David Byrne’s “American Utopia” concert is the subject of Spike Lee’s latest film.
DAVID BYRNE'S BROADWAY SHOW HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A FILM BY SPIKE LEE.
The question feels like one pried loose by age, yet David Byrne was just 28 when he asked it the first time on record: “Well, how did I get here?”
Ours is a big country with great means of transportation, so who knows how any of us ended up where we are. Byrne has been asking it for 40 years now because Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” remains one of the all-time great pop/rock songs: weirdly funky, strangely groovy, playful yet cryptically philosophical and relatable for its humorous sense of being confounded and overwhelmed by life and its cycles.
Yet “David Byrne’s American Utopia” — his 2018 album, the subsequent tour and the surprising Broadway show based on that tour — doesn’t find the cycles to be perfect circles, but rather gently modified spirals. Look at life — any life — and a sense of “same as it ever was” emerges, but there also exists some imperceptible incremental change. Why else ask how we got here?
“American Utopia” is now a film directed by Spike Lee, who shot Byrne’s Broadway show with a sense of boundlessness inspired by the tour’s movement. (It airs 7 p.m. Oct. 17 on HBO and HBO Max).
That this show has enjoyed three distinct stages speaks to something persistent about its songs, its visuals and its themes. Why else would it not fade away like other tours by other artists for their new albums? Take Bruce Springsteen, another rock performer who took on Broadway: He remains an arena draw, whereas Byrne mostly plays theater spaces. And Springsteen’s Broadway show was a sensitive excavation of his past. Byrne allowed the past to find its way into his show like a fond memory. But those memories function only in how they can connect to our present.
A clean break
Byrne started by cutting everything. He says in the film, “What if we eliminate everything from the stage except for the things we care about? It would be us and you. And that’s what this show is.”
And that was the visceral feeling I got when I saw the American Utopia Tour in April 2018 atWhite Oak Music Hall. The stage was surrounded by chain-link drapes. Stagehands were out of sight. The drums were deconstructed. There were no visible cables plugging instruments into some source of sound. Byrne and his band, a dozen together, moved with predetermined choreographed precision.
Do you know how you’ve seen that show where the performer made you feel like yours was unique amid a tour of dozens of shows? This was not that show. It was more like a Broadway performance: a piece of sea rock made smooth and beautiful through the repetition of the tides.
So I left Byrne’sWhite Oak show not thinking I’d seen anything special compared to what those in San Antonio saw the night before nor what those in New Orleans saw the night after. But I thought I’d seen something special compared to other concerts.
A friend in New Orleans commented a night later on how Byrne had made a concert out of a Second Line parade. His ensemble was purely mobile. It just needed fuel. There his 40-plus years of music came into focus. And if you missed the tour or the Broadway show, HBO’s presentation of “American Utopia” offers a loving representation of the performance. Is it the same experience? I can’t say so.
But with Talking Heads, Byrne dropped a buoy in the sea of filmed concert performances.
“Stop Making Sense” was without peer when it was made in the 1980s. “American Utopia” achieves something similar today: It mixes song, movement, film and theme into a singular thing that rises and crescendos in a way both celebratory and provocative. A few critics have found fault with the latter. Worth noting: The frat-house jocks in “Revenge of the Nerds” also mistakenly thought of Talking Heads as a party band. Choose your company carefully.
New feeling
“American Utopia” is a title laced with coiled meaning. To push back at the title and its intent is a reasonable activity. To express surprise at it is willful ignorance.
Byrne has spent about 45 years probing our sense of selves and our sense place with his songs, first with Talking Heads, a band he worked with over a decade in the ’70s and ’80s that collaborated with him on much of his best and best-known work. And while Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison created the hits associated with Byrne, he’s continued to work similar themes about people and connectivity even after the band split. Grousing about the political content of “American Utopia” is akin to grousing about the political content of “Born in the U.S.A.” Listen, actually listen, and you won’t find the party music you thought you knew.
So Byrne and the Heads were perfectly poised for rediscovery. One could do a jittery dance to Talking Heads, but it was like Prince’s countdown in “1999”: a dance party for the end of the world.
One need not listen too closely to hear the connection between Byrne’s past and present; the ties are in the titles. Two years ago, when I asked Byrne about “American Utopia” (the album), I inquired about the line “Hey, it’s not dark up here!”
The line is quintessentially Byrne: a declaration kept from robotic simplicity by its enthusiasm. He was talking about an attic or a mind. It almost doesn’t matter. Sometimes the dark spaces we fear aren’t as bad as we think.
That line comes from a song titled “Here,” and the “American Utopia” film opens with another song titled “Here.” Byrne begins the song holding a plastic replica of a brain. The move is on-brand for Byrne, who always seems more a creature of the mind than the heart, such that it is. I hate being the one to apply an elbow to the ribs. But the title suggests some sense of heart: “Here.”
“Well, how did I get here?” That Byrne and his entire ensemble of musicians are all dressed alike in gray suits wasn’t just a creative choice to convey solidarity. The attire ties back to “Stop Making Sense,” when Byrne would twist and cavort in a suit several sizes too large.
By 2018, Byrne on stage found a suit that fit.
Life during wartime
That said, “David Byrne’s American Utopia” isn’t the culmination of 40 years of music, I hope, because the album and the show contain a tension tied to our times that hints at hopefulness. But they make clear that hopefulness doesn’t rise from complacency, but rather agitation.
Lee, the filmmaker, diverts from what actually happens in the stage show to portray the people referenced in Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a roll call of unarmed people killed by armed people charged with protecting them. Byrne, as he recounts on stage, asked Monae — a queer woman of color — for her blessing to cover the song since he’s “a white man of a certain age singing this song.”
She told him, he recounts, the song was “‘for humanity. A protest song and a requiem for lives senselessly taken.’ It’s also about possibility. Possibility of change. Not just in an imperfect world, but in myself.”
How did I get here? Byrne doesn’t offer answers but suggests we’d all be better asking that question. And he doesn’t see the other refrain in “Once in a Lifetime” as cynical as it might have been decades ago. Once it felt like a white flag. Now it’s a point of agitation, an impetus for change.
Consider how much easier “American Dystopia” would have been to sell as a title for an album in 2018. Years ago he made an album titled “David Byrne” that was strangely personal, instrumentally subdued and fairly underheart. One song had the lines, “It’s not the ending of the world, it’s just the closing of a discotheque. I used to go three times a week. But that was a long, long time ago.”
“American Utopia” considers the end of something but fights back. Had Byrne fallen back on a story about dystopia, there wouldn’t be a Broadway show, nor this collaboration with Lee.
That in itself feels like a rebellion against resignation to a future that is the same as it ever was.