![]() And yet I feel I would enjoy even one of these nightmare evenings right now. But only the lucky few have never experienced watching a band they love flounder on stage while hoping this is the last song, desperately holding onto that urgent piss while counter-productively quaffing the pint they bought even though they were full. You’ve paid the money so you try to make the best of it, to stick it out to the bitter end. But the truth is we’ve all been to some disappointing gigs in our time. Gigs, for instance, seem like a holy grail to us music lovers and the temptation is to remember every single one we’ve been to as a positive experience. In such uncertain times, we long for the comforts of a world we are already struggling to remember accurately. Or maybe, to look at it more optimistically, we’re at the end of one… or it could just be just the beginning. As I write this, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. The hope of one day being in a packed audience again.God, I miss gigs. You can feel it in Spike Lee’s direction, yearning for the unique angle that might redefine a form. ![]() You can see it in David Byrne and on the faces of the performers. The standouts of his recent songs, like "Everybody’s Coming to My House" (performed here), are the unashamedly hopeful ones. Sincerity was always fluttering beneath his deadpan irony. It never feels didactic, because the politics is weaved seamlessly into the show, and Byrne speaks with candour which enhances the mood of hope. And he projects an image of a kneeling Colin Kaepernick. He praises the immigrant contribution to his music. He encourages people to vote in (what was then) the upcoming US election. But he does include a string of political messages for the current moment. There’s no need to change what his fans love, so Byrne doesn’t try. The song line-up is a kind of greatest hits, with the old songs seeming refreshed by the new band and the intelligent choreography. One of the longest takes I can remember is an extreme close-up of one of the dancer’s feet. Lee’s camerawork is humorous in an off-kilter David Byrne kind of way. A poorer concert movie would be less dynamic, holding for too long on the wide angle of the stage for example. The editing is quick without being jarring. Spike Lee uses camera shots from behind the stage and the ceiling to show us what the live audience cannot see. It is as though Byrne has created a 3D TV screen. The stage setting for this performance is a bare grey square, a box set, in which the musicians and two dancers move through in precise, goofy orchestration. His robotic dancing style parodies the types of characters (cartoon animations, newscasters, workout coaches) we might see on TV. Byrne’s music was often about new technology, particularly television. American Utopia (and Byrne’s whole artistic oeuvre for that matter) plays into this concept of multimedia performance. Supposedly, the presence of cameras (Lee used eleven) and how they are edited for a screen viewer can enliven and even change how a live performance is perceived. ![]() I wanted to be there.īut who wouldn’t? This is not the correct standard to apply to the genre. Byrne hasn’t lost anything of what he always had, and Spike Lee does interesting things with the camera, but it's hard to avoid envying the real audience we see singing and dancing in the grand Hudson Theatre. Two unlikely titans match, with good results. ![]()
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