I think it was Mark Twain who wrote, “Bores, pretentious bores, performance artists”? On second thought, it was me. And despite what you might think, I didn’t have Yoko “Black Bag Job” Ono in mind when I wrote it—her thrashing around in a bag on stage was certainly pretentious, but it was also very entertaining comedy.
No, I was thinking of Laurie Anderson. I’d just finished listening to her 1982 (kinda sorta) debut LP Big Science, which established her as performance art’s answer to David Byrne, and I didn’t find it at all entertaining. The words I would use to describe Big Science are wooden, underwhelming and very, very tedious. And pretentious of course.
Big Science raises Big Questions, the biggest of which is why real human people, many of them presumably sane, would buy Big Science. A cynic by nature, I would suggest it had a lot to do with the cool “blinded by science” cover. It suggested that here was an interesting artist, visually arresting, MTV ready and cutting edge at the same time. Word of mouth undoubtedly played a part as well. But whose mouths are we talking about? The critics who lauded it played a role. But there were others as well. Music critics aren’t the only unscrupulous souls out there. I think my brother used to own a copy. I should ask him who fooled him into buying it.
Because Big Science is a novelty record, and a rather lame one. It’s also a comedy record of sorts, and even lamer in that respect. But mostly it’s a novelty record, and as such I have a hard time imagining anyone listening to it more than once or twice. I would like to think there isn’t a well-worn copy of Big Science in existence. But I’m sure I’m wrong about this, because there are a lot of easily bamboozled souls out there, just as there are people who think listening to Big Science makes them sophisticates. Or is good for them, a form of aural-intellectual vitamin.
Then there are those people who live in apartments with very thin walls and want to annoy their neighbors. Of course there are far better ways, such as playing Meredith Monk or Diamanda Galas, to annoy your neighbors, although “O Superman” (which rather implausibly became a hit of sorts in the UK) is a swell way to annoy your neighbors. Me, I play “Sister Ray” when I want to annoy my neighbors. I see no reason why I should have to suffer along with them.
The word that comes to mind when I think of Big Science is “quirky.” It’s a collection of off-kilter takes on this, that, and the other thing, and seeing as how “quirky” generally means funny you would think I’d like it, because I’m a big fan of funny. The problem is it’s not that funny. It’s not that smart, either. Or captivating. Anderson’s musical backdrops are interesting, but interesting isn’t captivating, and interesting in Anderson’s case sure as hell isn’t danceable.
In fact a few of these musical backdrops are downright annoying, which brings us back to the question of why anyone would want to listen to Big Science more than once or twice. What Anderson has to say and the musical backdrops over which she says what she has to say pale in comparison to the competition that immediately comes to mind, David Byrne’s Talking Heads albums with Brian Eno. Her spoken (and sometimes sung) words certainly fall into a similar vein. Her words simply aren’t as good and the music is at times almost deliberately off-putting. She’s the anti-Byrne.
I will just add this. Listening to an album should not be work. If listening to an album IS work you’re AT work, and if you bought the album you’re listening to you paid money to go to work, when it should be the other way around. You should have walked into the record store, plunked the album down in front of the record store clerk, and he or she should in turn have opened the register and given you the price of the album. Isn’t that how work works?
Big Science is work, and the only workaround I’ve been able to devise is not listening to it. But I have to listen to it because I’m reviewing it, and while reviewing records is my job, and hence work, I don’t think anyone should have to work this hard at their job, unless they’re a coal miner. I’m no coal miner, but just as with coal miners, there’s danger involved. Coal miners die from black lung. I could die hacking up performance art. Thankfully there’s no danger of a cave in. Or methane explosion. That would be asking a bit too much, even of a pro like me.
I’ll also never figure out how Big Science got such rave reviews. I can only assume that the world is full of music critics who believe reviewing albums SHOULD be hard work, or conversely enjoy hacking up performance art. Or who believe judging albums makes them mean and hence bad people who deserve to be punished, and albums like Big Science are their punishment. Or who think giving their seal of approval to albums like Big Science proves they’re sophisticates, a subject I’ve touched on above.
Anderson is big into electronics, as if you can’t tell from the cover, but she’s not the go to RadioShack type—she prefers to invent her own instruments, which makes her (and she should be proud) the Tom Scholz of the New York avant garde music scene! That said, Big Science features a whole mess of instruments besides synthesizers and the instruments she invented herself. There are lots of saxophones (New York’s all right if you like ‘em) and all kinds of percussion gee-gaws and even bagpipes. You won’t find a single electric guitar or bass, which if you ask me they should have put on a (prominent) album sticker. It might have saved at least a small handful of unfortunates from buying it.
Big Science opens with the plane crash song “From the Air,” which I will never include on one of my one-of-a-kind plane crash song mix tapes because it’s too boring. Laurie’s your pilot, and she delivers a few lame laugh lines from the cockpit that only she laughs at, and at the end she says “There is no pilot” and I guess that’s the big punch line. She’s all mannered and deadpan as she talks over a vocal track of her uttering nonsense syllables over and over along with some saxophones and some synthnoodle and she sounds so ironic and distanced you’ll want to scream.
Dry and ironic is her thing, and after making some bird noises and singing “It’s cold outside” at the beginning of the title track she launches into a monologue (over some percussion and synthesizer) that is so over the top “arty” there’s no need for Fred Armisen to parody it—it parodies itself. I hear “Big science, hallelujah,” then a mock yodel, then I turn it off. I can’t help myself. David Byrne could do better in his sleep, and he could set it to some music with a beat that would keep you listening. It’s a sorta stop making sense proposition, this one, but nothing leaps out and grabs you by the throat. “Hey professor, could you turn out the lights?” certainly doesn’t do it, although it makes me want to turn out the lights on the song. At least when she says “Every man for himself” she speaks truth—you’re on your own with this one.
“Sweaters” is at least in-your-face-noisy annoying. You get bagpipes, and what sounds like Anderson doing a bagpipe imitation, and some very unpredictable drum clamor, and basically Anderson is saying she no longer loves you, she no longer loves your sweaters, she no longer loves the way you hold you pen and pencils (which she pronounces funny). This one will annoy the neighbors, so add it to your stockpile.
“Walking and Falling” is just lame. Over a minimalist dithering Anderson repeats that she was looking for you but couldn’t find you, and hey aren’t you lucky? After that she goes into this bit about how when you’re walking you’re falling and catching yourself and I don’t know if this is her idea of a deep observation but if it is she’s a very shallow observer.
“Born Never Asked” has a droning synthesizer backdrop with cool percussion and a moody violin and what makes it one of the album’s few listenable tracks is she doesn’t open her mouth, aside from an opening bit, before the music comes in, about how we’re all in a room and we’re all wondering what’s behind the curtain and guess what—it’s life! We haven’t been born yet! Is that deep or what? Then the music starts and she wishes us a Happy Birthday and after that it’s more or less clear sailing, just the music and no words to mar your listening experience.
“O Superman” was a big shocker of a hit in England thanks to John Peel and it’s the only thing I hold against the man. Personally I don’t understand, between the “hahaha” that serves as a musical bottom throughout and the robotic vocals she also employs throughout, how anyone can listen to it. Especially given the fact that the way she employs her voice is irritating beyond words. I can READ the lyrics and appreciate the story she’s telling about American military power, just as I can appreciate how she conflates being held in mom’s arms with Uncle Sam’s petrochemical and military arms etc. etc., but I literally cannot listen to the work itself without wishing an American drone missile would drop a warhead directly onto my head. I’d sooner listen to “The Ballad of the Green Beret” than “O Superman,” and I’m a pacifist. Where is Sgt. Barry Sadler when I need him?
“Example #22″ is a busy piece of art that actually works. Imagine that. Anderson speaks some in German, a phone rings, some guy speaks in German, a cool horn line kicks in, and Anderson sings “Honey, you’re my one and only, so pay me what you owe me.” Which actually tickles my funny bone. Then you get more of the same until Anderson commences to sing nonsense over some cool horn blurt, and it’s actually kinda fetching. It’s so nice to hear some actual music, and Anderson’s nonsense syllables are a wonderful improvement over her ironic detachment—why, she almost sounds unhinged. And sanity appears to be her biggest problem.
But on “Let X = X” she’s back to sounding cool and distanced, and when she isn’t saying rather pedestrian things in her irony-inflected voice she’s saying rather pedestrian things in a robotic voice, things like “Thanks for letting me put on the feedbag” and “thanks for letting me autograph your cast.” Excuse me for being underwhelmed. The backing music, which includes handclaps, synthesizer and some cool horns, is rather catchy, and if you could erase her vocal track I might actually be able to listen to it without wanting to throw it out the window. On and on she goes, as the song segues seamlessly into “It Tango,” where she says more stuff (over more handclaps and a stop-start synth line) not worth remembering, and I can say this with certainty because I can’t remember a thing she says. Other than “isn’t it just like a woman,” which she says a lot. She drills that baby right into your memory bank, she does.
Big Science closes in on self-parody, which is different from parody and what would she be parodying in the first place? Her own art world pretensions? With albums like Remain in Light David Byrne (who also walked the line of self-parody but never succumbed to it until that awful Jonathan Demme movie) and the Talking Heads pulled off what Anderson never could, bringing “no sense makes sense” (an aesthetic devised by Charles Manson, who inexplicably never got a Guggenheim grant) to the arena masses. And they pulled it off by means of undeniably joyous and funky music you could shake your hips to.
I hear no joy in Big Science and you certainly can’t shake your hips to it. You can only “respectfully appreciate” it with your hands in your lap, or if you’re me, squirm at the vast ironic distance that separates Anderson from the real world of feelings and emotions and at the words that come out of her mouth, which aren’t funny enough or perceptive enough to stand up under repeated listening. Truth is, I found very little worth hearing the first time.
What I hear when I listen to Big Science is an artist who can’t quite wrap her mind around the possibility that there could be a world outside of the bohoNewYorkArtScene, and whose only defense against this possibility is putting on a weird pair of sunglasses and becoming a robot. It’s like she listened to the Talking Heads’ “Big Country” and decided to make that her aesthetic. There’s something out there, but to her it’s not real. It can’t be real, because if it is real it could come for her. And that’s terrifying. Which is why she wouldn’t leave her performance space if you paid her to.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
