The 2020s File Feature
The Alan Parsons Project - Let's Talk About Me (Official HD Video)
Let's Talk About Me — The Alan Parsons Project's Sharp Left TurnBy the mid-1980s, the Alan Parsons Project had built one of progressive rock's most distincti…
01 The Story
Let's Talk About Me — The Alan Parsons Project's Sharp Left Turn
By the mid-1980s, the Alan Parsons Project had built one of progressive rock's most distinctive identities: layered, concept-driven albums exploring themes from Edgar Allan Poe to the pyramids to artificial intelligence, produced with a precision that reflected Alan Parsons's background as an Abbey Road engineer who had worked on recordings by the Beatles and Pink Floyd. Let's Talk About Me, from the 1985 album Vulture Culture, represented something genuinely unexpected from this project: a sharp, mordant piece of social satire aimed squarely at the self-absorption of the decade it found itself in.
The Alan Parsons Project's Creative Formula
The Alan Parsons Project was never a conventional band. Parsons and his creative partner Eric Woolfson treated each album as a thematic vehicle, recruiting guest vocalists rather than maintaining a fixed frontman and building elaborate sonic architectures around their conceptual frameworks. By Vulture Culture, they had accumulated a substantial catalog of ambitious, polished albums: Tales of Mystery and Imagination, I Robot, Pyramid, The Turn of a Friendly Card, and Eye in the Sky had established them as one of the most sophisticated acts in mainstream progressive rock. Vulture Culture maintained the sonic quality but took a somewhat more pointed satirical stance.
A Song About Self-Absorption
The track's subject is the culture of narcissism that critics had been diagnosing in American life since at least Christopher Lasch's 1979 book of the same name, and that reached a kind of gleeful commercial apotheosis in the Reagan-era 1980s. The narrator of Let's Talk About Me is exaggeratedly self-focused, interested only in conversations about their own life and preferences, and the song treats this as both funny and slightly alarming. It is a satirical portrait rather than a celebration: the humor is knowing, and the target is the culture of relentless self-promotion that was becoming, in 1985, increasingly visible.
Chart Performance and Reach
Let's Talk About Me reached number 56 on the Hot 100 in 1985, a solid mid-chart showing for a track that was always more conceptually interesting than commercially obvious. The song's dry wit and sophisticated production found an audience large enough to generate meaningful airplay, particularly on the album-oriented rock stations that formed the core of the Project's fan base. While it did not reach the heights of Eye in the Sky's 1982 number-three peak, it demonstrated that the act's fanbase remained engaged with the project's ongoing evolution.
The Satirical Edge of Vulture Culture
The album title itself, Vulture Culture, announces the satirical intent with considerable directness. The vulture as a symbol of consumption without production, of benefiting from others' labors without contributing, frames the album's thematic concerns. Let's Talk About Me is the most explicit expression of those concerns: the self-absorbed narrator is a figure of gentle ridicule, a product of the exact culture the album is examining. The Parsons Project rarely deployed this kind of pointed social commentary; its usual register was grander and more philosophical. The more specific social satire of Vulture Culture gave the project a different kind of relevance.
Legacy and Continuing Resonance
The self-absorption the song satirized in 1985 has only intensified in the decades since; the dynamics it described have been amplified enormously by social media, selfie culture, and the attention economy. Listeners encountering Let's Talk About Me now will find its satire has aged with uncomfortable precision. For fans of the Alan Parsons Project, it stands as one of the more immediately accessible entries in a catalog that can sometimes require patience to enter, a song that leads with its wit and then reveals the craft underneath.
Press play on Let's Talk About Me and hear 1985's culture of self-promotion described with an exactness that feels entirely contemporary.
“Let's Talk About Me” — The Alan Parsons Project's singular moment on the charts.
02 Song Meaning
Let's Talk About Me — The Anatomy of a Satirical Self-Portrait
Songs that satirize selfishness face an inherent challenge: they must make the thing they are criticizing entertaining enough that the listener stays for the critique. Let's Talk About Me solves this problem elegantly by embodying the self-absorption it is targeting, presenting a narrator so thoroughly consumed by their own interests that the joke writes itself and the point lands without needing to be stated directly.
The Narrator as Target
The device the song uses is simple and effective: the narrator is not describing someone else's self-absorption but demonstrating their own, in real time, through the content of the song itself. Every verse returns to the central preoccupation of the speaker's own life, preferences, and importance. The listener occupies the position of the person in conversation with this narrator, being subjected to the endless monologue the title promises. This structural joke sustains the song's running time without ever wearing out its welcome, because the execution is precise enough to stay funny rather than merely repetitive.
The 1980s Context
The specific cultural moment the song targets was the Reagan-era flowering of what sociologists had been calling the "culture of narcissism" since the late 1970s. The combination of economic prosperity at the top of the income scale, the ascendancy of self-help culture, and the new visibility of conspicuous consumption created a social environment in which self-promotion became not just acceptable but aspirational. The Alan Parsons Project, operating from a British perspective, could observe this dynamic with some critical distance and translate it into a song that American audiences recognized and laughed at partly in recognition of themselves.
Wit as a Compositional Tool
The song's musical wit matches its lyrical wit. The production is slick and confident, as the Parsons Project's work invariably was, but the arrangement serves the satirical content by providing a backdrop of assured, polished self-presentation that is itself part of the joke. The narrator does not describe their self-absorption in a sloppy or self-aware way; they deliver it with complete confidence, which is precisely what makes it funny. The music performs the attitude the lyrics describe.
Why the Satire Holds Up
The irony of Let's Talk About Me's longevity is that the culture it satirized has only intensified since 1985. The dynamics of social media, the attention economy, and celebrity culture have made the self-absorbed narrator of this song feel less like a period caricature and more like an accurate contemporary portrait. The song has aged not by becoming quaint but by becoming more precisely descriptive, which is the mark of good satire: it identifies something true about human nature at a particular historical moment, and the truth outlasts the moment.
More than four decades on, the question the song's narrator keeps returning to, what about me? - remains the fundamental organizing principle of far too much public and private life.
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