USA TODAY International Edition
David Byrne’s ‘American Utopia’ raises a problem
Heavy collaboration is entirely male
David Byrne should have known better.
The new album from the prolific Talking Heads frontman, American Utopia, came out Friday, his first release under his own name since 2004’s Grown Backwards. Byrne’s trademark warbling vocals are front and center on American Utopia’s tracks, but, in a now-controversial post on his website, he highlighted 25 artists with whom he collaborated on the album, including his longtime counterpart Brian Eno, younger virtuosos like Dev Hynes and Sampha, and a variety of relatively unknown electronic music producers, describing how he solicited contributions over the Internet and “ended up with a whole slew of contributors to a song, a patchwork—and somehow it worked.”
There’s just one issue with the 25 farflung collaborators Byrne recruited for American Utopia. All of them are male. And per the American Utopia album credits, of all the producers, engineers, background musicians and other artists credited to the album, just one person — mix engineer Marta Salogni — is a woman.
After some Internet backlash to his blog post highlighting his American Utopia collaborators, Byrne apologized in a social media statement on Tuesday, identifying that the album contributed to “a lack of representation (that) is something that is widespread and prob- lematic in our industry.”
Yet, the incident is still a disappointment for Byrne fans, who have come to know the artist as politically engaged and progressively mindful. Sharing his observations in interviews and in posts on his online “journal,” Byrne has written essays disowning New York City for its inequality, advocated for gun control and built playlists of African and Caribbean artists in response to politicians’ racist comments, and praised the “glorious” Women’s March. He kicked off his 2018 with a lecture series titled “Reasons To Be Cheerful,” featuring earnest speeches about finding joy and seeking change in today’s turbulent era. His most recent album, Love This Giant, was a collaboration with St. Vincent, in which he equally split his duties with a female artist.
All of which is to say, Byrne is not a clueless classic-rock fossil from the 1970s, who perhaps wouldn’t recognize the unfortunate optics of American Utopia’s all-male team. He has dedicated many words to advocating for his fellow musicians, railing against streaming services’ unfair payouts and urging politicians to pledge more federal funding to the arts in his blog posts.
Presumably, an artist this engaged in the health of his industry would grasp the importance of gender equality in music, especially considering the woeful statistics of women in the business.
2017 marked a six-year low for female artists in popular music, according to the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s inaugural report on women in music. Beyond the fact that in 2017, 83.2% of artists were men and only 16.8% were women, the numbers for women working behind the scenes to write and produce music were even more grim, with women making up only 12.3% of the credited songwriters and 2% of the producers surveyed for the report.
Those numbers are certainly represented on American Utopia, which Byrne acknowledged in his apology.
“I regret not hiring and collaborating with women for this album – it’s ridiculous, it’s not who I am and it certainly doesn’t match how I’ve worked in the past,” he wrote. “It’s hard to realize that no matter how much effort you spend nudging the world in what you hope is the right direction, sometimes you are part of the problem.”
Byrne fans seeking musical value out of American Utopia will find a largely pleasurable album, featuring the offbeat, stream-of-consciousness songwriting and inventive instrumentations that Byrne has employed throughout his career. And perhaps this incident will inspire Byrne to make more effort to involve a more diverse team.
Yet, American Utopia entered the world on Friday as a work of music made almost entirely by men, a legacy that’s depressingly at odds with the album’s own title.