This is the time, and this is the record of the time

April 21, 2022 7:12 AM

Laurie Anderson’s debut album Big Science was released 40 years ago this week. “The album is an immense structure, generously democratic, as approachable as it is enigmatic – and it sparks at the very least curiosity among anyone who crosses its path for the first time.” “To listen to the songs of Big Science is to feel something of this state of perpetual transience, as if it is not quite the same album you listened to 10 years ago, nor even this morning.” Laurie Anderson talks Big Science and her creative process with Studs Terkel.

Note: the Studs Turkel interview is listed as "date unknown", but seems to be from when the album was newly released.

posted by oulipian (40 comments total)

"'Cause When love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force."

Sigh.
posted by The Bellman at 7:18 AM on April 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

"'Cause When love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force."

You need to include the next line!

"when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!"
posted by mark k at 7:55 AM on April 21, 2022 [21 favorites]

So sit bolt upright in that straight backed chair,
Button that top button
And get set
For some Difficult Music.
posted by effluvia at 7:57 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

quoting myself from a few years back ...

It’s 1982 and Laurie Anderson, who no one I know has ever heard of, has suddenly painted a picture of the future, equal parts strange and beautiful, yet already haunted. The whole album‘s a gem but the title track deserves special mention for the way it delivers this future — all shopping malls, drive-in banks and every man for himself. And yodelling, hallelujah to that, and to the big science that makes it all possible — those cooling towers off the edge of town, higher than any church steeple ever towered, hissing and droning, liable to melt down and explode at any second.

That album still sounds like next week ...
posted by philip-random at 8:17 AM on April 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

It's such an amazing album, and a brilliant distillation of her "United States I-IV" work into the length of a single LP.

"And I said: 'uh-oh'...
this is gonna be some day...
Stand by."
posted by SansPoint at 8:25 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I remember hearing Peelie play O Superman for the first time and it was like a door opening.
posted by fallingbadgers at 8:37 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 8:43 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

And get set
For some Difficult Music.

Note that this actually from the intro to "Language is a Virus (from Outer Space)" which, if we're to consider Big Science a summary of United States I-IV, didn't make the cut. It is in the Home of the Brave film, however.

Hey, Pal!
How do I get to town from here?

Love the wintry ambience of the "Big Science" song. I once remixed it with some wind sounds, "Big Science" from Big Science fading into the "Big Science (Reprise)" from United States I-IV.
posted by Rash at 8:50 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I met her once (and have a nice sketch in my Nerve Bible to prove it!), and she was very nice in person. Such a tremendous body of work – I greatly enjoyed her Norton Lectures: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
posted by bouvin at 8:52 AM on April 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Like other 80s productions Max Headroom, and Verhoeven's Robocop, Laurie Anderson's Big Science is deeply and disturbingly prescient in so many ways. I love it so much, but I also hate it for how true it is. A fantastic work of art and an incredibly talented artist.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:04 AM on April 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

Mach 20 I have to include this clip of Laurie Anderson's performance of this piece on Saturday Night Live.
posted by effluvia at 9:06 AM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

O Superman is, by the way, a really great song when you're high.

Also, I love Let X=X, and you should too.
posted by aramaic at 9:19 AM on April 21, 2022 [12 favorites]

For fans of her artistic work and are unaware, if you can make it to DC by July, there's a major collection of her works at the Hirshorn.
posted by Candleman at 9:26 AM on April 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Nick Offerman had an interesting chapter about Lauri Anderson in his book, Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:41 AM on April 21, 2022

I love Laurie Anderson and I love this album. I have talked before once or twice about O Superman being one of those songs I encountered by chance passing in the pre-web days of my childhood, just a minute or so on public radio in the car with my dad, and it seeding a lifelong fascination with the sound of vocoders. I only looped back to the actual song and in turn Big Science years later and it was such a revelation and catharsis to rediscover it. I recorded a cover of O Superman over a decade back and it remains one of my favorite bits of recording.

There's a great bit of interview I watched years ago with Anderson, I can't even remember the context, but in which she was talking about how she had at some point just started calling herself a "multi-media artist" partly because it was accurate but partly because people didn't know what to do with that and it solved a lot of problems about artistic earmarking or typecasting. I think her thesis was basically "other people should use that label too, because it'll throw tedious art people off balance and you can just do whatever the fuck you want".
posted by cortex at 9:54 AM on April 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

I've always felt this record to be a spiritual cousin of Kraftwerk's Computerworld, released less than a year earlier.
Listening to Computerworld now, though, is an exercise in a kind of bitter futurist nostalgia (although it's still beautiful) while Big Science is even more chilling than when it came out.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:07 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh hey, is this a good place to ask if anyone has a lead on where to find Alive From Off-Center?

"What you mean we?" was one of my favorite pandemic discoveries and everything else I've seen of the series has been phenomenal as well.
posted by gee_the_riot at 10:22 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

For those of you who love altered states, and, who doesn't, here is another gem she did in collaboration with Brian Eno ****WARNING CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES****

Like Pictures
posted by effluvia at 10:42 AM on April 21, 2022

It’s a sky blue sky
Satellites are out tonight…
posted by Windopaene at 10:46 AM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

yo-de-lay-hee-hoooooooo
posted by kokaku at 11:04 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

a brilliant distillation of her "United States I-IV" work into the length of a single LP

I wanted you
And I was looking for you
But I couldn’t find you

c22754065143f728504b787f2c31cb890ec095d1
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Alive From Off-Center

That show was so good.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:05 PM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I found myself in the precisely optimal circumstance to have my mind blown by Big Science - in a brainy highschool in NYC, a friend brought in the thin-vynil single of O Superman issued as an insert to some sort of art magazine that I’ve never yet seen on Discogs - and so I fell for Laurie’s work hard. The meticulousness in her distilling of words, and also the oh-so exacting enunciation of those words, it was an attitude to the importance of something being said (or not said), that seemed like an emotionally rich and playful version of a kind of deeper thinking I later found a corollary to in Wittgenstein. So, thanks, Laurie, for such long-lasting teenage kicks…
posted by progosk at 12:36 PM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I met this guy, and he looked like he might have been a hat check clerk at an ice rink..
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:56 PM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Laurie Anderson was a huge favorite of mine all through middle and high school, and in retrospect was a big contributor to my love of storytelling. I sort of drifted away from her stuff after I went to college, for no particular reason, and hadn't been keeping up with her post-9/11 work beyond a faint awareness that it existed.

Last month, I saw the retrospective exhibition of her work at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC, and it brought up all kinds of feelings and memories. I got to see pieces I'd only read about, like the bone-conduction audio table, and watch videos that had only been reproduced as still images in Nerve Bible. For a few minutes, it felt like I was standing side by side with my 13 year-old self, or like I'd somehow grown into at least a small part of the future that he envisioned for himself.
It was really something. I'm not sure what, but it was something.
posted by bokane at 1:27 PM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

"From the Air" is like the theme song for the entire 21st century.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:08 PM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

thin-vynil single of O Superman issued as an insert to some sort of art magazine that I’ve never yet seen on Discogs

Sadly, your memory may be at fault. "Let X=X" was issued as an Artforum flexi in 1982. However, your friend may have also had the "O Superman" 7" in its original pressing on One Ten Records, which was the imprint run by artist/archivist Bob George.
posted by mykescipark at 8:27 PM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

your memory may be at fault. "Let X=X" was issued as an Artforum flexi in 1982

the record of the time stands corrected: Let X it was! (O Superman must have been via WNYC, then.)
posted by progosk at 10:58 PM on April 21, 2022

My sister brought back a copy of Home of the Brave from college in 1986, it was one of my most prized possessions my senior year. I just had to pass it around to friends for the wow factor. I still watch it (YouTube) about once a year. I saw her do Strange Angels at the Wiltern in LA, on so much acid that all I remember is flowers. Still have the Talk Normal anthology and a handful of O Superman mixes floating around the music rotation. Still in love like when I was 16.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:38 PM on April 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think my first encounter with Laurie Anderson was waking up on January 1 1984, and surfing around the television. I encountered a truly bizarre show on PBS called "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell", and it took YEARS of waiting before it appeared on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oUdI-KFCyU

I believe it was live, and I don't think it was ever re-aired. Burned into my brain, I sometimes questioned if I ever really saw it. Behold, the greatness: Laurie Anderson! Allen Ginsburg! Nam June Paik! George Plimpton! Merce Cunningham! Peter Gabriel!
posted by scolbath at 4:43 AM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is my favorite Laurie Anderson lyric of all time:

"Hey pal! How do I get to town from here?
And he said:
Well, just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall
Go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway
Take a left at what's going to be the new sports center
And keep going until you hit the place where
They're thinking of building that drive-in bank."

I grew up in a suburb and have spent far too much time in modern industrial parks, so this hits me where I live.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 7:19 AM on April 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

tallmiddleagedgeek: you forgot the last line of that bit:

"And I said to myself, Well, this must be the place."

I heard this in my first week of college, and it blew my mind. The guy on my hall who owned it shared it with me, and I listened to the whole thing on headphones, which was awesome and I kept getting lost in it. It was rich, and weird, and it fit to my brainscape as it was at the time. I still adore it and I have it on my phone (my current main music player) to this day.
posted by mephron at 8:04 AM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

my favorite Laurie Anderson lyric of all time

The Mailman's Nightmare (United States Live CD box set, disc 2, track 15):

"I have this recurring nightmare, and that is that everyone in the world, except myself, has the problems of babies? I mean they're normal height and everything, five feet, six feet tall, in that respect they are normal. But they have these giant heads, like babies, y'know. And these enormous eyes, and tiny legs and arms, real top heavy. And they can hardly walk, y'know. And I'm going down the street and when I see them coming, I give them some room, and step aside. Also they don't read, or write, so I don't have much to do. Job-wise, it's pretty easy."
posted by flabdablet at 8:19 AM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

scolbath, if I had seen that when I was 14 I would have just gone deeper into weird kid in town and had a crush a few years earlier. Maybe for the best, I was weird enough already for my environment to be the weird one for things like this. Thanks for posting it, I might have missed it or even not there on the local PBS. Wish I had seen it back then, had to wait a while.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:00 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yay edit window, I was trying to just like the video scolbath dropped: The Allen Ginsberg Project - Good Morning, Mr Orwell! (Complete Video) - YouTube
posted by zengargoyle at 12:07 PM on April 22, 2022

Like 20:50 in that video is so just something something. This is the language of the on again an off again future". I wish maybe I was a bit older....
posted by zengargoyle at 12:51 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

New Year's Avant Day: Good Morning Mr Orwell previously, OmieWise FPP from September 2016.
posted by Rash at 1:37 PM on April 22, 2022

The subject of OP apparently was released right about the time I was disconnecting from popular culture for about 15 years and I had never heard of either Laurie Anderson or Big Science.

All I can say is, wow. Thanks, oulipian, for pointing this out to me.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:34 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Night resting heavy and humid in Central Florida, when UCF was still a tiny school none of my relatives had heard of, and I flinging myself through the world in a strong young body, sitting in the darkened livingroom-divided-off-by-sheets-as-curtains that served as my bedroom, on a floor-shod mattress that served both as couch and bed. The uncanny poet who was my lover (and a nouvelle cuisine chef, yes 80’s we feel you) finding the way by feel, slid this cassette into the player. *click* as the door snapped closed. Tape reeled and unreeled, that subtle hiss underlying all the music. And then Laurie Anderson’s art pouring until the night was full.

Such wonder.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 8:34 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I listen to Big Science pretty regularly. I always make sure that our cats are around so they can enjoy the wolf howl.
posted by neuron at 8:41 PM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]