Big Science prompted trendy early-'80s art students to plug in their synthesizers and start their own postpunk performance-art-cum-rock-&-roll projects. The album actually produced a hit single in the form of "O Superman." That track and "Let X=X" are the two best-known things from this album, which is a condensation of United States, Anderson's four-and-a-half-hour performance-art piece. The entire show is available as United States Live, a four-disc box set. Big Science, however, presents the cream of the crop. Although a lot of Anderson's shrill non sequiturs seemed annoying at the time of her breakthrough, she predicted techno music years before it happened. Still, as rock critic J.D. Considine pointed out, her creations are often closer to theater than to music. --Bill Holdship
Laurie Anderson
Big Science
[Warner Bros.; 1982; r: Nonesuch; 2007]
Rating: 8.7
"In September 2001, I was on tour and played 'O Superman' at Town Hall in New York City," writes Laurie Anderson in the liner notes to her newly reissued Big Science. "The show was one week after 9/11, and as I sang, 'Here come the planes/ They're American planes,' I suddenly realized I was singing about the present."
"Suddenly?" Methinks Anderson is being a touch disingenuous. On the night of September 11, 2001, Anderson was performing at the Park West in Chicago. The air was heavy with dread, confusion, and anger. Waiting for the show to begin, the crowd was talking amongst itself, conversations running the gamut between those three poles. Anderson herself had allegedly spent much of the morning on the phone with her partner Lou Reed, who was back in New York-- and supposedly sitting on the roof of their building watching the Twin Towers burn-- though she made nary a mention of the day's events once she started performing.
The crowd was dead silent throughout, but when Anderson began "O Superman" you could hear the room shift as the already menacing song took on new layers of eerily contemporary meaning. "Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me, but I know you. And I've got a message to give to you. Here come the planes. So you better get ready." The lyrics chimed out like an answering machine message sent to the future, picked up several decades too late.
That song's mix of politics, Zen-like aphorism, and sentimentalism hit like a punch to the gut as the nation stood on the precipice of the unknown, and the toll the collapse of the Twin Towers would truly take on this country-- and the world-- hadn't quite settled in. So: "suddenly?" No, surely Anderson recognized the renewed power of her (sole) unlikely hit well before she made it home to New York City. Then again, the almost mystically timeless song was in a way always about the shifting "present." Anderson writes that "O Superman (For Massenet)" was inspired by a composition from Jules Massenet's opera Le Cid, "O Souverain", which in turn reminded Anderson of Napoleon's fall at Waterloo. She had also taken into account the bungled U.S. rescue mission in Tehran. It's a song of military arrogance, failure and the price we all pay, recorded for a modest €360 ($500) with an NEA grant. In 1981, it went to No. 2 in the UK.
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.
-Joshua Klein, August 02, 2007
http://www.myspace.com/languageisavirusfromouterspace
Review by Stewart Mason
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.
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