I
“O Superman” might have been
the strangest pop song
I had ever heard in my life
up to that point.
I heard it for the first time
the year after I graduated from high school
and I bought the Big Science album.
In ’87, in a fit of stupidity, obsessed
over the hot new digital medium for music,
I sold most all of my records, but
had the sense to keep
the five record box set
United States, Live.
Clocking in at 4 hours and
28 minutes, it is the Moby Dick
of live albums. Both the difficulty
and the beauty of Laurie
Anderson’s work is that you can’t
look away, you can’t leave the room,
you can’t just have her humming
along in the background.
You must attend, and carefully,
or you’ll miss something.
Bouncing back and forth between
profundity, absurdity, pure silliness,
musicality and noise,
story-telling and stand-up comedy,
history lessons, poetry, performance art,
violin solos, electronic experimentation,
saxophones, and visual components
that are sometimes glaringly absent
in the audio but tucked in photos or crudely
represented in the sleeve art, she muses
about the origins of Noah’s Ark, sending
photos of people waving into space,
walking the dog, near plane crashes,
how much Edison hated Tesla, and
the language of the on-again off-again future.
What I remember most about this record
is still fundamentally evident, that its
testing my patience at every turn.
I don’t “like” it as much as I respect it,
and that’s kind of a strange relationship
to have with an album. An origin record,
in a way, as every thing that would develop
in her art over the years and decades
is hinted at here, baby pictures of an
insanely advanced baby, the genius
laid bare. I don’t know, though, as I
finish the first two albums in the box, that I
can listen to all ten sides of this thing.
II
“You were born, and so you’re free.
So happy birthday.” Did I make it?
I made it; it took me
three days to get through ten sides.
On album 3, Laurie dreams she’s married
to Jimmy Carter. William F. Buckley goes
to a mall to give a political speech and
sell some books. He’s told to leave
because he’s on private property.
Laurie claims she could write a book
big enough to stun an ox. Let X=X.
She delivers the famous lines:
“Your eyes. It’s a day’s work just
looking into them.”
Her voice pitched down an octave
or two, she introduces us to
“Difficult Music Listening Hour.”
She asks the proverbial giant question:
“Hey, who ate all the grapes,
the ones I was saving?”
Side 5 ends with this famous conclusion
and the atypical rhyming couplet:
“Language is a virus from outer space,
and hearing your name is better than seeing your face.”
Percussion: she plays the drums on her skull,
amplified by a tiny microphone attached to
a pair of glasses resting against
the bridge of her nose, and
it turns out, the drumming of
David Van Tieghem is woefully underrated.
III
In the late 80’s, Anderson started
to sing just as much as she spoke.
I have all of those records
on compact disc, albums of Laurie Anderson
trying on traditional pop music,
but in my vinyl collection, after
United States, Live, I have two of her most
recent projects, the first, a collaboration
with Kronos Quartet, the second,
an album exclusively about Amelia Earhart,
neither of which has anything to do
with pop music.
IV
In October of 2012, Hurricane Sandy flooded New York
and destroyed Laurie Anderson’s apartment.
For the album Landfall, I recommend headphones
and a darkening room, dusk, on a clear evening
after an entire day of heavy rain, and if that can’t
be managed, imagine it. But headphones are a must.
Here, there is more Kronos Quartet than Anderson,
but this is a dark, scary, beautiful masterpiece
about a hurricane and a half a dozen other disasters,
including the fact that 99% of all animals that ever
lived are now extinct. “How beautiful, how magic,
and how catastrophic.”
Amelia, an album sung and/or spoken
almost
entirely
in the persona of the aviation pioneer,
the first woman to make a solo transcontinental
solo flight, a woman who died with her navigator
attempting to circumnavigate the globe in 1937,
although, mysteriously, she, her navigator, and
her plane were never found. This album is
a kind of diary of her journey. Listening
to this is like reading a book. Listening
to Laurie Anderson is like reading a book.
Listen to my heartbeat.
“It was the sound of the motor
I remember the most.”
V
I’ve spent almost an entire day today
listening to her music.
I don’t think I would be who I am
without Laurie Anderson. In 1984,
the year I first listened to her,
I decided to be an English major
and started writing absurdist fiction
and my first efforts at poetry.
I became ensconced in the aesthetic
that if music or literature was not
a little bit strange, it was not worth
listening to or reading or writing.
In the most fundamental way,
more than any of my earliest influences,
she demonstrated for me that music could
be literary, that there was a place
for the spoken word in pop music,
there was a place for poetry and
storytelling in music, ultimately,
there was a place for my own weird
and wacky tendencies, a place for me.
Notes on the vinyl editions: United States, Live might be an original pressing. Sounds pretty good, but too sibilant at times, and generally the production is spotty, sometimes her voice is too weirdly effected to understand sufficiently, or in some cases, the recording seems to be made primarily with a single microphone in a large room (not likely), at which point Laurie sounds like she’s in a cave. As far as I can tell, this 5 record set is perhaps the second thing Anderson released in her career, decidedly the least commercially viable and least accessible thing she would ever produce. I find myself in awe of a major label (Warner Brothers) that allowed this thing to exist in the world in the first place. This came from a time when labels were taking risks, throwing stuff out there to see what would stick. Laurie Anderson was a beneficiary of that kind of openness.
Landfall, Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet: Nonesuch Records, 2018, double LP, heavyweight vinyl, extensive liner note with lyrics and essays by Steve Smith and Laurie Anderson.
Amelia, Nonesuch Records, 2024.
Postscript in Bullets:
- This is the 6th poem in a series of poems about records in my collection, a response to the attempt to listen to every record I own, A to Z, and write a poem thing about every artist represented. This may take a long time.
- All the poems in this series will have dumb titles to make these pieces easy to distinguish from other kinds of poems.
- The poems may or may not be a direct response to the listening, might be tangential, discursive, journal-like. I’m finding I am less satisfied with the output when I end up writing purely descriptive pieces about the music, like I’ve kind of done here, mostly. I prefer the associative approach, even though it is less obvious that I have actually listened and not just remembered. But that’s not really the point, I think, is it? The listening is just for me. The writing, however, hopes to find an audience. So I want to try to do what’s best on the page, what’s most engaging or artful. I will try to do better.
michael jarmer 