My kids continue to be absolutely obsessed with David Byrne’s American Utopia. I am especially surprised by how attached they are to “Don’t Worry About The Government.” Here’s the original version, from the first Talking Heads album.
Here’s a live performance from The Old Grey Whistle Test:
Here’s my transcription:
This is an extremely weird song, even by Talking Heads standards. It isn’t overtly nonsensical like “Once In A Lifetime“, but it speaks from a peculiar perspective. Who is this person singing it? On the one hand, he has conventional yuppie-ish tastes and priorities. On the other hand, he expresses his thoughts like a space alien. If you are singing about your apartment, why start with a description of the sky? How are civil servants just like your loved ones? Who describes their loved ones as “loved ones” in the first place? And what is up with that title? David Byrne gave a talk at NYU a couple of years ago, and the moderator asked about it. He said that it fits with the outlook of the song’s blithely selfish narrator: “Everything is going great for me, and by the way, don’t worry about the government.”
“Don’t Worry About The Government” is harmonically odd too. None of the individual chords are exotic, but they are combined in unpredictable ways. The song supports Philip Tagg’s idea that chords in grooves are there to signpost the meter rather than to function according to the rules of Western tonal theory. The chord choices here seem arbitrary, though maybe there is some deeper logic I’m not hip to. Let’s look at each section.
- Intro: C and Csus4 – Bright, colorful, childlike, a little too frenetic.
- Verse: “I see the clouds that move across the sky…” – The first phrase alternates C and A, which is extremely odd. I wonder if David Byrne got that idea from “Light My Fire” by the Doors, or if he was just combining open-position guitar chords at random. If A was the tonic chord, hearing a C wouldn’t be too surprising, that’s a standard rock and blues trope. However, hearing an A chord in the key of C is really weird because it has C-sharp, the most dissonant possible note in the key. It would be one thing if it resolved to Dm, but it doesn’t. The first time it goes back to C, and the second time it goes to G. The second phrase is more conventionally within C major: G, Dm, Am. Maybe the Dm and Am are there to retroactively make sense of the A? The Dm would be the chord it’s supposed to resolve to, and Am is the chord that you’d normally expect in this key.
- Prechorus: “It’s over there, it’s over there…” – This is not so much a full section as just a transitional phrase, but it is quite different from what came before melodically. The chords are simple, C, F and G, I-IV-V in C major. But the V chord doesn’t resolve to C, it resolves unexpectedly to D.
- Chorus A: “My building has every convenience…” – This is a straightforward loop of D and G, I and IV in D major. However, the melody doesn’t follow the changes, there are a lot of F-sharps on top of the G chords.
- Chorus B: “Loved ones, loved ones visit the building…” – The key center jumps up another whole step, to loop E and Dmaj7, the I and bVII chords in E Mixolydian mode.
- Chorus C: “Don’t you worry ’bout me…” – A loop of F, G, and D. This would feel like dropping back down a whole step except that the first chord is up a half step from E. It would feel like a blues riff, except the little countermelody on the D chord walks straight down the D major scale. It does not make sense! And yet, it sounds better and better the more you listen to it.
I had a hard time figuring out these changes, and also have a hard time playing them, because they just don’t follow the patterns that I’m used to. I was only able to identify a couple of those chords after looking at David Byrne’s left hand in live performances.
Like I said in my last post, my kids strongly dislike the Talking Heads recording of this song (and of every song). They only want to hear the American Utopia version. He moved the key down so he isn’t straining for all the high notes. The pandeiro sounds better to me than Chris Frantz’s drumming. In the show, it comes out of a lovely David Byrne solo song, “I Know Sometimes A Man Is Wrong.”
Adesola Thomas wrote a wonderful essay about the song. She debates whether it’s meant to be ironic or not, before deciding that it doesn’t actually matter:
When Byrne sings, “I’m a lucky to live in my building” and “My building has every convenience / It’s gonna make life easy for me,” he could be voicing the satisfaction that accompanies having a reliable place of one’s own, or he could be voicing the empty measurements of personal worth America generationally ascribes to convenience and property ownership. The movement from the nature scene in the song’s opening stanza with the fragrant “pine trees” and “peaches in the woods” to the “highway that goes to the building” signal a shift in environment that could be a celebration of urban sprawl or sequestration away from that which is intrinsic or natural. The building in that latter reading then becomes a distancing element from the loved ones, rather than a place of pure communion for the speaker. All of these possibilities do not cancel one another out. In fact, the song offers something new with nearly every listen… We are not tasked to select the ironic bits over the sincere bits or vice versa because all of those things are overlaid and interwoven. They sit inside the same song, waiting to be seen from each and every purview.
This is the weird and wonderful thing about David Byrne’s whole persona, that he is both kidding and dead serious, all the time.