Broadway Review: ‘David Byrne’s American Utopia’ Finds Paradise, No Wires Attached

One of rock’s great questions, a rung or two below Are You Experienced? and maybe Which One’s Pink? but still right up there, has got to be Why A Big Suit? David Byrne asked himself that in an early-MTV-era promo for Jonathan Demme’s brilliant Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, posing a query about an image – the angular frontman all Dada’d up in a gigantic gray, V-cut suit – that itself was a signature pose of the 1980s.

His answer had a bit to do with a love of geometric shapes but mostly reflected a desire to make his head seem small – a way, he suggested, of highlighting the physical, rather than the cerebral, in music. Of course the very contemplation of the matter funked things up more than a little; as, it turned out, shrunken heads are about as good at escaping attention as whispers. But of course Byrne knew that all along.