At this year’s Coachella Music Festival, legendary musician David Byrne gave a killer performance. Byrne, formerly a member of Talking Heads, has been promoting his new record, Who Is The Sky? This new albumis an upbeat collection of songs celebrating joy. It’s so happy, in fact, that anti-American liberals can’t stand it.
Writing in Pitchfork, music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine was put off by Byrne’s buoyancy. “Joy is precious in the 21st century,” he writes, “so it’s worth celebrating the reasons to be cheerful.” He references Bryne’s positivity project, “a kind of Buzzfeed for relentless optimists.” Furthermore, “these songs are designed to help get you through the day—vivid, colorful tunes that place a premium on human interaction.”
So why the lousy 5.1 rating?
Byrne’s recipe is comfort food, sunny nourishment in troubled times. But his determination to look on the bright side of life yields an album with no ambiguity or subtext. All the joy is right on the surface, delivered with relentless gaiety that becomes hackneyed long before the album is over … All those demands to turn that frown upside down can turn even the staunchest optimist into an irritable crank.
The truth might be that the left is so wedded to defeat and misery that even simple joy is considered fascist. In his new book Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock, Jonathan Gould argues that when the Talking Heads emerged in 1970s New York, the city—and the country—were hungry for hope and positive energy. The punk rock scene was fun and energetic, but also limited. “[Singer] Richard Hell was essentially a style icon masquerading as a rock singer,” he writes, “while the Dead Boys, who had arrived in New York from Cleveland over the summer, were tuneless Stooges acolytes with an alarming penchant for Nazi paraphernalia.” An ad by the Heads’ label Sire announced, “Don’t Call It Punk.”
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