If you were to condense David Byrne’s music down into a single word, that word would more than likely be “connection.” Every song he has written deals with connection to other people or, more often, the difficulties associated with connection to other people.
Consider his Broadway show American Utopia (the live recording of which, directed by Spike Lee, was released earlier this year). The show begins where the album of the same name leaves off, with the song “Here”. Byrne sings with a model of the human brain in hand, indicating the areas he’s describing. “Here is a region of abundant details/Here is a region that is seldom used.” The music swells, the anatomy lesson continues. A pair of dancers, Angie Swan and Chris Ciarmo, come onto the stage and begin a duet, orbiting and bouncing off each other like twin cell organisms trying to fuse. Byrne continues to sing, building toward the song’s climactic lyric, which underlines the premise of his show, of his album, of his career: “Here is a connection with the opposite side.”
American Utopia, by existing in a post-Stop Making Sense world, invites comparison. The 1984 concert film, directed by Jonathan Demme, is inarguably the seminal work of the genre. Shot over three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, Stop Making Sense is a touchstone work for fans of David Byrne, a synthesis of the various strands of his work as a part of Talking Heads. Rather than shy away from this comparison, Byrne and Lee lean into it. American Utopia is in direct conversation with Stop Making Sense.
Compare, for instance, “Here” to Stop Making Sense’s opening number “Psycho Killer”. Where the former sees Byrne giving a tranquil, almost meditative, performance — the latter hinges on apprehension and unpredictability. Demme opens the film with a long shot, tracking Byrne’s sneakers as he walks out onto stage. Byrne places a tape deck on the floor, hits play, a rattle-snaking pre-recorded beat starts; he launches into the song, singing frantically. Halfway through he breaks into dance, stumbling around the stage, disoriented, like Buster Keaton reincarnated. Byrne’s performance leans into the natural anxiety of the track. Ostensibly it is about a psychopathic murderer, but the lyrics keep details elusive. Every time you feel you have a solid grasp on what the song is about, and whose perspective it is sung from, Byrne disorients you again. Is the narrator the killer? The victim? A third party who is watching and doing nothing to help? And where does that leave us, the listener?
In his review of Stop Making Sense, Roger Ebert writes that Byrne’s performance solidified his place in the pantheon of Rock n’ Roll’s great leading men, alongside the likes of Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, and Prince. Their unifying characteristics, he says, is “stage presence,” which he characterizes as “sour and weary and strung out.”
This exhausted quality is key to the appeal of rock stars. They are avatars for aspects of Western cultural malaise; doubly so for those who were at their height in the tail end of the 20th century. The best have an ability to embody broad social ideas with a performance that marries emotions that are simultaneously personal and universal. Springsteen was a mouthpiece for working-class ennui. Prince, the vehicle through which a sexually repressed generation found release. Bowie, with his recurrent science-fiction imagery and alien alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, examined the double-edged sword of fear and possibility that was technological progress.
As the frontman of Talking Heads, David Byrne was the manifestation of an inability to feel comfortably settled in society; an alien in a familiar land. His work is preoccupied with the tension between American suburbia and American counterculture, both of which seek to embrace him, even though he feels at home in neither. There’s a prominent vein of skepticism toward these cultural blocs throughout his Talking Heads-era output, a notion that both are built on hollow promises, selling safety in exchange for social assimilation.
The purpose of a concert film is to provide the audience with a unique insight into the personas of the performers. Stop Making Sense literalizes this concept. By beginning with “Psycho Killer”, Byrne and Demme start at a point of familiarity for the audience — it is, after all, the band’s most popular song. In a game of stream-of-consciousness word association, Talking Heads and “Psycho Killer” are next-door neighbors. With each subsequent number, a new instrument is brought onto the stage. The bass comes on in “Heaven,” the drums in “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel”. It is not until the sixth track, “Life During Wartime”, that the entire band is on stage. Assembling the band in front of our eyes literalizes the function of the concert film. We, the audience, gain new insights into how the band functions by witnessing how their sound is constructed.
From “Life During Wartime” onwards, each number touches upon the basic theme of the show — difficulty connecting with others — in a new way. “My Girlfriend is Better” sees Byrne don the now-iconic big suit, an over-the-top replication of ‘80s fashion. “Making Flippy Floppy” sees Byrne and co performing while behind them giant screens project a sequence of unconnected words: PIG/FACELIFT/STAR WARS, GRITS/DOG/TIME CLOCK, DIGITAL/BABIES/DUSTBOWL. These gimmicks combined with Demme’s directing — which neither cuts to behind-the-scenes footage nor the audience throughout — draw us into Byrne’s psychology. It’s an anxious place, where society is a collection of purposeless rituals and symbols. The title of the film can be read as a plea: Stop Making Sense because that, to Byrne, would make sense.
In recent years Byrne has been more open about the impact his inability to easily comprehend social conventions has had on interpersonal relationships. Byrne is no longer on speaking terms with the other band members of the Talking Heads, due in large part to how difficult he was to work with (he famously did not allow water on stage during Stop Making Sense as it would interfere with the aesthetic of the show). In 2009 Byrne stated he is on the autism spectrum, and this affected his development: “I was a peculiar young man — borderline Asperger’s, I would guess.” He has since elaborated on this, saying that a large amount of his difficulty connecting and communicating can, in part, be attributed to his high-functioning autism.
Byrne’s autism contextualizes a great deal of his lyricism. As writers on the spectrum have noted, his songs — which tend to talk themselves in circles and question even the most mundane things — reflect how someone with autism sees the world. His specific mode of expression, however, taps into a broader feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction. When Byrne wails “By God what have I done?” in the Stop Making Sense version of “Once in a Lifetime”, he taps into a universal feeling of existential restlessness.
Of the 20 songs performed in American Utopia only seven are taken from the Talking Heads’ catalogue. And of those seven, even fewer appear in both American Utopia and Stop Making Sense, but “Once in a Lifetime” is one of them. Like “Here” and “Psycho Killer”, the contrast between the two versions of “Once in a Lifetime” is as white is to black. Both Demme and Lee use chiaroscuro lighting to isolate Byrne onstage. But where Demme reinforces that isolation by eliminating the rest of the troupe from the frame for almost the entirety of the song, Lee lifts the lighting during the choruses. The troupe rushes forward to join Byrne, and they belt out the lyrics together. The agitation at the heart of the song is just as defined, but it becomes almost comforting when sung by a collective.
Stop Making Sense cemented Byrne’s persona as an embodiment of anxiety; American Utopia actively deconstructs it. The structure of the show follows the same basic formula laid out in “Once in a Lifetime”, oscillating between isolated and communal. Sometimes Byrne, and the eleven other performers who make up the troupe, are separated through lighting techniques, which cast massive shadows across the stage, visually distancing them. Other times full stage lighting is up, and the troupe performs as a unit. But like “Once in a Lifetime”, while the show shifts between the two, it always resets to communal; connected is the default state.
The visual language of American Utopia marks the quiet completion of the character arc of David Byrne: Rock Star. In his non-musical output, Byrne has already been moving toward an outlook focused on positivity and connection — he currently runs a good news website called Reasons to Be Cheerful and, since becoming a US citizen in 2012, has become increasingly focused on politics as a vehicle for humanistic change. This change is mirrored in his personal life. In an interview for The Guardian he said, “I’ve changed over the years. I’m imperfect, but I communicate better. I don’t just bury things and let them explode at some point. I’m able to talk in a social group whereas before I would retreat into a corner.”
None of this belies the difficulties and tensions Byrne experienced, and often caused, earlier in his career. American Utopia is as concerned with human failing as it is the concept of utopia. Between songs, Byrne stops to give mini-lectures on topics: the driving philosophy behind the show, importance of voting, and — of course — all things related to human connection. These monologues are instructive but rarely instructional (Byrne does not, for example, tell us who to vote for). Throughout you are left with the impression that Byrne probably doesn’t have an answer to the questions he’s raising, just that he believes the discussion of them is important. His entire career was built on the notion that once one gains understanding they will be able to fully connect with others, but American Utopia sees him reject this. American Utopia rounds out with a performance of “Road to Nowhere”, easily the most confusion-laden song Byrne has written. He and the troupe descend from the stage and parade through the crowd, the barriers between performer and audience, person and person, dissolved. For a man who has been hounded by feelings of unease and separation throughout most of his performing life, the message impossible to miss: connection is not the product of confusion’s antidote, it is the antidote.
