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Laurie Anderson
Big Science
(Nonesuch)
First Appeared in The Music Box, September 2007, Volume 14, #9
Written by Douglas Heselgrave
"I can see the future, and it’s a place about 70 miles east of here," Laurie
Anderson sang in a deadpan tone over the metallic handclap that anchored the
rhythm of Let X=X, one of the pithy social essays masquerading as a pop
song on her 1982 major label debut Big Science. Anyone who is hearing the
recently reissued album for the first time in 2007 can be forgiven for wondering
what all the fuss was all about. In the 25 years since its initial release, so
many of Anderson’s off-kilter vocal techniques and electronic flourishes have
found their way into the language of popular culture that it may be hard to
impress upon people just how groundbreaking a work Big Science was at the
time of its birth.
Emerging from the same Lower Manhattan scene that nurtured the pursuits of
Phillip Glass and Talking Heads, Anderson began her career as a conceptual
artist in New York City, and her first audience was primarily an academic one.
She was influenced by the linguistic dynamics of William S. Burroughs (whose
cadence and detached delivery she emulates perfectly) and Brion Gysin as much as
she was by the pop sensibilities of Motown acts and The Beatles. What is
remarkable about Anderson is that — much like David Bowie, with whom she often
is compared — her artistic output briefly was able to cross into the mainstream
without her ever having to dilute her message to fit within its narrow
parameters.
Big Science was essentially a selection of songs from Anderson’s lengthy
performance piece United States, and when it first was released in 1982,
it became a surprise hit. O Superman, the effort’s initial single,
actually went as far as number two on the English pop charts, and it received FM
radio play throughout North America. For a brief period during the Reagan years,
before music went dreadfully wrong, artists such as Anderson — along with David
Byrne and Brian Eno, whose brilliant collaboration My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts also has managed to remain contemporary, regardless of the passage of
time — was able to skirt along the mainstream and challenge audiences with
material that was truly new and different. With her disembodied vocals riding
over instrumental tracks of found sounds, tape loops, and minimalist
instrumentation, Anderson’s approach to a song anticipated and predated, by at
least a decade, the aesthetic routes taken by singers like Bjork.
While all of this context may be interesting, it begs the question as to
whether Big Science sounds any good in 2007. No matter how "important" a
work it happens to be, if it’s no fun to listen to it, then there’s no point in
seeking it out. Thankfully, after not hearing the effort for more than 20 years,
I was surprised to discover how delightfully funny and chilling Anderson’s
observations continue to be. While the "future shopping malls and drive-through
banks" at which Anderson scoffs in the album’s title tune were built long ago,
there remains something shudderingly contemporary about her admonitions and her
ironic approach to discussing technology. The fears she anticipated may have
materialized, but lines like "Don’t forget your mittens/Big science hallelujah"
still nail the incongruity of seeking solace from technology when there are more
basic kindnesses and approaches that allow one to transcend any form of
"progress."
In a world where electronic voices regularly stress that "your call is
important to us," the cramped and paranoid environment that Anderson created on
Big Science is still astutely frightening and real. Listening to the
opening track, From the Air in a post-9/11 world is even more horrifying
and funny than it was during the relative innocence of 1982. Exploring the range
between politeness and distance, warmth and detachment, the voice that says
"I’ve got a funny feeling I’ve seen this before/Why?/Because I’m a caveman"
shows the listener, more clearly than any Noam Chomsky essay, how little the
world has changed, despite 6,000 years of civilization. With lyrics that dance
around both the dependence on and fear of technology as well as the
disillusionment with leaders and their agendas that exist in the world today, Big Science was clearly years ahead of its time:
"Put your hands over your eyes
Jump out of the plane
There is no pilot
You are not alone
Stand by."
The need for warmth and reassurance, as the flames of the apocalypse are
licking around our collective butts, has never been so well eviscerated and
communicated in a pop-art disguise. Due to its use of sampled sounds and
detached vocals, Big Science initially was a novelty for many listeners,
but the intervening years have revealed the protest album that is embedded in Big Science’s DNA. Anderson does not employ the rugged, individualist voice
that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan employed to call "the everyman" to arms; her
instrument of choice was not the simple bohemian six-string weapon that both men
opted to use. Yet, her mission and her resulting art have many similarities to
their works.
Throughout Big Science, Anderson uses the sounds and devices of
technology to comment on its prevalence in our everyday lives. Alternately
humorous and terrifying, Big Science is a multilayered effort that has
gained in significance and power as the years have passed. Anderson’s ironic
delivery belies the warmth and humanity that transcend both the form and content
of her work in order to reveal a collection of songs that — though often funny —
express a deep concern for the direction of progress, and it is even more
essential to hear her message today than it was 25 years ago. Post-modern in its
sensibilities and timeless in its outlook, Big Science is an album that
has survived the original novelty and context surrounding its release to become
a landmark recording that belongs in every serious music fan’s collection. It is
unquestionably, unarguably essential.  ½
Big Science is available from Amazon.com.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2007 The Music Box
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