David Byrne: American Utopia

DAVID BYRNE: AMERICAN UTOPIA (2018)

1) I Dance Like This; 2) Gasoline And Dirty Sheets; 3) Every Day Is A Miracle; 4) Dogʼs Mind; 5) This Is That; 6) Itʼs Not Dark Up Here; 7) Bullet; 8) Doing The Right Thing; 9) Everybodyʼs Coming To My House; 10) Here.

General verdict: A record that is supposed to make you feel happy, but instead makes you feel confused... and this would have been a compliment in 1979, but not in 2018.

David Byrne has been so active and so much around in the first two decades of the 21st century that it is actually surprising to realize that American Utopia is his first proper solo album of new material in fourteen years — everything since Grown Backwards has been either soundtracks, or collaborations, or guest appearances. Even on this album, most of the songs are co-credited to David and Brian Eno (two to David and electronic artist Daniel Lopatin), but at least the album as a whole is not attributed to the two of them, which is understandable, since American Utopia is very much Byrne in spirit and relatively little Eno.

One of the reasons is that, as the years go by, David seems less and less interested in making «pure» music and is more and more slipping into the Wagnerian spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk, something that had already become fully manifested in the era of Stop Making Sense and True Stories and has now become the norm for the man — American Utopia was announced as part of a much larger multi-media project called Reasons To Be Cheerful (title borrowed from Ian Dury) and was very quickly transformed into a Broadway musical that had itself a nice little run from late 2019 to early 2020, shutting down right in time for the COVID-19 disaster. Speaking of which, the album should play right up 2020ʼs general alley — allegedly it is all about staying cheerful and optimistic in the face of terrible odds, something that was fairly characteristic of Byrneʼs art from day one but is now directly pronounced rather than just hinted at.

Although from a purely musical standpoint, the album is highly eclectic and its tunes are difficult to assign to any particular genre, it is clear that musical structures and arrangement details here are secondary to the artistic message — itʼs just the way David has always worked and you will neither catch him pandering to any particular trend nor dumbing down the music to amplify its mass appeal. For instance, ʽGasoline And Dirty Sheetsʼ will combine Indian sitars, country-western harmonicas, old-fashioned New Wave guitars and new-fashioned drum programming to the point where all this synthesis leaves you confused and disoriented; but whether all this kaleidoscopic mush actually has a point, and whether the music in this song really «matters» next to its lyrics, is quite debatable.

Maybe it was the collaboration with St. Vincent that rubbed off so seriously on David, but the problem remains the same as it was with Love This Giant — I respect the work that went into the making of this album, but I do not properly feel it. At the core, these are fairly accessible pop songs, often with catchy choruses and shit, but if their point is indeed to transmit a feeling of hope and optimism in the midst of troubled times, I must confess that I sense neither too much trouble nor too much happiness in the music. Good case in point: ʽEvery Day Is A Miracleʼ, where the somewhat somber verses are supposed to contrast with the somewhat cheerful chorus. Lyrically, the song is astute and occasionally hilarious, right from the point where David reflects on what Heaven should look like for a chicken ("...and God is a very old rooster / And eggs are like Jesus, his son"). But musically, the verse is reduced to a few rumbly bars of synth-bass and the chorus is just a limp ska pattern whose melody might just as well be played by a bunch of automatons. It is loud enough and you might be tempted to sing along to "every day is a miracle, every day is an unpaid bill", yet nothing in the song either creates real tension or relieves it. Itʼs just a song, no better or worse than a million other ones.

I think that the only number on American Utopia where I smelled the faintest glint of tension was ʽItʼs Not Dark Up Hereʼ, with its jumpy change of tone from verse to chorus and mildly spooky "HEY!" that changes the discourse from protagonist to his imaginary-hallucinatory conversation partner in the skies above. It does not hurt, either, that the song is driven by paranoidally funky guitars, not unlike in the good old days — yet even so, thereʼs light years of distance between the spookiness of this chorus and something like, say, ʽMemories Canʼt Waitʼ or ʽSlippery Peopleʼ.

In the end, while I cannot for the life of me properly badmouth any of these songs for any specific sins, I still cannot help but view American Utopia as an artistic failure. It is clearly a conceptual project that must have meant a lot to David at this point, but even a weakass Talking Heads album like True Stories ended up making more sense and providing more emotional release than this collection of well-crafted, but ultimately cold and limp songs. Certainly the words deserve to be studied, and I am glad to see Byrne, at the age of 66, in such fine vocal form and with so many different ideas, even when they are derivative or ineffective. And perhaps in the context of his Broadway show, interspersed with genuine Heads classics, they do make better sense. But for now they do nothing to dissuade me from the opinion that Byrneʼs spark of genius went extinct somewhere around the time of Look Into The Eyeball, and that not even a global pandemic or a worldwide economic crisis will be enough to rekindle it at this time.