Скачать или смотреть Talking Heads karaoke - Don't Worry About The Government (w/video background)

In “Don’t Worry About the Government,” Talking Heads frontman David Byrne larks about the pleasure of pausing the work day to entertain the company of “loved ones” who, like “civil servants,” (wink, wink) “work so hard and try to be strong.” It’s sentimental without being saccharine, and sonically, it has allowed me to occasionally reenter a world that has been deemed mostly inaccessible due to necessary pandemic restrictions—a world in which I marvel at “the clouds that move across the sky” and conjure gratitude for “people that are working for me.” But as I revisited the song after the insurrection and again when hearing about the aforementioned “civil servant” at the State Department, I couldn’t help but wonder: is “Don’t Worry About the Government” truly an optimistic ditty about anchoring your joy in moments of levity and cultivating respect for community members? Or is it an ironic song about needing to distract ourselves from the frustrating limitations of our institutions?


Perhaps it is less important to deliberately pinpoint whether this Talking Heads song was designed to be sincere or biting, and more important to consider why the tension within that very question may be the point.

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.

During some listens, perhaps we resonate more with the joy of the loved one that is visiting the speaker who lives in the proverbial building. Maybe during other listens, Byrne’s “It’s gonna make life easy for me” harkens back to times when we’ve naively believed that a new apartment or city, newfound wealth or status, or Presidential administration would help us fulfill our idealized version of personhood or citizenship. 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.

The beauty of “Don’t Worry About the Government” and its political design, deliberately or otherwise, is that it echoes the possibilities the listener hears inside of it. Its majesty is in the riddle of its aims. And for the three-or-so minutes of the song’s duration, I am enraptured by the nature scenes, the highway, the clouds, the building, the civil servants in D.C and the puzzle at the heart of the song. And paradoxically, for those few delectable, fleeting moments, I stop worrying about the government.

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