[ The former Talking Heads front man is battling Broadway
musicians, the concept of musical theatrical productions on Broadway,
and the local musicians’ union over a production that relies on
prerecorded music. No live music, Not a musical.]
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“THIS AIN’T NO DISCO,” BROADWAY TELLS DAVID BYRNE  
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Chris Lehmann
June 2, 2023
The Nation
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_ The former Talking Heads front man is battling Broadway musicians,
the concept of musical theatrical productions on Broadway, and the
local musicians’ union over a production that relies on prerecorded
music. No live music, Not a musical. _

David Byrne speaks at a meet and greet for the upcoming Broadway
musical Here Lies Love” in New York City., Bruce Glikas // The
Nation

 

Former Talking Heads front man David Byrne has seen the future of
rock and roll, and it is not solidarity. Ahead of the July Broadway
debut of _Here Lies Love_, Byrne’s “immersive” musical theater
collaboration with Fatboy Slim, the production has run afoul of the
American Federation of Musicians’ Local 802, which objects to the
show’s extensive use of prerecorded music. The Local’s Broadway
contract usually stipulates that productions employ 19 live musicians,
and union representatives take understandable exception to a pending
show that disregards that protection for workers in the industry.
Byrne’s supposed artistic motives align a bit too neatly with
measures that other cost-cutting executives would embrace as a
precedent to sideline musicians already struggling to make ends meet
in the age of monopoly-platform streaming
[[link removed]].

In response to the union’s concerns, Byrne and the show’s PR team
released a sententious statement on Instagram
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production’s revolutionary format and genre-bending originality.
“_Here Lies Love_ is not a traditional Broadway musical,” the
statement reads.

The music is drawn outside of the traditional music genre. The
performance of the live vocals to pre-recorded, artificial tracks is
paramount to its artistic concept. Production has ripped out the seats
in the theater and built a dance floor. There is no longer a
proscenium stage. The Broadway Theater has been transformed into a
nightclub, with every theatergoer immersed in the experience.

If this sparks traumatic flashbacks to the cultural-studies jargon of
the 1990s, prepare yourself: Byrne and company are just getting warmed
up. The statement builds to its own karaoke-in-a-graduate-seminar-room
crescendo:

_Here Lies Love_ is on Broadway because Broadway must support
boundary-pushing creative work. Broadway is also the venue for a well
conceived, high-quality show that highlights the valued traditions of
specific cultures whose stories have never been on its stages. _Here
Lies Love_ does not believe in artistic gatekeepers. _Here Lies
Love_ believes in a Broadway for everyone, where new creative forms
push the medium and create new traditions and audiences.

In short, _Here Lies Love_ is an opportunistic Mad Libs–style
display of self-serving pomposity, haphazardly dressing up a slender
theatrical conceit as a vehicle of mass empowerment and liberation.
The premise of the show is simply to recreate the atmosphere of the
New York townhouse that Imelda Marcos, the turbo-shopping wife of
former Filipino authoritarian leader Ferdinand Marcos, converted into
a disco in the 1970s. Like the not-at-all boundary-pushing
work _Evita_, the production supplies a decontextualized, aesthetic
account of an ugly political moment
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posing as a searing commentary on the politics of cultural production
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the overblown liberationist rhetoric of the show’s Instagram
statement, its only innovation appears to be linking the name
“Fatboy Slim” with the phrase “new creative forms.”

More than that, though, _Here Lies Love_ also serves as the perfect
distillation of Byrne’s own free-floating omni-aestheticized
worldview—and the reactionary labor politics of its producers are
entirely of a piece with Byrne’s own terminally preppy view of the
world as his customized playhouse of innovation and expression. That
vision was confidently announced in the Talking Heads’ 1977 debut
LP, with not merely faux-transgressive fluff like “Psycho-Killer”
and “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,” but also the wan character study
“Don’t Worry About the Government.” Here, the trademark Byrne
narrator—an agitated and suggestible art-student type plunged into
one stagnant over-signifying set piece after another—finds to his
own quasi-bafflement that he’s the president of the United States.
“Some civil servants are just like my loved ones,” Byrne sang.
“They work so hard and try to be strong.” He goes on to hymn the
perks of his station with the mien of an overgrown infant: “My
building has every convenience / It’s gonna make life easy for me /
It’s gonna be easy to get things done / I will relax, along with my
loved ones.”

This early outing conveyed the essential message of every Talking
Heads song: Alienation is amusing and harmless, even (or perhaps
especially) when partnered with maximum social power. It’s the
refrain that blares throughout the signature Heads anthem “Once in a
Lifetime,” where the pasteboard Byrne character muses on the empty
material rewards of suburban life like a minor John Cheever character:
“And you may ask yourself, ‘How do I work this?’ / And you may
ask yourself, ‘Where is that large automobile?’ / And you may tell
yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house’ / And you may tell
yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife.’”

Trippy. But here, as in most of the entries in the vast and numbing
Talking Heads catalog, nothing much is ultimately at stake. It merely
turns out that, seen from a certain angle, American success is unreal
and ritualistic. (The video for “Once in a Lifetime” has Byrne
assuming the character of a Pentecostal preacher, as the song’s
chorus evokes the rite of baptism.) But life goes on, and the
malleable posture of restive-yet-comforting unreality infects the
band’s treatment of every conceivable topic, from international
terrorism and political exile (“The Listening Wind,” “Life
During Wartime”) to work and culture creation (“Paper,” “Found
a Job”) to sex and childrearing (“Little Creatures”) and moving
house (“Cities”). To be immersed in the Talking Heads songbook is
to experience in utero the same hermetic gestures of labored whimsy
and entitled rebellion that would later fuel the relentlessly twee
cinema of Wes Anderson and the pipsqueak-pomo fiction of Jonathan
Safran Foer. It is to scan across the landscape of cultural power and
gurgle in self-satisfied delight.

Indeed, David Byrne’s sensibility—the bedrock conviction that
saucer-eyed bemusement simultaneously explains and absolves all—is
perhaps the most enduring cultural legacy of the Reagan era, when the
Talking Heads catapulted into mass stardom. Jonathan Demme’s
worshipful 1984 concert film,_ Stop Making Sense, _transformed Byrne
into an all-purpose prophet in a gargantuan white suit, purring the
very sort of koan-like couplets that one could all too readily imagine
caroming through the head of an American president who was not always
sure he wasn’t on a movie set
[[link removed]].
At the same time, Byrne’s own foray into filmmaking—the
unwatchable cracked-Americana travelog _True Stories_—showed none
of the Gipper’s assured populist instincts. Instead, it’s a
cringey tour through a stereotyped version of small-town USA: a museum
installation of tabloid-besotted proles, conspiracy theorists, and
other assorted oddballs, with Byrne as the deadpan, self-appointed
docent. Like the band’s recorded work, Byrne’s film was steeped in
the smarm and condescension that infused the era’s superficial
fascination with offbeat and quirky Americans who work for a living
and retreat into dumbfounding private cosmologies in their off-hours.
It’s as if Frank Capra had matriculated at the Rhode Island School
of Design—the well-appointed art school where Byrne met up with
Heads drummer Chris Frantz and set about forming a band.

But as the dispute over the staging of _Here Lies Love_ shows, Byrne
is now fully aligned with his inner Reagan. Reagan was perhaps the
country’s greatest labor-movement turncoat; after serving in the
1940s as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he moved swiftly as
president to break the air traffic controllers’ union, and thereby
discredited work stoppages as an effective mobilizing strategy
for the better part of a generation
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In an official statement
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Musicians Union Local 802 President Tino Gagliardi argued that Byrne,
too, “is trying to break the union” and attacking members by
“denigrating their work, tossing them aside, and saying they can’t
do it.” Reagan, like Byrne, pawned off a fundamentally reactionary
model of enterprise as an unrelieved study in exhilarating
liberation: _Screw the gatekeepers, man!_ Both cultural
entrepreneurs wasted little time in disowning their past comrades—be
they the air traffic controllers, who actually endorsed Reagan in the
1980 election, or Byrne’s fellow musicians, who are trying to ply
their craft without having to compete with the hoary conceit of a
dictator’s first lady’s playlist. (By the way, Mr. Offbeat
Celebrant of the Plain Folk: If you want to stage a theater project in
a disco setting, _rent a fucking disco_.) Both men even share an
inexplicable fascination with Imelda Marcos
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Reagan claimed that his reactionary views on political economy were
grounded in his disenchantment with liberal politics writ large. He
famously proclaimed that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party;
rather, it left him. David Byrne, bard of the ascendant Reaganite
cultural consensus, can claim no such excuse. As the master himself
put it back in the day [[link removed]]:
“same as it ever was.”

_[CHRIS LEHMANN [[link removed]] is
the D.C. Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor
at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The
New Republic, co-editor of BookForum, DC correspondent for The New
York Observer, senior editor at CQ Weekly, an erstwhile columnist
for The Awl, and held positions at New York magazine, Washington
Post Book World, and Newsday. Lehmann has published essays and
reportage on politics and culture in a wide range of outlets and is
the author of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the
Unmaking of the American Dream
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2016) and Rich People Things: Real-life Secrets of the Predator Class
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2012).]_

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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Local 802 American Federation of Musicians
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* Culture
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* Music
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* musical
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* Music theater
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* Broadway
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* Labor
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* New York City
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* Musicians
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* Local 802
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* American Federation of Musicians
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* AFM
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* David Byrne
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* Live Music
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* Canned Music
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* Prerecorded music
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