FEATURE:
O Superwoman
Laurie Anderson’s Groundbreaking Big Science at Forty
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QUITE a few…
IN THIS PHOTO: Laurie Anderson in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
pioneering and classic albums celebrate big anniversaries in April. On 19th, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science turns forty. Although the album was reissued in 2007, there is a new red vinyl version coming out on 9th April. I would encourage anyone to get the album, as it is a work of art! Coming out on the Nonesuch label, they provide us with some detail about the pioneering Laurie Anderson, and how Big Science came to be:
“In the early 1980s, Laurie Anderson was already respected as a conceptual artist and composer, adept at employing gear both high-tech and homemade in her often violin-based pieces, and she was a familiar figure in the cross-pollinating, Lower Manhattan music-visual art-performance circles from which Philip Glass and David Byrne also emerged. While working on her now-legendary seven-hour performance art/theater piece United States, Part I–IV, she cut the spare "O Superman (For Massenet)," an electronic-age update of 19th century French operatic composer Jules Massenet’s aria "O Souverain," for the tiny New York City indie label 110 Records. In the UK, DJ John Peel picked up a copy of this very limited-edition 33⅓ RPM 7” and spun the eight-minute-plus track on BBC Radio 1. The exposure resulted in an unlikely #2 hit, lots of attention in the press, and a worldwide deal with Warner Bros. Records.
'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!
At the time of its original release, the NME wrote of Big Science, "There’s a dream-like, subconscious quality about her songs which helps them work at deeper, secret levels of the psyche." With instrumentation ranging from tape loops to found sounds to bag pipes, Big Science anticipated the tech-savvy beats, anything-goes instrumentation and sample-based nature of much contemporary electronic and dance music. On the album’s 25th anniversary, Uncut noted, "The broader themes of alienation and disconnection still resonate, while Anderson’s use of loops and traditional/synthesized instrumentation is prescient."
"In the ’70s I traveled a lot," Anderson recounts. "I worked on a tobacco farm in Kentucky, hitchhiked to the North Pole, lived in a yurt in Chiapas, and worked on a media commune. I had my own romantic vision of the road. My plan was to make a portrait of the country. Big Science, the first part of the puzzle, eventually became part two of United States I–IV (Transportation, Politics, Money, Love). My goal was to be not just the narrator but also the outsider, the stranger. Although I was fascinated by the United States, this portrait was also about how the country looked from a distance. I was performing a lot in Europe, where American culture was simultaneously booed and cheered. But the portrait was also a picture of a culture inventing a digital world and learning to live in it. Big Science was about technology, size, industrialization, shifting attitudes toward authority, and individuality. It was sometimes alarmist, picturing the country as a burning building, a plane crash. Alongside the techno was the apocalyptic. The absurd. The everyday. It was also a series of short stories about odd characters—hatcheck clerks and pilots, preachers, drifters and strangers. There was something about Massenet's aria ‘O Souverain’—which inspired ‘O Superman’—that almost stopped my heart. The pauses, the melody. 'O souverain, ô juge, ô père' (O Lord, o judge, o father). A prayer about empire, ambition, and loss”.
There are a few really interesting articles out there about the tremendous Big Science. An Avant Garde and Art-Pop masterpiece, I wonder whether there were any albums quite like Big Science in 1982. The early-1980s saw a lot of innovation in terms of Electronic music and pushing the boundaries. On its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2017, The Vinyl Factory talked about the context of Big Science and how Laurie Anderson’s debut heralded in a new age for music:
“When she married Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed in one of music’s most sustaining partnerships, they came together as creative equals. On another, more artistic note, current enthusiasm for its 45th anniversary shows that Anderson also picked cannily when she distilled her 4 ½ hours-long orchestral and multimedia performance, The United States of America, into the comparative brevity of Big Science’s eight pungent tracks.
With her postmodern pixie haircut – allegedly first snipped by Winston Tong, the singer of West Coast art-rockers, Tuxedo Moon — Anderson was a fresh paradigm, who programmed to her own drum sample. Perhaps anniversaries act as too easy an anchor in our chaotic culture, but Big Science deserves its re-assessment. It seems now to have a quality of eerie prophecy.
The album’s anniversary is being celebrated as a birth of synthesized art-rock – pace Brian Eno — but let’s also dig Big Science as the harbinger of intersectionality that it is, sizzling somewhere between music and drama, social observation, politics, history, projection and humour; and with its sound just as unexpected, melodies, more abstract soundscapes, and for at least some among us, the pleasing and unexpected skirl of the bagpipes on the very funny ‘Sweaters.’
On the track ‘Big Science’ itself, her gentle vocal persuasion counterpoints a dirge of a drone, that could recall the harmonium and voice of Nico, Reed’s early bandmate/muse – except that Anderson’s tough fragility is tones apart from Nico’s deadpan, near-dead affectlessness.
Something about the brutish optimism of the early 1980s prompted the frequent use of the word “Big” (Disclosure, I co-created a TV music show back then called Big World Café and noticed we were part of a “Big” Moment before we said Moment, including this LP and the Tom Hanks flick.) The title’s nod to Science acknowledges the dream of technology as hope – and its limits.
There’s a suggestion of the era’s hysterical expansiveness in Anderson’s butterfly-wing-subtle deliveries, fluttering fast through meta levels of wry wit and seismic sighs at the human condition. Above all, right now, it is the chilling suggestion of creeping authoritarianism that makes Big Science feel so scary timely. Modestly lilting, the folksy intimacy with her characters makes her odd rigor all the more powerful. Take the airline pilot of opening track, ‘From The Air,’ professionally, detachedly and yes, robotically, steering the passengers through the imminent Big Crash. Is this the inner voice of the guardians of nuclear buttons in today’s Lukewarm War?
Beyond the famous early-girl-with-synthesiser aspect, perhaps the biggest surprise is how the emerging trends of the time, which proved durable, are so clearly limned: the neo-African kalimba-like sound, and above all the experimental fireworks of free jazz, sparkling off in several directions.
The entire exercise is steeped profoundly in the harmolodic concept of Ornette Coleman, a figure who also loomed large in her marriage; L&L, as Lou’n’Laurie called themselves, were regulars at Ornette soirees and events; he represented one of the few key constants and touchstones in their select pantheon. The biting spoken verse of the young Coleman’s wife, firebrand activist poet Jayne Cortez, also seems to resonate deep inside Anderson’s polished rage.
They called it art-rock but it is simply, timelessly, avant-garde.
The ultimate triumph of Big Science, and the key to Anderson’s longevity, resides beyond her mind and music’s admirable keen-ness, giddy hilarity and somber empathy. It is that growling animal thing, the wolf howling within the minimalism, rendering the supposedly cold synthesizer into an all too human instrument”.
I want to end with a couple of reviews. Even today, Big Science sounds so futuristic and unmatched. Whilst many artists have been influenced by the album, I don’t think anybody has managed to synthesise the same sound and visions as Laurie Anderson. It is a staggering work! This is what Pitchfork wrote about Big Science in 2007:
“Big Science comprises songs from Anderson's also quite prescient United States project, a multimedia performance art piece cum opera ("It seemed like everyone I knew was working on an opera," she recalls) that depicted America on the brink of digital revolution and capitalist nirvana, where the dollar trumped tradition and the apocalypse-- cultural, political, technological-- loomed large. In fact, given its themes and presentation, much of Big Science sounds every bit about "the present" as "O Superman" does, and its idiosyncratic execution (with stylistic nods to the minimalists and pal William S. Burroughs) has helped the disc weather the passage of time remarkably well. It's less a document of the early 1980s than it is a dark glimpse of the future recorded at the dawn of the Reagan era.
Anderson's ingenious move, musically, was utilizing the vocoder not as a trick but as a melodic tool. It's the first thing you hear on Big Science, looped in "From the Air" like some bizarre man-machine synth. The rest of the track revolves around a circular pattern of blurted sax figures and hypnotic drums. There's virtually nothing about it that screams its age as Anderson intones a wry announcement from a (caveman) pilot of a plummeting flight. "There is no pilot," she speaks. "You are not alone. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time." It's a metaphor for every frightening thing about 20th (and now 21st century) living you can think of, and in its spare way it's enough to scare you silly.
The gloomy ghost town future-music of the title track sounds like the rueful ruminations of someone who sees the end of the world on the horizon and can't help but to chuckle a little at their impending doom. The austere soundscapes of "Walking & Falling" and "Born, Never Asked" convey a similar chilliness laced with a despair at once aloof and oddly wistful. "Example #22" is like a Can/Yoko/Eno chop-shop, its funky wordless denouement part chant, part celebration of the absurd.
In fact, one of the elements that makes Big Science so special is Anderson's sense of humor. In "Let X=X", Anderson offers, with a wink, "I can see the future, and it's a place-- about 70 miles east of here." It's a perverse punchline to some cosmic joke, and the human element back and forth of "It Tango" does little to dissipate the feeling that on Big Science it's the machines that are getting the last laugh at the expense of their masters. The future was yesterday. The future is now. Welcome to the future”.
I will finish with another review. AllMusic showed their admiration and respect for an album that was unlike anything at the time. Big Science was definitely not a commercial compromise or sell-out on behalf of Laurie Anderson:
“There was a backlash against Laurie Anderson in "serious" musical and artistic circles after the completely unexpected mainstream commercial success of her debut album, Big Science. (The eight-plus-minute single "O Superman" was a chart hit in England, unbelievably enough.) A fair listen to Big Science leaves the impression that jealousy must have been at the root of the reception because Big Science is in no way a commercial sellout. A thoughtful and often hilariously funny collection of songs from Anderson's work in progress, United States I-IV, Big Science works both as a preview of the larger work and on its own merits. Opening with the hypnotic art rock of "From the Air," in which an airline pilot casually mentions that he's a caveman to a cyclical melody played in unison by a three-part reeds section, and the strangely beautiful title track, which must feature the most deadpan yodeling ever, the album dispenses witty one-liners, perceptive social commentary (the subtext of the album concerns Anderson's own suburban upbringing, which she views with more of a bemused fondness than the tiresome irony that many brought to the subject), and a surprisingly impressive sense of melody for someone who was until recently a strictly visual artist. For example, the marimba and handclap-led closer, "It Tango," is downright pretty in the way the minimalistic tune interacts with Anderson's voice, which is softer and more intimate (almost sexy, in a downtown-cool sort of way) than on the rest of the album. Not everything works -- "Walking and Falling" is negligible, and the way Rufus Harley's bagpipes intentionally clash with Anderson's harsh, nasal singing and mannered phrasing in "Sweaters" will annoy those listeners who can't take either Yoko Ono or Meredith Monk -- but Big Science is a landmark release in the New York art scene of the '80s, and quite possibly the best art rock album of the decade”.
On 19th April, Big Science turns forty. Still astonishing and unique, I think people will discover Laurie Anderson’s debut fresh. It will be quite a realisation and revelation! An album that is still creating tremors, Big Science is one of the all-time great L.P.s. If you have never heard it before, then do yourself a favour and experience…
A marvellous and groundbreaking album.