At this year’s Coachella Music Festival, legendary musician David Byrne gave a killer performance. Byrne, formerly a member of Talking Heads, has been promoting his new record, Who Is The Sky? This new albumis an upbeat collection of songs celebrating joy. It’s so happy, in fact, that anti-American liberals can’t stand it. 

Writing in Pitchfork, music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine was put off by Byrne’s buoyancy. “Joy is precious in the 21^st century,” he writes, “so it’s worth celebrating the reasons to be cheerful.” He references Bryne’s positivity project, “a kind of Buzzfeed for relentless optimists.” Furthermore, “these songs are designed to help get you through the day—vivid, colorful tunes that place a premium on human interaction.”

So why the lousy 5.1 rating?

Byrne’s recipe is comfort food, sunny nourishment in troubled times. But his determination to look on the bright side of life yields an album with no ambiguity or subtext. All the joy is right on the surface, delivered with relentless gaiety that becomes hackneyed long before the album is over … All those demands to turn that frown upside down can turn even the staunchest optimist into an irritable crank.

The truth might be that the left is so wedded to defeat and misery that even simple joy is considered fascist. In his new book Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock, Jonathan Gould argues that when the Talking Heads emerged in 1970s New York, the city—and the country—were hungry for hope and positive energy. The punk rock scene was fun and energetic, but also limited. “[Singer] Richard Hell was essentially a style icon masquerading as a rock singer,” he writes, “while the Dead Boys, who had arrived in New York from Cleveland over the summer, were tuneless Stooges acolytes with an alarming penchant for Nazi paraphernalia.” An ad by the Heads’ label Sire announced, “Don’t Call It Punk.” 

Gould notes that “in a proud but demoralized metropolis that was hungry for ways to celebrate itself, the New York press, from the Times to the Voice to the Soho Weekly News, hailed the release of Talking Heads: 77 as the work of hometown heroes.” One reviewer, after seeing the band live, described them as looking like “Republicans, playing courteously toned-down music, another decried them as “the great Ivy League hope of pop music.” Writing in Sounds, British journalist Vivien Goldman praised the vibe of bassist Tina Weymouth: “Tina’s haughtiness when faced with people who give her a hard time is more threatening than screaming or yelling; it’s born of a deep-down awareness of position and privilege, both natural and social.”

Another woman who came out of the punk scene but grew into a mainstream artist is Debbie Harry of Blondie. In one interview, Harry disparaged the vulgarity of some of the punk scene:

Some of the stuff I find gratuitous and, as you say, over the top and not very interesting.

Sometimes it’s fantastic—it really depends on the artist. The combination of really saying something that you mean and being connected to it, having a real point of view about what you’re singing about as well as being overtly sexual or slightly nasty with it—that makes all the difference.

Like Talking Heads, Blondie were extremely pro-American. They loved American music, movies, art, and popular culture. Their music, like David Byrne’s, is joyful.

While Gould and the other music writers of that era who praised Talking Heads went to great lengths in trying to distinguish the band from punk rock, it’s important to remember that the best punk rock of the 1970s and 1980s was just as much about questioning liberalism any socialist vision of “social justice” as it was the staid conventions of the past.

In a piece in the Washington Examiner, Daniel Wattenberg, who had been part of the New York punk scene in the 1970s, describes it well:

New York punks were unapologetic about their comfortable suburban origins, playful and irreverent in tone, and pretty affirmative about modern American life. Indeed, in many ways, New York punk represented a first skirmish within American popular culture with the then-gathering forces of political correctness.

This was true of the scene when I was a college student in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s. My favorite band, the Replacements, ridiculed androgyny and blasted corporate MTV as fake and boring. The Dead Kennedys sneered at rich, clueless liberals in “Hop with the Jet Set”:

We’ll save the whales
We’ll watch them feed,
Buzz around them in boats
‘Til they won’t breed
Just here for the ride
Then we hop with the jet set tonight

Johnny Ramone of the Ramones once said, “People drift towards liberalism at a young age, and I always hope they change when they see how the world really is.” That change is not meant to be dour and hopeless.