You can find an interview with david byrne in AVclub where he says:
'Twenty-five years ago, Talking Heads stuff. Sometimes I would write songs based on an instruction I had given myself, like a point of view. There's a song on the second Talking Heads record [1978's More Songs About Buildings And Food] called "The Good Thing." It was an attempt by me... This was my instruction to myself: Write a song that sounds like a bad English translation of a Red Chinese anthem. That's what the song was meant to be. Sometimes I'd get those pamphlets, like Mao in art and literature, and they had this weird filtered language that I loved because it has this approach to English that wasn't quite Japanese mangling of product names or catchphrases, but something close to that. I found that very poetic and appropriate. You could write something in that style, in the style of bad translation. They don't do that so much anymore. '
You can find an interview with david byrne in AVclub where he says:
'Twenty-five years ago, Talking Heads stuff. Sometimes I would write songs based on an instruction I had given myself, like a point of view. There's a song on the second Talking Heads record [1978's More Songs About Buildings And Food] called "The Good Thing." It was an attempt by me... This was my instruction to myself: Write a song that sounds like a bad English translation of a Red Chinese anthem. That's what the song was meant to be. Sometimes I'd get those pamphlets, like Mao in art and literature, and they had this weird filtered language that I loved because it has this approach to English that wasn't quite Japanese mangling of product names or catchphrases, but something close to that. I found that very poetic and appropriate. You could write something in that style, in the style of bad translation. They don't do that so much anymore. '
I guess that's what he meant..