February 2, 2022 by A.S. Van Dorston

Laurie Anderson’s Big Science was the first exposure for many to avant-garde performance art and spoken word. You couldn’t ask for a better one.

Laurie Anderson’s haunting, hypnotic “O Superman” single, originally released in 1981, was my first exposure to avant-garde performance art. Unsurprisingly it was for a lot of people, a rare accessible piece that achieved crossover success on the pop charts. While based in spoken word performance and spare, austere electronics, there’s also a solid musicality to the album Big Science that followed on April 19, 1982. Anderson had a solid background in music, having played violin as a teen in the Chicago Youth Symphony, and making use of her classical skills throughout her long career in performance art, starting in 1969. She invented the tape-bow violin in 1977 using recording tape and a magnetic tape head in the bridge, and used voice filters to create an androgynous persona, originally referred to as the “voice of authority,” and later named Fenway Bergamot. She developed a massive repertoire of pieces that mixed dadaist and deadpan humor with meditations on technology, gender politics and power dynamics, culminating in United States I-IV, from which she cherry picked selections for Big Science.

It starts with the hypnotic “From the Air,” its deadpan humor leaving a decidedly more sinister aftertaste after 9/11: “Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees. / Captain says: Put your head in your hands. /
Captain says: Put your hands on your head, put your hands on your hips. Heh heh. / This is your captain. We are going down.” The title track is more of a meditative synthpop ballad, a delicate, icy beauty. “Sweaters” is more quirky and potentially grating, with Anderson matching her voice with bagpipes, but I dig it. “Walking and Falling” is a rare case when the pretentiousness becomes a bit laughable, ripe for parody. “Born, Never Asked” briefly features spoken word, but mainly focuses on Anderson’s evocative violin and synthesizer duet. The 8:25 “O Superman” sits like an elephant in the middle of the album, as it should. “Example #22” sounds like a collaboration between no wavers Teenage Jesus & the Jerks with a John Zorn-led klezmer band, but with a melody nearly catchy enough to be snuck into new wave rotation (it wasn’t). The album concludes with “Let X=X,” the spoken words and electro claps enhanced by exquisitely arranged orchestration for a celebratory ending.

Tracks from the album and United States Live (1984) drifted out of my clock radio at night throughout the early 80s and mesmerized me. Anderson’s art had set up camp in the back of my brain, never to leave, making an appearance in a couple of my ambitiously bloaty college papers, like “Postmodernist Music: The Culture of “Cool” Vs. Commodity: Shop as Usual . . . and Avoid Panic Buying“. The latest reissue came out on Bandcamp last April, minus the bonus single B-side “Walk the Dog” that was included in the 2007 CD reissue. 40 years later, it still feels fresh and contemporary, thanks partly to the clean, minimalist production, and also the massive influence Anderson continues to exert on current music.

While Anderson took voice lessons and focused more on traditional songwriting later in her career, her peak influence probably culminated with her movie Home of the Brave (1986), which featured cameos from William S. Burroughs and Adrian Belew (King Crimson). She was also a featured guest on Peter Gabriel’s blockbuster So, on “This is the Picture (Excellent Birds).” Kate Bush also participated on that album, who you might hear from later in this series.