August 2, 2024
Thanks to 2023 HMU Fellow in Ideas Chad Greene for today’s post.
“We’re on a road to nowhere”?
Why was that line – seemingly depressing on a surface level – so inspiring to me that I unexpectedly found myself on my feet in front of the TV in my living room, dancing, singing, and even crying?
During my 2023 Fellowship in Ideas at Harrison Middleton University, I had conducted research into portrayals of utopias in imaginative literature – from ancient classics to modern comics and movies. But I confess I hadn’t watched one relatively recent text until this summer: Spike Lee’s 2020 movie version of David Byrne’s American Utopia, the stage show that went on to win a Special Tony Award in 2021.
Simply put, American Utopia is a powerful performance led by Byrne – an award-winning artist who has almost fifty years of songs to pick and choose from, stretching from his work as the frontman of the Talking Heads in the late 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s through his even longer solo career since then. But what struck me most powerfully when watching the movie version were his last two selections from that half century of songs, which – placed into that specific context – create connections to great books and historic speeches that suggest shared inquiry questions.
Specifically, let’s start our analysis at around the 1:29:55 mark in the movie version of American Utopia, when Byrne begins his introduction of the last two songs: “One Fine Day” and “Road to Nowhere.” In terms of books, our shared inquiry questions will lead us to consider connections both to the Bible and to Utopia by Thomas More; in terms of speeches, we’ll start with “A Model of Christian Charity” by John Winthrop as well as echoes – and distortions – of it in subsequent speeches by two American presidents: Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan.
Byrne begins his introduction of those last two songs by creating an explicit connection to a relatively recent American author. “The writer James Baldwin said, ‘I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done before.’ And this, this was a man who suffered lifelong oppression and discrimination. Despite all that’s happened, and despite all that’s still happening, I think there’s still possibility. We’re a work in progress. We’re not fixed” (Lee 1:29:55-1:30:25). A little less than a minute after this joint declaration of optimism, Byrne and his band transition into their performance of “One Fine Day,” a song he co-wrote with Brian Eno for the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today in 2008.
Our analysis of lyrics in “One Fine Day” will be guided by our first shared inquiry question: In the specific context of a stage show titled American Utopia, how should a reference to “a city on a hill” be interpreted?
In the lyrics of “One Fine Day,” the narrator finds himself “[i]n a small dark room,” where he will “wait” and “contemplate” (Byrne and Eno). That patient contemplation eventually leads him to a vision: “Then before my eyes, is standing still / I beheld it there, a city on a hill” (Byrne and Eno).
Now, placed into in the specific context of a stage show titled American Utopia, our interpretation of a reference to “a city on a hill” should first consider its connection to John Winthrop’s 1630 speech “A Model of Christian Charity.” At that time, Winthrop had been appointed the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America and was about to lead a ship full of settlers there from England. Near the end of his speech, Winthrop cautioned his listeners, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world” (9). The phrase “a city upon a hill” is itself a reference to the account of another speech, Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, in the Bible – specifically, in chapters 5 through 7 of the Gospel of Matthew. This specific section of the sermon comes right after the presentation of the Beatitudes, when Jesus tells his listeners, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16). In both these passages, then, the image of a city on a hill is meant to communicate to the listeners their visibility as examples to others throughout the world. And both speakers are urging their respective listeners to, of course, be good examples of those of their faith.
However, in the subsequent speeches of our presidents, the image has instead been used to communicate that America is destined to be a utopia. Specifically, in the past century, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama have made explicit connections to Winthrop’s speech in addresses of their own – though Kennedy and Obama were not yet president at the times of their respective speeches. Obama, for example, referenced “a city upon a hill” in a 2006 commencement address at a particularly appropriate place, the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a city upon a hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed” (Obama 2). Reagan similarly invoked the image of a “shining city on a hill” before he was president, perhaps most notably in the speech titled “A Vision for America” on the eve of his election in 1980.
However, it was in his “Farewell Address to the Nation” in 1989 that Reagan presented his most complete description of it. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But, in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still” (Reagan 5). Notice that, to Reagan, the “city on a hill” had been “God-blessed” – essentially, helped and protected by a deity during its establishment in America. Reagan saw this “shining city” serving as a “beacon.” “After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on that granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home” (Reagan 5).
What the narrator sees in the lyrics of “One Fine Day” similarly serves as a navigational beacon. Two lines after he beholds “a city on a hill,” he declares “Then a peace of mind fell over me. / In these troubled times, I still can see. / We can use the stars, to guide the way. / It is not that far, that one fine day” (Byrne and Eno).
As hopeful as those last lines are, “One Fine Day” is not the song with which Byrne chooses to end his contemplation of an American Utopia; instead, it is “Road to Nowhere.” This brings us to our second shared inquiry question: In the specific context of a stage show titled American Utopia, how should the word “nowhere” be interpreted?
Now, placed into in the specific context of a stage show titled American Utopia, our interpretation of the word “nowhere” should consider its connection to Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia.
First, though, we should point out the explicit link in the imagery in the lyrics for “One Fine Day” and for “Road to Nowhere,” which Byrne wrote almost forty years ago for the 1985 Talking Heads album Little Creatures. Specifically, it is the mental image of a “city” that the narrator uses as the destination for the “ride” that he invites his listeners to take with him. “There’s a city in my mind. / Come along and take that ride…. / And it’s very far away, / But it’s growing day by day” (Byrne). When “Road to Nowhere” is performed right after “One Fine Day,” this comes across as a reference to the aspirational “city on a hill.”
Yet the narrator repeatedly characterizes the road he and any willing listeners will ride together as a “road to nowhere.” That and the similar phrase “ride to nowhere” are repeated a combined eleven times in the lyrics of the song. On a surface level, those lines might seem depressing. However, they became instead inspiring to me when I remembered that the word “utopia” literally translates to “nowhere.” As Dr. Espen Hammer, a professor of philosophy at Temple University, explains, “The term ‘utopia’ was coined 500 years ago. By conjoining the Greek adverb ‘ou’ (‘not’) and the noun ‘topos’ (‘place’) the English humanist and politician Thomas More conceived of a place that is not — literally a ‘nowhere’ or ‘noplace’” (1). Especially when taken in combination with the image of “a city on a hill” at the end of a stage show titled American Utopia, Byrne’s “road to nowhere,” then, is the path toward a utopia.
In this significant sense, Byrne’s “city on a hill” – his “nowhere” – serves an opposite purpose to the references to that image in some speeches by American politicians. At the end of David Byrne’s American Utopia, it is not a myth looking backward to our past, but a vision looking forward to our future.
My research into portrayals of utopias in imaginative literature has led me to agree with Hammer’s assertion that “a fully modern society cannot do without a utopian consciousness. To be modern is to be oriented toward the future. It is to be open to change – even radical change, when called for” (4). Taken together, the performances of “One Fine Day” and “Road to Nowhere” are an exceptionally powerful emotional expression of that intellectual understanding.
And that’s why that particular line about taking a collective trip “on a road to nowhere” was so inspiring that I unexpectedly found myself on my feet in front of the TV in my living room, dancing, singing, and even crying at the end of Lee’s film version of David Byrne’s American Utopia.
Works Cited
Byrne, David. “Road to Nowhere.” Little Creatures. Sire, 1985.
Byrne, David, and Brian Eno. “One Fine Day.” Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
Todo Mundo, 2008.
Hammer, Espen. “A Utopia for a Dystopian Age.” The New York Times. 26 June 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/opinion/a-utopia-for-a-dystopian-age.html . Accessed 9 June 2024.
Lee, Spike, director. David Byrne’s American Utopia. HBO Films, 2020.
Obama, Barack. “University of Massachusetts at Boston Commencement Address.” Obama Speeches . http://obamaspeeches.com/074-University-of-Massachusetts-at-Boston-Commencement-Address-Obama-Speech.htm Accessed 8 June 2024.
Reagan, Ronald. “Farewell Address to the Nation.” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/farewell-address-nation . Accessed 9 June 2024.
Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity.” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/A%20Model%20of%20Christian%20Charity_Full%20Text.pdf Accessed 8 June 2024.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Lisandro Julian Leyra
