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David Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-12-08 07:26:31 +0000 UTC
"Utopia -- the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes." (Yvonne Rainer)
Of course it isn't Stop Making Sense. Nothing else is. However, one of the most striking things about American Utopia -- the film, the concert, and the new songs -- is how it subtly charts Byrne's evolution as an artist (and thinker) since 1984.
With the Talking Heads, Byrne's alien-observer approach to American culture, for all its insights and tangents, was remarkably straightforward. People are odd, the media is inscrutable, and the way to push through all that emotional dislocation is to heighten the artifice, to make it outsized and ironically visible. From the duck-walking to the giant shadows and giant suit, Byrne's approach was what me might call "the comic sublime." Like Andy Kaufman as an avant-rocker, Byrne's underlying attitude was, "I'm not weird. You're weird."
But American Utopia comes to us in a time when we think a bit differently about neuro-atypicality. Although it's not presented as a big deal, Byrne's difference from the mainstream has shifted in terms of perspective and sociopolitical valence. Byrne begins American Utopia by talking about neural pathways, and how babies' brains are more receptive and "alive" than those of adults. One of the implicit themes of this show is "connection," and how intersubjectivity is an instinctual, almost electrical process that breaks down as we get older. Later in the show, Byrne explains that it took him a long time to realize that people, with all their unpredictability, are more beautiful and worthy of attention than, in his examples, "a bicycle, a sunset, or a bag of potato chips."
One can sense now that this realization was a hard one for Byrne, who might've been more comfortable spending his whole life writing more songs about buildings and food. During the Stop Making Sense days, Byrne's creative shtick was, at least in part, about keeping other people at a safe distance. But he doesn't want to do that anymore. Before performing the song "Everybody's Coming to My House," he mentions the different slant that some young singers in Detroit put on the song. For them it was joyous, whereas in Byrne's original conception, the idea of "losing" your home to "everybody" was pretty daunting. (The song could be a semi-sequel to "Memories Can't Wait" from Fear of Music, in which Byrne is deeply ambivalent about the "party in my mind" that other folks can leave, but not him.)
So if we extrapolate from all this, we can perhaps understand American Utopia as a kind of personal journey that might serve as an object-lesson for the rest of us. The show is about the joy of interaction, the satisfaction one receives from working and playing with others. It is explicitly pro-immigrant, anti-violence, and speaks to the value of challenging ourselves to be better. American Utopia insists that we become wiser and more expansive the more we are willing to make those cross-individual connections. Byrne essentially makes a neurological argument for the value of diversity.
This desire to engage with the strangeness of others is, of course, a political matter as well as a personal one. The company's rendition of Janelle Monáe's "Hell You Talmbout" is the emotional crescendo of American Utopia (and the single most evident instance of Spike Lee's otherwise unobtrusive direction). This is perhaps because so many impulses and ideas that have been implicit throughout the show are made manifest here. Racism, after all, is a fear of difference so acute that it transforms into hatred, and with Monáe's song, Byrne takes account of the intolerable human cost.
