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22

feels reductive to just call david byrne a musician when i think he's really the world's greatest children's television host with a brain that probably functions like one of those extremely complicated million-gear machines you see in a children's book. he's raffi for adults. his work rides a very goofy line of earnest loving optimism and sarcastic cynical criticism, like an alien who doesn't understand why we do the things but has come to love our patterns all the same.

maybe i just think of his work as childish because it always makes me feel childlike; untethered and happy, swaddled in the comfy and smart way he speaks but encouraged by the exuberant, full and constructed feeling of his music…

5

David Byrne’s
American Utopia
streaming exclusively
on HBO Max
 ○ 
く|)へ
    〉                        Hamilton streaming
￣￣┗┓                exclusively on Disney+ 
            ┗┓　 ヾ○ｼ
                 ┗┓ ヘ/ 
                      ┗┓ノ 
                           ┗┓

7

Even in an era when rock shows were all about orgiastic excess, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne made a warm and inviting spectacle out of his own smallness. The signature image from Jonathan Demme’s totemic concert documentary “Stop Making Sense” finds Byrne getting lost inside his own comically large silver business suit; maybe it was a Kabuki-like expression of a man being swallowed alive by runaway capitalism, or maybe — as Byrne maintains — he just wanted to make it look like his head had shrunken down to a funny size.

Not that it was ever big to begin with. As radical in his humility as he was humble in his radicality, art rock’s very own Mr. Rogers welcomed…

3

put this on across two separate nights while cooking risotto. my review of david byrne's american utopia is that i shouldn't have put as much butter in the risotto

18

hate to it that i feel very "let's separate the art from the artist" about david byrne and pretty much david byrne only. too many bad stories sprinkled through his career history that feel entirely antithetical to his work and it bums me out! i choose to celebrate the david byrne i can only know through his work, and not the david byrne i would know by being treated like shit as his bandmate and knowing he left a literal turd in the room of a hotel he didn't like 😌 i wish he treated the heads better 😌 i just likey da songs 😌 american utopia so good 😌

edit: ugh, i don’t like reading this back later- look,…

3

No one gets it like David Byrne gets it, an artist who somehow translates alienation and disenfranchisement into positivity, decency, inclusion, and shameless dancing. A genuinely inspiring person with more good songs than just about anyone who started after 1975. I felt my heart pause and grow a little when "Slippery People" started. Spike Lee does a lot that Jonathan Demme didn't do in STOP MAKING SENSE—overhead cinematography, pitiless closeups on faces and feet, an acknowledgement of the audience. It's with purpose—it's not a surrealist exercise, it's a communal jubilee. What a bookend.

Review by jawn dielman ★★★★ Liked

did his suit get smaller or did he grow into it

Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½ Liked

AMERICAN UTOPIA might be the most joyful thing that made me incredibly sad. 2020!

Time isn’t holding us. Time isn’t after us.

2

I don’t think there is anyone in the world like David Byrne and I wouldn’t want there to be. Gave me the same feeling as Stop Making Sense of somehow breathing just a bit more oxygen than the world would usually allow, feeling your heart beat a little, a lot bigger. One Fine Day cracks me open. It’s all fucking glorious, will rewatch to death.

9

This definitely confirms it: David Byrne has been having an uninterrupted existential crisis for the last 45 years.

It's truly amazing that his satire on American capitalism seems as relevant as it did in the 80s. Unlike Jerry Seinfeld doing bits about iPhones, it doesn't feel like he is trying to bend to be more relevant to the times, but more like he has always known what we needed. I think it is because he was always an outsider. He often sings about waking up to a realization or seeing his world through a different lens. The world has evolved but it hasn't fundamentally changed, just as his message evolved but remains the same.

This is Spike Lee's best movie…

Review by Muriel ★★★★★ Liked

david byrne helping me rediscover what being happy feels like, same as it ever was. really wishing i could go to his house and never come back home right now.

Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★★ Liked

“Looking at people? Yeah. That’s the best.”

A couple of weeks ago I finally saw American Utopia live on Broadway (fucking stellar) but we arrived comically late (just before “Once In A Lifetime”) so we watches the first half this morning. Really so wonderful every time. I always wonder why Byrne never made another movie after True Stories, but I think it’s because True Stories was as much the culmination of his thoughts as any of his songs, and this makes it clear. American Utopia is like a greatest hits album, where the songs present the same vision as a movie he made in 1990. Some would say it’s because he never changed or evolved into something new, but I think it’s because he’s known exactly who he is and what he finds interesting his entire career.