Issue No. 3: David Byrne's American Utopia (A Spike Lee Joint)
I was lucky enough to catch a touring performance of David Byrne and company’s American Utopia in Asheville a couple of years ago. A massive fan of Byrne (and Talking Heads, the new wave/funk/art rock/avant pop band he fronted for sixteen years) the experience was frankly a dream come true for me. Even better than seeing a personal artistic hero in action was the particular joy of witnessing him push forward into ever creative dimensions.
Byrne could have phoned it in the way so many 60-something rockers do, faux-humbly pacing the stage and playing only recognizable hits from the glory years with Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison. But, thankfully, that’s never been Byrne’s modus operandi. American Utopia is many things but a cash-grab victory lap by a gray-haired has-been it most certainly is not.
In fact, the first the world glimpsed of the various projects known collectively as American Utopia was the studio album released in March 2018. Comprised of ten new original solo songs, the favorably reviewed album became Byrne’s first top 10 entry on the Billboard 200. His subsequent tour combined this new material with a retrospective collection of songs written over the past four decades with (of course) Talking Heads but also collaborative efforts with St. Vincent, Fatboy Slim, and Brian Eno. This touring show morphed into a stage production at the Hudson Theatre from October 2019 to February 2020, then that was released as a live album, and now finally we have a concert movie/documentary of the theatrical run directed by Spike Lee.
Quite a path, indeed. The remainder of this essay will comment on Lee’s film version since it is widely available for streaming through HBO/HBOmax and on demand.
An Ambitious Venture
The subject of American Utopia is nothing less than the desire to remain optimistic in spite of contemporary political struggles and environmental concerns. In a conversation with Spike Lee, Byrne noted that “obviously we [as Americans] do not live in a utopia, but I’m putting forward evidence that we can do this. We don’t need to make a speech about it. You can see it - right there. And not just see it, you can feel that it feels good. It’s not just an idea. It feels good.”
This is certainly a bold claim for a U.S. denizen in the year 2020, but then again Byrne has never been a typical… well… anything. Byrne as musician and personality first captured wider public attention through imaginative music videos for the songs “Road to Nowhere,” “Burning Down the House,” “Wild Wild Life,” and “Once in a Lifetime,” the latter capturing his iconic portrayal as a jittery, bespectacled, one-cup-of-coffee-away-from-a-total-nervous-breakdown dancing nerd. Hardly, one would think, the stuff of rock legends.
The anxious CBGB troubadour has aged and transmuted, however. Once a wiry art school kid, Byrne is now everyone’s favorite weird uncle who rides bicycles with his band mates at every tour stop while musing about Kurt Schwitters and Fela Kuti. During American Utopia, the part civics-class Jeremiah, part optimistic alien anthropologist encyclopedically catalogs his precious curios and prophecies, submitting dispatches from the 21st-century United States not in the form of intergalactic journal articles but sonic tapestries woven from the music of seven billion humans.
The show features Byrne and eleven other musicians from around the world (Jacquelene Acevedo, Gustavo Di Dalva, Daniel Freedman, Chris Giarmo, Tim Keiper, Tendayi Kuumba, Karl Mansfield, Mauro Refosco, Stéphane San Juan, Angie Swan, and Bobby Wooten III) all uniformly clad in light suits and bare feet presented on an empty stage surrounded by a thin chain curtain. Most importantly, all twelve members of the troupe are completely wireless, able to move with utter freedom. Yes, even the drummers. With such minimal staging/lighting and costuming designed to disappear into the background, the focus then is almost totally on the dozen people - singers, dancers, instrumentalists all - and their various interactions. American Utopia unfolds as a delightfully chaotic brew of rock concert, voter registration drive, stage play, state-of-the-art light demonstration, lecture, marching band show, stilted stand-up routine, and dance competition.
According to Byrne, “when I began to think about the show I realized that what we humans like looking at the most is other humans… So I thought about the show and I wondered: ‘What if we could eliminate everything from the stage except the stuff we care about most? What would be left?’ Well… it would be us… us and you - and that’s what the show is.”
What the Show Is
Byrne begins alone on stage, sitting at a plain card table with an oversized plastic model of the human brain in front of him. As he is joined by two dancing singers he patiently croons, illustrating to the audience various parts of the dissected organ:
Here is a region of abundant details
Here is a region that is seldom used
Here is a region that continues living
Even when the other sections are removed
The metaphor to American society is simple but immediately effective.
“Here” is followed by a deep cut into the Talking Heads discography, “Don’t Worry About the Government,” a song choice that initially made me uneasy. It seemed more than a touch pollyannaish and entitled hearing an older white guy sing:
My building has every convenience
It's gonna make life easy for me
It's gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax alone with my loved onesLoved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I'll be working, working but if you come visit
I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are importantDon't you worry 'bout me
I wouldn't worry about me
Don't you worry 'bout me
Don't you worry 'bout meI see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington D.C
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for meSome civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I'm a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along
If recent events have taught us anything it’s that not all Americans enjoy living in convenient buildings, could put down their work if friends visited, and reap the benefits of civil servants. More on this curious choice later.
By the fifth song, “I Zimbra” from 1979’s Fear of Music, all twelve musicians have finally assembled and choreographer Annie-B Parson’s work truly begins to take flight. Nowhere is this more evident than the standout number “I Should Watch TV” (penned with St. Vincent). Here Byrne’s throbbing techno music, Lee’s smart camera work and editing, the lighting design by Rob Sinclair, and Parson’s dance moves collide in a movie-within-a-movie spectacle. Byrne, proclaiming satirical lyrics (“Everybody’s got a touched up hairdo/ Everybody’s in the passing lane”), squares off against his eleven squad members as they menacingly thrust like the Doof Warrior from Mad Max: Fury Road. The tension breaks in a moment of realization for our main character as all on stage take a knee accompanying the words “How am I not your brother?/ How are you not like me?” An enormous image of Colin Kaepernick is projected and Lee’s shot lingers. As the song concludes with “Maybe someday we can stand together/ Not afraid of what our eyes might see/ Maybe someday understand them better/ The weird things inside of me,” Byrne breaks through the chain curtain and Lee cuts to black after a close-up. I regard this as a pivotal moment in the narrative arc of American Utopia.
Uptempo hits follow, both new (“Everybody’s Coming to My House) and classic (“Once in a Lifetime”). The latter is reimagined no longer as a litany of midlife crisis questions but as an almost joyful golden-years reflection on impermanence. “Toe Jam,” co-written with Fatboy Slim, is a feel-good bop oddly placed after a few minutes of direct prodding that viewers should vote more frequently in local elections.
“I Dance Like This,” the weakest song in the show and the album that initially spawned it, is salvaged through quirky staging and well-placed silence (Parson doing some heavy lifting here). I was intrigued to see what Spike Lee would do with politically charged “Bullet” but any imposed commentary by the director is nonexistent. Lee instead simply shows the already brilliant stage concept: a lamp with a bare lightbulb slowly moving away from Byrne as the band enacts a funeral procession around him.
The show concludes with Byrne’s smash “Burning Down the House” which predictably has the audience jamming in the aisles. The triptych of encores that follows, though, is the real philosophical coda of American Utopia as combined they offer seemingly contradictory yet interlocking attitudes on how we can engage with our society moving forward: defiance (“Hell You Talmbout”), optimism (“One Fine Day”), and anarchic resignation (“Road to Nowhere”). “Hell You Talmbout,” the only cover in the entire show, is a percussion-and-voices protest song by Janelle Monáe that implores us to say the names of black Americans murdered (Monáe granted Byrne permission to perform the song). Lee cuts away from the stage action to reveal oversized portraits of each victim, slowly pushing in to make their faces inescapable. The effect is sobering.
American Utopia is a triumph of creative energy, cathartic and earnest, exuberant and delighting in humanity’s strange invention of society. Byrne and Lee are a match for the ages. Special credit must be given to the duo of lead dancer/singers, Chris Giarmo and Tendayi Kuumba, and the one-two combo of Angie Swan and Bobby Wooten III whose guitar/bass precision are unbelievable.
“There’s a city in my mind…”
Any concert film - let alone one starring David Byrne - will inevitably draw comparisons with Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads feature Stop Making Sense, frequently lauded as the greatest example of its genre. Lee is, whether he wanted to or not, making a sequel to one of the most beloved filmed music experiences of all time.
But whereas the narrative of Demme’s movie plots an arc from the nervous Reagan-era isolationism of “Psycho Killer” toward the baptism-into-community of “Take Me To The River,” Lee reveals by extension the same protagonist reckoning with social justice responsibilities he owes to the diverse society that welcomed him three decades prior. Byrne’s “character” begins American Utopia in a position of older white male privilege (“Don’t Worry About the Government”), has an epiphany (“I Should Watch TV”), and concludes by intoning the names of slain black compatriots (“Hell You Talmbout”).
Demme’s concert film is about finding your brotherhood; Lee’s is about honoring your obligations to them.