Nite, later retooled as America 2-Nite). Yessir, ol’ Marty was the fruit of Providence’s white-bread loins—until those wacky, irreverent Talking Heads came along and made him look like a festering pile of week-old cheese. Unfortunately, the Mullster never really recovered; it was almost painful watching him simper his way through those episodes of Roseanne in the mid-‘90s (where was Fred Willard when we needed him?).

But I digress. The triple threat of Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and dropout David Byrne (proof that you don’t need a degree to wear a big, stupid suit) redefined private-school cool in the late ‘70s, especially after they moved their band to New York City and picked up keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison for their paranoid, angular stab at rock music. Call it art punk, call it new wave, call it skinny kid wimp rock—whatever it was, Talking Heads brought it to the masses on their creatively titled 1977 debut Talking Heads: 77. The masses didn’t respond (they were too busy fawning over “Disco Duck”), but to the Heads’ credit, they didn’t throw in the towel. They put out another album the following year, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and their ghostly cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” caught on with thousands of folks in need of a good aural cleansing.

Thanks to those fancy pants degrees they picked up in the Ocean State, the Talking Heads were able to use the hip new medium of music video to stretch their career well into the ‘80s (unlike, say, Brownsville Station). Byrne and Co. churned out such classic clips as “Once in a Lifetime” (also known as “Nerd Having Seizure in Front of Computer Screen”) and “Burning Down the House” (“Disembodied Head Taunts Suburban Home Owners”). These visual head-scratchers endeared the group to a mainstream America already obsessed with vaguely bizarre crap (Mr. T, Pac-Man, Jazzercise). To this day, Talking Heads clips are considered the vanguard of the art form that catapulted New Edition and El DeBarge to superstardom (the Heads would also prove themselves in the long video format, both in the creative concert film Stop Making Sense and the 1986 Byrne-directed feature True Stories).

In this, the current century, there’s a brand new angular rock group with art school roots and a noisy name that rose to prominence after manipulating channels of technology to their own advantage. I speak of Connecticut College-born Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who in 2005 became the toast of the global music scene after mp3s from their eponymous debut album made the rounds on various highfalutin’ blogs. Clap Your Hands took their act from the Nutmeg State to Manhattan, and big city hipsters from every borough fell in love with their gently disturbing music. David Byrne himself was even spotted at a few of the band’s shows; the former Head must have enjoyed watching singer Alec Ounsworth take his introverted vocal style to a raw, more emotional place (or maybe he was just looking for more freaks to point a camera at).