David Byrne, Adam Corolla, Dying Cowboys, & Old Men on Bikes (Patreon)

I feel like most towns have an old man on his bike.

He’s this old guy who rides around, sometimes for exercise, sometimes he’s doing errands, and sometimes he’s chatting with those who seem to know him. This man will sometimes have an unassuming, but still somehow silly, outfit. This man usually composts. This man often cares about social issues and will go to town meetings. He asks about what the kids are into and genuinely tries to keep up with changing words for things. Maybe this man has a band that he still plays with. Admittedly, I’m talking about white suburban / quaint town culture here and sometimes I know this particular brand of old man can be an aggressive weirdo. But a lot of times he’s just this soft-spoken hippie dude who never really changed in the right ways — and also changed in the right ways, too. In my town, that guy was one of the art teachers at the High School. He taught us how to make pottery and played Beatles covers (because of course he did). In my current town, Los Angeles, that guy is Ed Begley Jr. (who, I swear to god, I met once at my mechanic and within three minutes he was urging me to buy an electric car. It could not have been a more perfect Ed Begley Jr. interaction). Hey, maybe I’m playing fast and loose with these kinds of archetypes. Maybe I’m combing some various people in my head. The point is I feel like we old guys like this exist…

And I thought about them again at the end of David Byrne’s AMERICAN UTOPIA.

It was the most delightful thing when the 68 year old Byrne emerged from New York City’s Hudson Theatre after his powerful new special. He came out donning his helmet and had his bike at his side. His fans cheered and he gave a laughing friendly wave and then went on his merry way, down 44th street. It was just like Byrne was anyone going about their evening.  And in that particular moment, the archetype hit me… David Byrne became the old man on his bike.

Perhaps I just like this idea because David Byrne has been one of my favorite artists for, oh, a long time now. The Talking Heads were always one of those bands that was in my orbit growing up, but it felt like I was born just a hair too late on the tail end of things. So I didn’t have that official obsession until high school. Part of which is when you have that huge personal turning point seeing Jonathan Demme’s STOP MAKING SENSE and suddenly it’s like Byrne’s wild world opens up before you. I can’t tell you how many concert films I’ve seen before and after, but there’s a reason it continues to stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s a film that captures this lightning in a bottle of energy through these odd, organic angles that make it all feel like accidental magic. It’s a film that radiates along with Byrne’s artistry, his vibe, and his off-hand contagiousness. And it’s a film I feel like I’ve been trying to describe for over two decades, but keep failing at. It’s relative goodness is almost non-euclidian, even now. Which is interesting because here we are, 36 years later…

And David Byrne seems to be having another moment.

I know that he’s always sort of wafted in and out of the public sphere, but there’s this funny way some figures resurface and come back into vogue. For Byrne, I honestly feel like it’s partly due in part to his recent appearance on John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch, which genuinely seemed to introduce him to a new generation of people. His segment in the special, “Pay Attention” isn’t just a fun and goofy song, it showcases the rare thing where an older man shows nothing but empathy for a young kid being ignored in an adult party world. It’s so simple and yet so poignant because it’s actually part of Mr. Rogers’ core philosophy: to pay attention to a young person’s interiority in a way that few adults ever do.

I think the same spirit is alive in Byrne’s new concert special AMERICAN UTOPIA. Maybe it’s just that he’s experiencing the aforementioned “moment,” but many are regarding it as a kind of spiritual sequel to STOP MAKING SENSE. I mean it’s not, really.  Especially because it’s less about capturing the energy of its manic central performer and more about opening up the stage in literal and metaphorical ways. Directed by none other than the great Spike Lee, Byrne’s stage becomes a brightly lit Brechtian Box that emphasizes the, um, stage-ness. Cool, steely gray permeates from wall to wall. First, Byrne takes the stage by himself, but soon more and more performers join. The performers could not be more different in terms of look, or race, or gender fluidity. Yet they all dress in the same cool, steely gray outfit that pairs with the stage. They dance and play and move in sequence as the camera cuts, bouncing you in rhythm all around while emphasizing light, shadow, placement with surgical ease. You have to imagine it isn’t easy for the 68 year old to keep up with all this, let alone propagate it, but Byrne beats along like a steady heart. But please realize it’s not so much about “keeping up” (as if this was all some silly attempt to stay relevant). No, it’s something much more essential.

David Byrne is paying attention to the interiority of America.

To be fair, David Byrne has always been political, but often in more metaphorical ways. Here, there’s no time for mincing words or being coy, for Byrne and Lee sense the urgency of the current moment. There’s a crisis of white supremacy, a crisis of reactionary thought, and, at the heart of it, a crisis of empathy. And so American Utopia starts with the portrait of how our young minds start off with all their electrons firing, open to the world, and capable learning — and then the acknowledgment that our brain cells capacity gets pruned with time. Which takes us into the horrors of the here and now. But such horrors have to be faced, so Byrne does just that. For all the playful verbiage about god being a rooster and what not, the piece is littered with direct calls to political issues. He and his players even perform a stirring version of Wondaland and Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout” (with permission of course). And as he does this anthem, I think about how many older old white artists would do this in such an unblinking manner.

Byrne tells the audience he’s an immigrant, not imparting some level of self-import, but to lift up the voices of other immigrants on stage and about the world. I think about this gesture. I think about how few other artists of his era have been married to the same person for over thirty years (and to someone older than him). I think about how he’s always been devoted to expanding the artistic interest of American youth. I think about the positive attention he’s brought to the spectrum of autism and Aspergers. I think about how he wasn’t always this person either, given that many of the other members of The Talking Heads don’t look back on that time fondly. But Byrne also talks about that time with regret. And I see that in the person who spends the end of his concert pleading with us to not keep pruning away: to try and find openness. And most of all, I think, what is it that makes someone choose to be like this?

What makes someone stay open to growth?

And what doesn’t?

* * *

Adam Carolla is a figure who, unfortunately, a lot of people my age grew up with. Much of this was the unending popularity of Loveline, which is something that’s dated to the point of absurdity,with two stodgy men bluntly yammering through their advice to young women, often moralizing, bluntly asking about sexual assault, etc. The problem is that in the back half of the 90’s, it also felt like a damn oasis in a world where teens were absolutely starved for any frank public discussions about sex. I cannot overstate how much that just didn’t really exist anywhere else. And the idea that young people could tune into a popular medical figure for basic medical advice felt so important. Just as I can’t explain how much it was a place where people first learned basic information about sexual health. Same goes for people understanding the sheer prevalence of familial sexual assault. But I also cannot overstate how much the conversation has evolved past that basic information in some aspects (while staying completely remedial in others, but we’ll get to that). And more importantly, evolved past Carolla’s casual, uneducated, shoot from the hip style of advice, along with the crushing heteronormativity of it all.

But I was thinking about Carolla again recently because he’s had these bAd TwEeTs, you see. Some of it is that specific kind of bad where they take archaic notions of manliness and use it to crush non gender-normative bullshit. Tweets like: “More American males now wear bracelets  than eat stew” which, I’ll let you laugh directly at yourself. But really, it was this other tweet that got me thinking (bad spacing included):  “Where are the comedians ? I thought they were the ones who pushed back against the Man ? Or are they cowards scared of the mob ?  Richard Pryor and  George Carlin are rolling over in their graves”

Ah, that old so and so, of course he can’t behold the irony!

So let’s go with the obvious: Carolla talks about pushing back against “The Man” and yet he literally hosted The Man Show. I mean… it’s right there in the name. Sure, he probably imagines himself as uncouth firebrand who rumples the feathers of all those stuffed-shirts out there (which goes back to way conservatives would rail against Loveline’s sexual frankness in that oh-so-90’s “think of the children” way), but he also fails to realize how exceedingly close he is to the aforementioned Man. Because literally everything he advocates, represents, and (probably) votes for is the exact same kind of conservative bullshit. He embodies the very “The Man-ness” that he assumes he’s against. We’re talking a cavernous cognitive dissonance here because it’s literally his brand. I mean, what does he think he’s rebelling against, exactly?

The answer is, of course, a myopic one: whoever criticizes his given viewpoint.

This is the whole up-is-down of the thing. He sees those who criticize such statements as the obstacles to his continued empowerment and all part of some powerful PC monolith! Which, you know, isn’t really a thing. Because at the same time he wonders where all the comedians are, which means he looks at the very NON-MAN comedians like Tig Notaro, Amber Ruffin, Hannah Gadsby, or Jessica Williams and goes “oh, that’s not funny” “oh, that isn’t edgy” or isn’t “pushing against anything.” When it is in fact 1) hilarious to some people and 2) by all accounts, a billion times riskier. Because it’s always easier for any comic to adopt material that caters to “The Man” that is the basic heteronormative status quo and succeed (there’s so many comedians who have and some even regretted it). But for people like the ones mentioned above to do so comes at the cost putting their entire personhood and others like them down. So they speak more passionately to limited audiences, criticize the actual man, and get called unsafe / unfunny, when really, the problem is that he’s part of The Man-ness that they’re targeting.

I mean, who does he think Carlin and Pryor really were? It’s not that they knocked down issues of propriety in society (traditional white comics of Carolla’s generation always fixate on that part). Pryor was having entire conversations about race that The Man wanted to ignore. Carlin was regarded as a lousy hippy who talked drugs and politics in a way that still broke doors down. But it’s not just that Carolla is ignoring the ways that progressivism was at the heart of their ideals. It is the failure to recognize the same kinds of cultural shifts that are happening right now. We’re long past Loveline. The battle over “proprietary" long went out the window (one edge-lord link from the internet can produce levels of the profane far from any public standards imaginable). And in the age of misinformation, it’s about grounding in the rest of the world in the reality of their experience. But when Ruffin talks about institutional problems with nuance, Carolla gets bored because he doesn’t see what’s so damn funny about his entire up-is-down. And as all this goes on, he wonders where all the comedians went and fixates on eating stew (which is honestly hilarious), I think about how and why Carolla went the way he did.

And then I think about his old partner, who went the other way.

Because Jimmy Kimmel was his co-host on The Man Show, which unlike Loveline, is something I couldn’t stand even then. It was one of those purposeful relics to the 50’s AKA something that catered to the time BEFORE even Carlin and Pryor’s hayday. I mean, I just looked at the pilot again and I can barely get two seconds into it. But I couldn’t then, either. But looking at Jimmy Kimmel in this, you think he’d also become even more reactionary like Carolla. And yet it’s not hard to see there’s been an obvious change. Granted, he hasn’t become some bastion of progressive thought, nor a revolutionary firebrand. We’re talking about the insanely-low bar of the most basic softening and evolution here.

Conventional wisdom tells us that Kimmel took the Disney late night job and started playing nice. But maybe he was just finally in a situation that brought more of the nice out. Maybe everything before was more of a put-on (after all, this is a guy who doesn’t really care about football, but uses it as an excuse to cook crazy food he’s passionate about and host people at his house). But really it was the experiences of life, like his son getting sick and his awakening to the dystopian nightmare of the American healthcare system. You could see his emotional self come online. And empathy isn’t a powerful drug, it’s a grounding one. And for the last few years you can see him realizing there is no such thing as apolitical comedy. And when it came to the real test of these sorts of “The Man Show” types, which is to say he was recently challenged on an old sketch where he performed in blackface as Karl Malone, he apologized imperfectly, but earnestly.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not holding these things up as the barometer for “good.” They’re just part of toxic untangling. And in that, I’m trying to identify the linchpins where people like Kimmel or Corolla go one way or another. Because on the other side of those moments are the figures like Ricky Gervais, who literally use any issue as an excuse to launch into a diatribe about how “everyone’s TOO offended, these days!” and just dig in deeper. What is it about these moments? Maybe it’s a complicated portrait with lots of moving parts (there’s actually a really great arc on the last season of BoJack Horseman about this, which I promise I’ll get to write about when my pandemic brain gets better). Maybe it’s something in the basic mentality of each individual. Maybe it’s circumstance. Maybe it’s a lot of things. But maybe, from the outside looking in, it is yet another archetypal question…

Who do you ultimately want to be?

* * *

It’s said that all great Westerns are about “the end of things.”

Because they’re about changing worlds. The laying of railroads. The claiming of property. The establishing of law and order.  In essence, it is the setting that best evokes “the march of progress.” And at the center of these tales is The Myth of the Cowboy. The lonesome figure who is just looking for a little place of their own. The same figure who then often finds themselves having to uphold a kind of frontier justice that spans the gamut of down home decency, to the chivalric protection of women and children from “savages” and other hugely problematic stereotypes. It’s no accident that all the western roles got piled up together and now it basically just means “guy with cowboy hat and gun on horse, basically.” And if the dangers of the wild don’t get them (they often don’t) then their heroism is often undercut by the progress and change that sweeps right on in. It is at this moment they become a different variation of the archetype: they become “The Dying Cowboy.” The heroic martyr for their protective, dignified cause. They are the one who stares at the horizon and reminisces about how the west was once pure and great… it is as romantic an image as they come.

It is also, of course, bullshit.

For one, the entire setting of the Western is one big act of horrifying colonization and genocide. The vast majority of films paint the opposite picture, but you know, that’s how historical propaganda worked and works and works in turn. But I’m also talking specifically about Americana’s lionization of the cowboy. The truth is that being a cowboy was considered a lower paying job that was largely held by Latino and Black people from Mexico and America alike (look no further than the history of the Vaquero). And like many things about those cultures, it was co-opted by a modern white culture who wanted to be cool / take on that parlance of toughness / pretend they did all the work that built the west (I also realize it’s a complicated, multi-faceted history, the point is that this is the part of the history that gets most ignored). And so, to take all that reality and turn it into the Dying Cowboy myth feels like the last line of usurpation.

And as I look at the mantra of the Dying Cowboy, I realize how much it captures that Adam Carolla mindset. No, it’s not just the penchant for stew. It’s the lionizing portrait of American history, along with a baked-in nostalgia for something that never really existed. For Carolla dreams of some Carlin / Pryor heyday, but if you take his exact same modern scenario and apply it to that time period? Oof, he’s probably one the white dudes making “clean up the floor” jokes at Redd Foxx during Dean Martin’s Roast. Which makes it more of the utter inability to recognize yourself and your place in the shift of greater culture. And when I look at a figure like David Byrne and the old man on the bike, I see someone who is at least engaging with that same shift.

To be clear, I recognize that my framing of this entire conversation is marked by a crushing, inescapable American-centric whiteness. Because there are people on the outside of this conversation who shouldn’t give two fucks about it. There’s too much pain, too much placement on their education of people who will never listen, and too much work to do to be preoccupied with the fighting for the soul of a demographic that votes for a monster like Trump with 70% support. It’s a nexus point of brutality. And it’s no one else’s job to “fix.”

So in that same exact vein, I can’t be framing this conversation as if it is something existing outside of myself, nor is it about finger pointing. Like all thoughts on societal matters, it comes with a plea for self-examination. Not just in that personal responsible way of going to therapy, getting in touch with personal trauma, endlessly examining personal hypocrisy, etc. But in constantly looking at the ways I need to evolve, accept change, and learn to just get the hell out of the way and lift up others. Because I see critics falling into that Western-esque existential trap all the time. Where they bemoan the loss of whatever it is they thought was once had, and often fail to see the merit of the new wonderful crop of professionals that comes up behind them (I mean, a lot of the best criticism is happening on youtube right now and has been for a while). I guess this is just a long way of saying the relatively simple… I watched AMERICAN UTOPIA and realized I really don’t want to be the dying cowboy.

… I guess I’ll have to buy a bike.

<3HULK