Laurie Anderson, United States Live (Warner Brothers, 1984)
I.
It’s Laurie Anderson’s birthday today. I had wanted to write something about this record a while back, but got sidetracked with other things, as evidenced by how infrequently I update this blog. I promise I will get through a good chunk of my record collection! I just can’t promise it won’t be before the collapse of society. Speaking of society’s fragility and potential collapse is a good place to start with Laurie Anderson. I first heard her music on the short lived variety show The New Show, ABC’s attempt to make its own Saturday Night Live. It aired 10 pm on Fridays, thus making it a little easier to convince my parents to let me stay up and watch it. Anderson was promoting her album Mister Heartbreak (which was also released in 1984) and presented two performances: the “Sharkey’s Day” video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaBbHGKLp88) and a spoken word piece from United States entitled “Mach 20,” a speculative piece on what would happen if human sperm were the size of whales and how fast they would go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxleuNDE). It always seems hyperbolic to say something like “I wasn’t the same after I saw this,” but, well, I really wasn’t.
It’s easy to understand the fascination and appeal of these performances to my eleven year-old self. The video has the type of animation style I would have recognized from years of Sesame Street, Electric Company and other examples of fascinating, avant-garde children’s animation from the 1970s and early 80s. In fact, the mask Anderson is wearing in the “Sharkey’s Day” video bears a striking resemblance to this Sesame Street clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVktxm3p7gl). Both that clip and Anderson’s video trigger a kind of fear of the blank face—Henson, after all, called his creation “Mr. Nobody.” Anderson adds the nose, but loses none of the creepiness. Who is the jerking, gyrating masked figure mouthing the words to a song that’s spoken more than sung? The first thing you might notice about Anderson’s vocal style is that, while I think she has a nice singing voice, she doesn’t sing that much. She also doesn’t always use her “real” voice as demonstrated in the Mach 20 clip. Instead, she uses forms of voice modulation to sound sometimes like a masculine-coded doppelganger, sometimes like a cartoon, and sometimes like a mechanical angel of death. She also has the type of speaking voice that might soundtrack a flight safety video, or a weather report: it signifies neutrality, the middle of the country, authority and, as she herself has parodied/embodied, expertise.
After that first exposure, I bought the albums Mr. Heartbreak and Big Science on cassette. In all honesty, Mr. Heartbreak, the album which contained “Sharkey’s Day,” kind of left me cold. I’ve come to really appreciate it but, at the time, I didn’t really understand, or I didn’t have the experience to understand, the themes or structuring of the songs. They floated along at their own paces, each one offering a story or impressionistic mantra until the music and voice faded away. There’s a song with Peter Gabriel—whose video “Shock the Monkey” had been in heavy rotation on MTV—and there was a concluding track that featured the writer William S. Burroughs. Anderson didn’t just show up on The New Show around this time, however, she also appeared on and composed music for PBS’ contemporary arts program Alive From Off Center. This particular entire episode focuses on her work, specifically a fictional account of Laurie Anderson’s “clone,” created to help her show up and complete all of her commitments as a famous performance artist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i5Ja_p70ss&list=PLOBEHUYlqGNNAnv3BarWv8ekdSw9_qu4m&index=4). Lest all of the above descriptions suggest that it is a tedious, navel-gazing performance art piece...it isn't! It's got Rambo and Rocky jokes and they're funny! Alive From Off Center introduced me to the world of video art and non-children's animation. I saw the Quay Brother's adaptation of Bruno Schultz's Street of Crocodiles there. Much like her appearance on The New Show, Anderson was a guide into a weird, pink (check her jacket in the above clip) opaque mid-80s artsy video world that was deeply surreal, playful and uncanny. It contributed in making the idea of staying up late to watch something weird on TV an existential exercise.
Last week I saw the movie I Saw the TV Glow. It’s a great film that, while perhaps not having Laurie Anderson in mind, represents a type of relationship to the surrealism of television you receive (if don’t necessarily understand) when you’re younger and the hour gets later. The fictional TV show inside the movie The Pink Opaque—another 80s music reference, here the Cocteau Twins—is also broadcast after 10 o’clock and requires special permission from the main character’s parents to allow him to stay up past his bedtime to watch it. The way in which the illicit knowledge of this broadcast, something the main character shouldn’t be watching, adds to its mystery. That the show inheres to his very subjectivity, used in the film effectively as an allegory for gender dysmorphia and trans identity, becomes a universal experience for anyone whose identity has been mediated by screens (i.e. most of the post-World War II American population), from which screen images give birth to personal obsessions. The 1980s, effectively the decade in which I “grew up,” was dominated by the aesthetic of MTV and music videos in general. Laurie Anderson was a pivotal figure.
II.
It’s a reasonable question to ask how a performance artist based in New York City had managed to become a musical guest on a variety show broadcast on one of three major networks in the 1980s. Even though Laurie’s earliest performance art pieces were very much of the time and the avant-garde, she famously played violin in a block of ice until it melted, she seems to have always had a pop sensibility about her. For example, her first physical release was this 7” released in 1977 as part of a small art edition for an exhibit of singles put in a jukebox for an instillation. I heard this a long time ago and had such a hard time finding it again that I was certain that I had dreamed it up: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zA6LL78KYU). It’s really catchy! And absolutely anticipated what would happen next.
In 1981 Anderson released a 12” on One Ten records called “O Superman.” This record is justifiably famous and, impossibly, became a number two hit in England. Warner Brothers records signed Anderson and, I assume anticipating a career of hits in England and the U.S., promoted her career in a way that few, if any, performance artists were promoted. The only two figures, both artistically and geographically, to whom she could be compared would be David Byrne and Arthur Russell. The difference, however, is that Byrne had already had success with the band Talking Heads and Russell had success making big, albeit idiosyncratic, disco singles. “O Superman,” one of the greatest pieces of sound art in the late 20th century, is not as catchy or categorizable as Byrne and Russell. Instead, it exists in this space between pop hook and minimalism. Populist broadcast and public despair. Much has been written about “O Superman,” and I have no confidence that I could tell you something about the song that the song doesn’t tell you itself. The experience of hearing Anderson’s voice fluctuate between the human and the mechanical, the voice leaving a message on the answering machine and the answering machine itself has only been captured, in my humble opinion, in the short stories of Kafka at the beginning of the twentieth century. Two voices, one male, one female, both of whom find the laughs get caught in their throats. Kafka and Anderson’s greatest works end up being human appeals to a faceless justice that, when unmasked, is always force. For Kafka, the human dies like a dog in the end. For Anderson, to die like a dog is the most spiritual endeavor one can undertake.
Meanwhile, as she was mapping out a career as a major label artist and proven pop charter, Anderson was developing a multimedia stage show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which would feature all the songs on her first album, additional unreleased songs, plus spoken word pieces and many pieces of visual art. The original performance was eight hours long. The album is four and a half hours long. It unbelievably consists of seventy-eight songs, although many of these songs are very tiny pieces lasting a minute or two. Equally unbelievable, Warners signed Anderson to an eight record deal and this is what they released after the “hit” of Big Science. Can we even fathom a major label having so much confidence in an artist, and an audience for that matter, that they would sign off on a four and a half hour recording of a performance art piece? People have compared it to Philp Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein On the Beach (which also premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), but that opera (which was always understood as an opera, even if it stretched the form to a breaking point) had a context and an audience for it. Einstein’s recording, originally released on Tomato Records, would eventually find a home, along with all of Glass’ other operas, on CBS records classical label. Opera had been able to experiment for over a century, and Glass and Wilson’s opera was seen as another formal invention of a venerated classical form. What was United States I-IV/Live? People in downtown Manhattan might have understood what a “performance art piece” was, but did the record buying public? Would they spend money on a five LP (!) box set of a performance art piece’s highlights?
Luckily, for the listener, Anderson is an assured guide. One of the highlights that shows up deep into the LP set is “Yankee See,” a song that attempts to give some context to everything that has gone before. It’s one of the catchiest pieces of the music in the performance, a joyous, percussive manifesto of how to sell a record company on recording and releasing a four and a half hour performance art piece. After starting the song with a dream about teaching cave people how to use blenders and toasters, Anderson explains that she was trying to figure out what to tell the audience about herself and her work. Helpfully, the people at the Brooklyn Academy of Music were handing out a brochure that, according to Anderson, would tell them about her only better than she could. Post-modernism is an overused and ill-defined term, but Anderson, coming of age in the post-modern art world, very entertainingly and usefully lays out the post-modern condition of the artist: anything I could tell you about myself is much more effectively and concisely summarized by this promotional document the venue produced for this show. If the history of the artist is feeling (him)self alienated by the very means of production (and reproduction) of the artwork in a market economy, then Anderson, consummate post-modern artist in late capital, ironically (or is it?) comments and compliments the machine for doing the work she doesn’t want to or can’t. And because she is a consummate performer, she repeats “films” with the self-conscious aside “did I already say films?” emphasizes the phrase “hand gestures” (as if it were a medium itself, which I guess it is) and seriously intones the brochure’s cliched place holder “…and more.” She does all these things…and more. She figures that, at this point, if you’ve stuck with her live performance or five LP recording thereof, you deserve her funniest, most crowd-pleasing, material. Here’s what’s fascinating about Laurie Anderson: she’s avant-garde, as well versed in the history of difficult classical music as anyone, but she also is, improbably, an entertainer.
This is born out in the following scenario sketched out by the song (it’s not really a verse and there are no choruses, other than a bunch of “heys”). Anderson is now out in LA on “music business” (you can hear the audience laugh) to fill them (assuming the Warner Brothers label people) in on what she’s been up to. “I see myself in a long line of American humor…Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam…and they said ‘well, actually, we had something a little more adult in mind.’ and I said ‘ok! ok! I can adapt!’” Towards the end of this epic, multimedia reflection on the United States in 1983, we haven’t really gone deeper than the “long line of American humor” embodied by Loony Tunes. The thing is…the thing is that she’s right. What makes Laurie Anderson a genius that I will love until the day I die is that she’s fucking right. Philipp Glass spent the rest of the 1980s making beautifully pretentious maximalist operas about Gandhi and Tutankhamun to express some cosmic speculation of a guy who was installing washing machines a decade earlier. I’m not saying he shouldn’t write such speculative operas, but at some point a listener might find himself less than engaged because the composer has just replicated the artistic gestures of the past. United States is an opera dedicated to the reality of the country who produces the artist, and there’s been no greater art that this country has produced than Loony Tunes. We all know that. And we know that half of the jokes Anderson tells throughout the four and a half hour recording come from the same fount as, say, the masterpiece that is the Loony Tunes cartoon “A Froggy Day.” There’s always an artist, always a schmo who tries to make money off the artist and either looks like a genius or a fool.
It would be easy enough to make a facile point about the artist and capital, but Anderson's work here goes further and proposes something fascinating: what if "A Froggy Day" were told as a myth, as a cyclical story about a singing and dancing frog who, periodically, is rediscovered and potentially exploited by humans but, to the humiliation and embarrassment to all the humans involved, fails to perform each time. After the inevitable humiliation and bankruptcy, each human who finds the frog, lets call him Michigan J., places him in a concrete box, burying him deep in a hole. Amazingly, this frog somehow is an immortal being, waiting for the next human to discover him and attempt to exploit him with each passing century. From deep inside the earth, the humans can hear him singing: "hello my honey. hello my baby. hello...my ragtime gal." And yet, each time the box is opened with increasing effort and required technology, Michigan J. just sits there and behaves like a normal frog. And the cycle begins again. This turns a Looney Tunes cartoon into something approaching Buddhist myth, a Kafka parable. And this is Anderson's greatest gift: turning the detritus of post-World War II American culture into moments of sublimity. In another piece from United States Live "Three Songs for Paper, Film and Video" Anderson talks about the first television broadcasts reaching out into space, being the first celestial voyagers. At the end of "Yankee See," Anderson, using her voice modulation, intones Ricky Ricardo's famous catch-phrase from the I Love Lucy show. "Lucy! I'm home!" not so much referring to the TV show itself (although it too is in a long line of American humor) but to the earliest broadcasts echoing through the cosmos. "Yankee See" begins with cavemen and ends with our first celestial voyagers.
III.
The town I grew up in, Needham, MA, had a store that sold both music and musical instruments. When I was a teenager, it had more records, tapes and CDs than instruments, although that significantly changed over time. Yet, in the salad days of my record buying youth, the music store in town was ground zero for discovering and purchasing music, before I was old enough to take the train into Boston. Inexplicably, they had a copy of United States Live, the first record filed under the As. For a period of time, every time I went into the store, Anderson would be staring at me from the cover: eyes nervously either sizing me up or attempting to communicate something disturbing coming my way. Her hand covering the left side of her face, shielding her own gaze from something terrible lurking back there in the darkness. And then, uncannily, oddly, inhumanly there is a light emanating from her clenched teeth. She is beautiful and alien.
Needless to say, having already owned and enjoyed both of her other albums, I really wanted this one. Yet, as you can imagine, a five LP box set was too expensive for my modest weekly allowance, so, like all big purchases, I asked for it for Christmas (or my birthday...can't remember which now). My aunt, only ten years older than me and clearly the person in my family who had the best taste in music, frequented record stores and knew how to ask record store clerks for obscure titles, bought it for me. When I opened it and showed my obvious excitement my aunt, bizarrely and matter of factly (to my best recollection) said "I don't like her." She had heard "Excellent Birds" on Peter Gabriel's So (I didn't get United States Live until a couple of years after it came out) and hated it. She hated her voice. She hated the music she made. She didn't know why Peter Gabriel would ruin his record by putting her on it. I was kind of confused because, first, my aunt and I had pretty similar tastes in music and, second, I had never heard her say anything negative about a musician. I've always wondered what she heard that made her respond that way. I wonder if it's the same thing I hear every time I put on record one, side one of United States Live and a voice, electronic, authoritative (and let's face it, bossy) half seriously asking, half mockingly asking "do you want to go home? Do you want to go home now?" after a lone human voice asks "hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?" In our country, we want certainty, we want a path forward, we want to light out for the territories. We've used technology to give us those things for a long time, often at the expense of human societies throughout history. At the end of it all, we want to know which way to go from the technology we have created. But it knows as much about where we are and where we're going as we do. Say hello. Say hello.
⭐️⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️
