My one complaint about Laurie Anderson’s new record, O Superman/ Walk the Dog, is its length: at only 15 minutes, it’s way too short. I’m ready for a double album. O Superman and Walk the Dog are two selections from her projected, four-part concert cycle, United States. As the cycle has yet to be completed, the double album will have to wait; but, in the meantime, Anderson’s current release is a lot more than teaser excerpts. Each piece is a compelling, self-contained musical narrative.
O Superman begins as a domestic mantra sweetly invoking “Mom and Dad.” Then, answering-machine voices are introduced: “Hello, this is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?” They grow increasingly ominous: “This is the hand, the hand that takes.” A collage of word-images inter-cuts passive/aggressive messages: “Mom” moves from nurturer to devourer. Ultimately Anderson’s “mother” is a country—one that effects a chilling, lulling reconciliation with its disoriented child. O Superman concludes with a matriarchal embrace as crushing as the one Athena inflicted on Laocoön.
Walk the Dog has a more anecdotal, overtly pop edge. Moving from a domestic quarrel which is temporarily stalled by the narrator’s decision “to go out and walk the dog,” the piece spins into a lacerating exploration of social attitudes. A driving carnival beat, calypso riffs, and sarcastically sanitized country-and-western rhythms are interlaced and layered to climax in a nasty, hallucinatory party scene. The conclusion smacks of a cruel practical joke, but—and here is one of Anderson’s major strengths—the force of that interpretation has much to do with the contrast between the lyrics and the intonation of the performer. Anderson’s voice remains a remarkable instrument: there may be only one singer, but that does not limit the number of characters the singer evokes. The glibly manipulative persona who emerges at the end of Walk the Dog turns a simple direction into a devastating threat.
Like much of Anderson’s work, the selections on the record have an hypnotic repetitiveness reminiscent, at their best, of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s elegant merger of electronic, concrete, and choral music. There are also lush, lyrical passages not unlike Isao Tomita’s synthesizer experiments, particularly his electronic reworking of Debussy’s “Preludes.” She also draws from mainstream American music (both pop and rock ’n’ roll) to achieve a satiric and seductively populist edge. It is Anderson’s knowledge of a wealth of new-music sources that gives her work such structural authority. And most significantly, as the libretto for United States continues to emerge, there are Anderson’s words. Her fractured, impressionistic narrative is a totally original, insightful reflection of American creativity and chaos. I have a feeling that the completed United States may well be one of the pivotal artworks of the 80s.
—Richard Flood
