The 2020s File Feature
David Bowie & Pat Metheny Group - This Is Not America (official video reworked)
This Is Not America: David Bowie and Pat Metheny Group's Cold War LamentA Film, a Commission, and an Unlikely PartnershipThere is something worth pausing on …
01 The Story
This Is Not America: David Bowie and Pat Metheny Group's Cold War Lament
A Film, a Commission, and an Unlikely Partnership
There is something worth pausing on in the image of David Bowie, glam rock's most theatrical shapeshifter, and Pat Metheny, jazz guitar's most celebrated innovator, sitting on the same recording project. The occasion was the 1985 John Schlesinger film The Falcon and the Snowman, a thriller drawn from the real story of two young Americans who sold intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union. The film needed a title song that could carry the weight of its themes: betrayal, idealism, the gap between what America says about itself and what it actually does.
Metheny had been pursuing increasingly ambitious projects through his group's run of ECM recordings and had developed a collaborator's sensibility that made him receptive to unusual partnerships. Bowie was between the phases of his career, past the glam reinventions and the Berlin trilogy and not yet fully settled into the commercial success of the mid-80s; he was, as he often was, available to the interesting assignment. The commission brought them together, and what emerged was one of the more unexpected recordings of that decade.
The Sound They Made
What distinguishes This Is Not America from much of what was happening on radio in 1985 is its tonal restraint. The track doesn't announce itself; it settles into the ear quietly, Metheny's production creating an atmospheric backdrop that is recognizably his school of jazz without being inaccessible to pop listeners. Bowie's vocal is similarly understated, a long way from the theatrics of Ziggy Stardust or the electronic chill of Heroes. He sounds almost mournful, which suits the material exactly.
The lyric circles around the gap between national mythology and national reality, the America of idealism and rhetoric versus the America that employs the intelligence services and makes the decisions that produce people like the film's protagonists. The song's title is a negation that functions as a question: if this betrayal, this moral failure, is not America, then what is? The song doesn't answer, which is precisely the right artistic choice.
A Song That Outlived Its Film
Many film songs are forgotten faster than the movies that generated them; This Is Not America experienced the opposite trajectory. The song achieved genuine chart success in multiple countries upon its release, performing particularly well in the UK and Europe, and has retained a cultural presence that extends well beyond the audience for The Falcon and the Snowman. Its YouTube presence continues to accumulate views, with the accumulated total approaching 857,000, suggesting ongoing discovery by listeners who may never have seen the film.
The song's resonance has only grown as the questions it raises about American identity and the distance between ideology and action have remained persistently relevant through the decades following 1985. There is a reason it keeps getting rediscovered.
Bowie's Mid-Decade Position
For Bowie, This Is Not America occupied an interesting moment. His 1983 album Let's Dance, produced by Nile Rodgers, had been a commercial breakthrough of a scale that surprised even him; the follow-ups had been less successful, and the question of what Bowie's post-glam, post-Berlin commercial form would settle into remained open. This kind of side project, a film commission with a jazz musician, represents the adventurous side of his nature that commercial pressure hadn't suppressed.
The track stands as evidence that Bowie in any commercial climate retained the instinct to follow interesting collaborations toward genuinely interesting results.
Pat Metheny's Role
It would be a mistake to treat the Pat Metheny Group as merely a backing band on this recording. Metheny was genuinely shaping the sonic identity of the track; his production sensibility, informed by decades of working at the intersection of jazz composition and accessible melody, is what gives This Is Not America its distinctive atmospheric quality. The collaboration between Bowie's voice and Metheny's musical world produced something neither would have made independently, which is the most one can ask of any creative partnership.
Find a quiet evening and let this one wash over you. It sounds just as contemporary now as it did in 1985.
“This Is Not America” — David Bowie/Pat Metheny Group's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
This Is Not America: Idealism, Betrayal, and the National Myth
The Gap Between What We Say and What We Do
The most uncomfortable question a society can ask itself is whether its actions match its values. This Is Not America, written for a film about two young Americans who chose to betray their country for what they told themselves were principled reasons, poses that question with remarkable directness. The title itself performs a specific rhetorical move: the protest that something is not representative of the true national character, which simultaneously acknowledges that it happened and struggles to locate its meaning within the national narrative.
That move is both sincere and self-questioning. Every nation maintains a mythology about itself that its actual history repeatedly complicates. America's mythology of freedom, democracy, and moral rectitude has coexisted with slavery, imperial adventurism, and institutional corruption from the beginning. Songs that acknowledge this tension, without resolving it into simple condemnation or simple absolution, occupy rare and valuable artistic territory.
The Cold War Frame
The early 1980s were a period of intense Cold War anxiety. The Reagan administration's rhetoric of American exceptionalism and Soviet evil created a cultural climate in which the idea that Americans might choose to side with the enemy was deeply destabilizing. The Falcon and the Snowman, the film for which Bowie and Metheny created this song, used the real story of Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee to complicate that simple moral map: these were not ideological converts to communism but disaffected products of American affluence who had lost faith in the system they were supposed to represent.
The song captures that disillusionment without fully explaining it, which is artistically honest. Disillusionment of this magnitude rarely has a clean explanation.
Bowie's Relationship to America
David Bowie spent significant portions of his career in America, recording in Los Angeles and New York, drawing on American music from soul to funk to the avant-garde. His relationship to the country was therefore neither that of an outsider nor that of a native; he occupied a peculiarly useful middle position, close enough to understand but distant enough to see. That perspective informs the song's tone: neither triumphalist condemnation nor defensive nationalism, but something more like sorrowful recognition.
For a British artist to sing "this is not America" is to implicitly claim some understanding of what America is, which the song earns through its careful, considered emotional approach rather than through polemic.
Why It Resonates Across Decades
The questions This Is Not America asks have not aged. The gap between national mythology and national reality, the possibility that the systems a society builds might produce people who feel compelled to sabotage those systems, the difficulty of locating genuine patriotism in a landscape of competing claims: these are permanent features of political life that no decade resolves. Each new generation that discovers the song finds it speaking to circumstances specific to their moment, which is the mark of genuinely durable political art. The song asks a question that keeps needing to be asked, and asks it beautifully.
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