An Elegy for the Trump Era, Part 2: American Utopia

It’s been hard to put words to just how much David Byrne’s and Spike Lee’s American Utopia blew me away. I’ll try to conjure up the thoughts as they somersault through my brain.

There is something about David Bryne that I just get. Artists, do you know what I’m talking about? You hear a fellow artist talk about something personal, and you instantly feel, in your gut, that if the two of you met, then you would deeply understand one another. This, I feel deeply when Bryne explains his version of “Everybody’s Coming to my House.” On this song, he says “It kind of sounds like the singer is not sure how he feels about people coming to his house.” I don’t know why, but I felt this. And especially now.

Throughout American Utopia, Byrne speaks about the connections we make over time- about, how, as babies, we are born with millions and millions of connections as we age. And, “As we grow up, we lose these connections….Well, what happens is, we keep the connections that are useful to us….until we get to the ones that define us as humans- that define us as people.” During this time of radical change in my life, and the lives of so many Americans (new President, new jobs, new schools, new ways of living, an explosive pandemic, many moves, etc.), this seemed pressing. We, as Americans, have been undergoing a great reckoning for many years. We are still moving through it. Still suffering through it. We were static for a long time, and now we wake up every day in the face of insurmountable, chaotic energy. This is how I felt on Saturday. Even though I had been angry for so long, there was still so much more that went suppressed for so long.

And then I realized….are we being punished? As I watched this production on a depressing, in-active Halloween night, I thought to myself, what is going on?

No, but really, what is going on?

I haven’t recognized America for years.

For the first time in many, many years, I felt hope for our country’s future. Perhaps it was because here, I was seeing an old white man at the forefront of this radically inclusive production. Artists of all walks of life, all different nationalities, all different colors, ages, etc. This was never a David Bryne piece; it was an American piece in disguise. It was that careful use of representation that is deeply satisfying while, at the same time, eye opening and tragic. To think about how much of America perceives its own in deeply negative ways….

David muses on social anxiety prior to “Everybody’s Coming to my House.” Remember? That song I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it hits differently at a point in time where inviting a stranger, or even a close friend, into your home can be extremely threatening or deadly. As if this nation wasn’t already plagued enough with the absence of face-to-face connection through social media, now being around one another is considered dangerous. Despite his evident social anxiety though, Byrne agrees that “Meeting people is hard, but I know- I know we have to do it,” and, moreover, that “looking at people. That’s the best.”

Merge this rhetoric with what you’ve probably been watching on CNN nonstop since last Tuesday, and you have one clear message:

We haven’t seen each other in a long time. It’s time to see each other again.

You can watch American Utopia on HBO MAX right now, and I also suggest you watch Stop Making Sense, if you have Amazon Prime. Both are great temporary cures for the long felt absence of live music.