Laurie Anderson

There have been many crossovers between the visual arts and rock/pop music, but only one figure has managed to achieve success in both fields: the American Laurie Anderson. In her work, two strands linking art and music converge. On one hand, there's the influence of performance art (from the forerunner John Cage through to the Fluxus group), blending the artist's own body — the protagonist of the action that constitutes the work — with the technological medium of video, which preserves its memory. On the other hand, there's the electronic avant-garde which, through Varèse and Stockhausen, has also become part of the contemporary art canon. Add to this a distinctly New York inclination toward urban poetry, which would lead her to collaborate with figures like William Burroughs and Robert Wilson, and which would also be part of her artistic and romantic relationship with Lou Reed.

What sets Anderson apart from the many musicians who have dabbled in art (we smile remembering Bowie's forays into painting, though he was in fact a very serious connoisseur and patron) is that for her the two aspects are inseparable, each living by virtue of the other.

Her first artistic masterpiece was the eight-hour multimedia performance "United States I-IV", developed starting in the mid-Seventies. From that melting pot, in 1981, Anderson extracted an eight-minute fragment which, retitled "O Superman (For Massenet)", became a single that reached number two on the UK charts, thrusting her into the heart of the pop scene.

In 1982, other segments of "United States", combined with the hit song, would give rise to the album "Big Science".

In 1984, buoyed by her success, the artist managed to get the entire performance released as "United States Live", a staggering five-LP set — a true feat of marketing genius. The whole thing becomes even more remarkable once you dig into the work's subject matter. The performance features Anderson speaking and playing in front of a screen onto which several projectors cast images, films and light effects, painting a sweeping four-part portrait of America (transportation, politics, money, love) and focusing on the idea of the US as the land of technological utopia. "Another theme of my work," she told the New York Times, "is how to live with technology and accept it. How to humanize it."

Anyone who has ever heard "O Superman" will remember the robotic vocal loop (Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah), built on two chords, which underpins the entire piece, serving as both its obsession and its main melodic hook. The unsettling use of technology in the performances — for instance, the use of answering-machine voices ("Hi I'm not home right now…") — also carries through into the alienating use of the Vocoder filter on the voice, and more generally into the cold, spoken-word delivery that makes up much of Anderson's "singing" on the track.

The piece opens precisely with an answering-machine message ("Hello? This is your mother."), which slides from reassuring banalities into a first sinister warning: "This is the hand. The hand that takes / here come the planes". It's later specified that the planes are "American", and that, per the Postal Service's motto, nothing can stop the couriers from completing their mission. Ironic maxims arrive as reassurance, like "When love is gone, there's always justice. When justice is gone, there's always force. When force is gone, there's always Mom." But it's in the finale that the song's apocalyptic themes are fully revealed — only partly tied to current events (with references to the 1979 US-Iran crisis) and rooted in a broader cultural vision: the invocation "So hold me, Mom, in your long arms / your petro-chemical arms / your military arms / your electronic arms" unfurls an eloquently terrifying panorama. But there's also the pleasure of quotation and culture: the main refrain ("O Superman. O Judge. O Mom and Dad") echoes an aria from Jules Massenet's opera "Le Cid" (referenced indeed in Anderson's title), which went "O Souverain, o juge, o père".

At once sinister and playful, cold and evocative, the track serves as the blueprint for the rest of the album, revealing both its playful, ironic side (elsewhere in "United States" the artist recounts the story of her signing to Warner Bros. against an image of cascading dollar bills) and its unsettling one, with the country portrayed as a great mother figure — protective, suffocating and imperious all at once. "Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects on your country from the air. Some of the objects will be useful. And others will be… strange… The United States helps, not hinders, developing nations by using their natural resources and raw materials" is one of the false slogans that opens the performance, paired with images of a flag being run through a tumble dryer.

Similarly, the opening "From The Air" shows a distinct rock-pop drive with its interlocking drums and sax, but it also delivers a chilling intro when Anderson's diabolical spoken delivery ("This is your Captain / and we're going down" — explaining the metaphor would be redundant) is underscored by the fatalism of the synths.

The title track, on the other hand, is the album's most solemn and electronic moment, carried by synths and sparse percussion, with the voice turning into a medieval-sounding chant ("Golden cities / Golden towns / Big Science / Hallelujah") alternating with the usual spoken delivery. It's a kind of dialogue between the protagonist and the Father figure, sketching a hallucinatory urban landscape ("And long cars in long lines and great big signs / and they all say: Hallelujah") that also amounts to a grim philosophy of life ("Every man, every man for himself"): along with the single, it's the album's most gripping moment.

While "Sweaters" is a jest built on disorienting bagpipes, "Walking & Falling" is an example of how Anderson can build dramatic tension with just a handful of sounds combined with her spoken delivery. The marimba that opens "Born, Never Asked", meanwhile, recalls the contemporary albums of Peter Gabriel, with whom Anderson would later collaborate (on "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)", from "So"), and who was pursuing a strand of technological humanism quite close to that of "Big Science". The track then evolves into a violin solo from Anderson herself, likewise as minimal as it is solemn and strangely tender. This is followed by the deranged vocalizing of "Example #22" (nonetheless full of references to unsettling "paranormal voices on tape"), marked by the richest and most bizarre instrumentation on the record (violin, flute, tenor and baritone sax, clarinets, accordion), proof that the musical side of things was never secondary for her.

On the contrary, Anderson made full use of the malleability of rock as a medium to cross-pollinate it with more "serious" forms of communication, while at the same time working to make the properly artistic side of her output spectacular and communicative. Equally playful is "Let X=X", which introduces a new discourse over solemn keyboards, marimba and hand claps, and seems to ironically embrace positivism on the lyrical level ("…cause I can see / the future and it's a place – about 70 miles east of / here. Where it's lighter…") before derailing into chaos with a berserk trombone.

The final track, "It Tango", continues directly from the previous one, forming a single piece with it, and revisits the pattern of dialogue between two characters (both, naturally, voiced by the artist, who has described herself as a "wearer of voices"), though it sinks ever deeper into nonsense, right up to the incommunicability of the final riddle, while romantic white clouds drift across the screen: "Your eyes. It's a hard work looking into them". The other great theme here, then, is communication itself, approached with a stance poised between positivist faith (a creative, human approach to technological means) and the fear of alienation ("you're not alone").

The sensation left behind by the record is precisely that of an intriguing puzzle, a sign of the disorienting, endlessly searching attitude that Anderson carried directly from the art world into rock, holding onto it even at the cost of forgoing easy success. Indeed, the breakthrough of "O Superman" had no real follow-up, while the shift from live performance to records continued with "Home Of The Brave" and "Moby Dick", both still intent on sketching the great American fresco.

Laurie Anderson's emergence within the rock world swept away the facile posturing of the "electronic dandies" of the Eighties and established an all-round artistic figure with few equals, one who completely redefined the role of women in music. It's no coincidence that she has worked alongside some of the biggest names in rock's intelligentsia, above all Brian Eno, surely the figure closest to her in spirit, with whom she made "Bright Red" in 1994.

Beyond her records, her career has been marked by countless projects spanning spoken poetry, performance, installations, collaborations on ballets, theatre pieces and film scores, while the period of her early work, up to "United States", is chronicled in the book "Stories from the Nerve Bible. A Twenty-year retrospective".

The performance of "O Superman" in New York in the weeks following the 2001 attacks proved just how alive that material still is, as well as Laurie Anderson's bond with the city, where thrilling artistic trajectories like hers remain possible.

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24/08/2008