HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH.

In 1982, I was in third grade, and it was common knowledge that the world was going to end, if not in 1982, then in 1983, and if not in 1983, then in 1984, and if not in 1984, than in 1985, and so on, and so on, but however and whenever the end actually came, it was coming soon. The things that I was most scared of as a kid, the things which kept me up at night, and gave me nightmares, were not monsters in the closet or under the bed, but monsters from the sky - namely, nuclear bombs and aliens - and I was vigilant about them.

Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night, thinking that the streetlight shining into my bedroom window, or the distant lightning flash from a storm that either hadn't quite hit or hadn't quite passed, was a beacon of my impending doom. I dreamed of night skies gone red, with demonic voices and rain that burned my skin like acid. I liked to read road atlases and books about planets and moons. The wallpaper in my room, which I had chosen myself, was brown, with a tight grid of white lines, interrupted at regular intervals by a thicker light blue line. I wouldn't hear of Laurie Anderson, or her song "O Superman" until much later on. But I'm pretty sure the song would have changed my life if I'd heard it in 1982 when it came out. Laurie and I were on the same page.

In her liner notes for the recent 25th Anniversary reissue of her debut album Big Science, Anderson notes, referring to the astonishing success of her first single in the U.K. (largely thanks to the late John Peel, who championed it on his influential radio show), an expansive and trance-inducing poem full of otherworldly electronic vocal effects that was (and is, even more so, today) simultaneously playful and creepy, an apocalyptic satire on American ambitions toward political, technological and cultural world domination (inspired by a Jules Massenet aria called O Souverain), that Europeans seemed conflicted about American culture, that they saw it as their own future. Here come the planes. They're American planes.

In 1982, I think I felt that I was living in a future as imagined by H.G. Wells or Rod Serling. I wasn't scared of the boogeyman, but I was scared of Russia. World War III was imminent, and it would likely involve not just people named Vladimir, but also metallic tripods from Mars which could vaporize human beings. And in aliens didn't invade soon, then, some cosmic event would occur in which the earth would, somehow, fall out of orbit, and we'd either be drawn into the sun's fire, or fall away into the cold deadness of the outer solar system, like in that one Twilight Zone episode. My favorite song was called "Mr. Roboto." Big Science is a record (of the time) that addresses all my Reagan-era childhood anxieties in retrospect - even as its references to crashing planes and burning buildings and its little ironic one-liner responses to crashing planes and burning buildings all speak directly to the present post-9/11 moment from the record's place in the past. In the album's title track, she envisions "golden cities" of full of sports centers and drive-in banks. I live in such a city now. Hallelujah. Yo-de-lay-hee-hoo.

HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH.

O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad... "This is the weirdest song I think I have ever heard in my whole life," my 12-year-old son Stew pronounces from the passenger seat while Leon, the younger of the two boys, fights off sleep in the back seat. I know, however, that he'll wake up when he hears the playful Teutonic folk dances and gleeful chaos of the next track ("Example #22"). He's already heard it once this afternoon, and he laughed out loud the way I've never heard him laugh during a Spongebob cartoon. I'm secretly taking a long way home just so that I (and, yes, the boys) can hear these two songs in succession, in their entirety.

Stewart has been enjoying the somewhat generic pleasures of Chicago 19 for the last couple of days. He's been singing "Heart in Pieces" around the house lately. But his reactions to the infinite, and infinitely strange "O Superman" are heartfelt and intense. He seems both curious and repulsed. Accustomed to hearing the occasional Broadway cast album in the car, he asks, "Is this a play?" Nope. "It's an album?" Yep. From 1982. The song was a big hit in Europe. Can you imagine hearing it on the radio? He gives me an incredulous look. "Ha ha ha", he chants along with the song's ever-present electronic respiration, "it's like a robot laughing."

But, over the course of the song's eight and a half minutes, the minimal, two chord melody becomes so integral to the moment that our brains inhale it like oxygen, and even without knowing the words, even just hearing it for the first time, I catch Stew absent-mindedly half-humming, half-singing along when Anderson's ever-vocodered voice gets to the part about when there is no justice, there's always force, and finally, when there is no force, there's always Mom - Hi Mom! - holding us in her long arms, her automatic arms, her electronic arms. The song rises in a climactic crescendo of brass and woodwinds, violins and synthesizer bleeps, and then it takes it's last breath. HUH. And Stew summarizes: "Okay, so that was just weird".

HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH.

It seemed everybody in the radical NYC art scene of the early 80s was working on an opera. So says Laurie. And while Laurie Anderson, then in her mid-30s, wasn't really writing an opera, she was in the midst of a massive project she would ultimately call United States, a multi-media performance piece in four discrete, themed parts inspired by her various travels as a self-proclaimed cultural anthropologist, which would be operatic in terms of sheer scope and emotional heft. Documented in a four-disc box set in the mid-80s (later re-released on CD), United States is as large and varied, conflicted, hilarious, scary, gleefully absurd, willfully difficult and self-assured of its own glory as the nation it simultaneously celebrates, satirizes and grieves for.

The 9 songs that make up Big Science were part of that (mostly, the second part - dealing with politics); and because Laurie Anderson wasn't really a singer - she performed in mostly spoken word with electronic vocal effects, her wry recitations full of strange, seemingly unwarranted pauses - and also because the songs were performed "multidimensionally", with integral visual elements that made them more like temporary art objects or sculptural installations than merely "songs", they were never really intended to be a record. But producer Roma Baran (who continued to collaborate with Anderson throughout the decade) finally convinced Anderson that there were perfectly avant-garde justifications for the recording of a single of "O Superman". Originally pressed by a tiny New York independent, the song, strangely (and somewhat miraculously, all things considered) became a huge pop hit in Europe, leading to an otherwise unlikely contract with Warner Bros. and an even more unlikely 25-year (and still going) career as a recording artist.

HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH.

This is your captain speaking. The album begins with a nervy musical motif in 8 beats, repeated, repeated, repeated, on wordless vocoder, later joined with heightening off-kilter jazz harmonies by saxophones as Anderson speaks the role of an airline pilot, all easy amiability and airborne hospitality as she calmly explains that we are going... down... we are all going... down... together between mordant Simon Says jokes and bleak church organ chords. The song is relentlessly claustrophobic - that 8-beat motif repeating endlessly like blood squeezed through tiny vessels in a panicked brain - even as it moves inexorably towards its final, suicidal liberation. Repetition is key to Big Science. But so is how the music often feels like a physical function - like the electronic breathing that anchors "O Superman" - willfully blurring the line between live and Memorex, woman and machine, voice and vocoder, until the integration of the two feels more real - the way people now attach communication devices to their heads - than their separation. In "Sweater", Anderson is backed by the jazz-bagpipist Rufus Harley, and, between her atonally dismissive verses, her voice squeals and drones like a human bagpipes.

In the ceremonial "Born, Never Asked", Anderson establishes a persistent and even lovable heartbeat rhythm with handclaps and marimba. In the midst of the album's strange cacophony of horns and bagpipes and synthesizers, in the midst of ringing phones and words spoken in foreign languages, and tape recorders playing voices in reverse, in the midst of all the polyrhythms (Anderson notes that the musicians working with her in the studio were often confused about where the downbeats should be, and she tried to keep the proceedings "barless"), and Anderson's modern-day Ezekiel street prophet hallucinations, that marimba handclap heartbeat - so simple and organic considering the surroundings - is somehow comforting, something to hold on to, something to protect us from the things that we've made that can destroy us, like the tall panels of plexiglass guarding the edges of the roof of the Rockefeller Center so that you don't accidentally jump off of the Rockefeller Center even as you look down from the roof and ponder what it must be like to jump off the Rockefeller Center and fall to the ground like a raindrop. Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane.

HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH.

"Let x=x?" Yeah. "What does that even mean?" I'm not sure, but I think it's about things being exactly what they appear to be. Or maybe longing for that, especially at a time when everything tries so hard to look like what it isn't. Y'know, like when you go to Wal-Mart and they're selling 'organic' stuff. It's the handclap marimba heartbeat again... so nice to have it back. And in the second verse she reads a postcard full of grateful sweet nothings - Thanks for all the presents. Thanks for introducing me to the Chief. Thanks for putting on the feedbag. - ending with hugs and kisses - X X X Zero Zero Zero - which all seems fun and nice until the postcard writer adds a frightening P.S., and the meditative farfisa organ chords give way to a bustling, popping horn section evoking sirens and the purposeful, surface-calm nervousness of an evacuation. "So, I guess the guy burned up then, right?" I don't know. "Because things are what they appear to be, right? Let x=x?"

I don't know, but I love the fact that Stew is asking. The thing about Big Science is that on paper, it would appear to be one of the most elitist, most esoteric, most self-consciously highbrow, avant-garde, artsy-fartsy things someone could ever want to listen to. The very definition of a niche release. Certainly a record that would come off as prohibitively strange to just about everyone I know. But the kids love it. And it speaks directly to my own Inner 9-year-old, reminding me of everything that I was scared of, and reassuring me that there's probably good reason to be scared. There is no pilot. You are not alone.

HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH. HUH.

The 2007 reissue of Big Science, by the Warner-affiliated Nonesuch Records comes in a cardboard digipack with a booklet full of archival photos, the songs' lyrics, and Anderson's reflective liner notes. There are no CD bonus tracks, but an "enhanced" portion of the disc includes "Walk the Dog", the rare original b-side of the "O Superman" single, along with the "O Superman" video. The sound throughout is superb, clear, layered, and beautifully separated, illuminating all sorts of tiny details that were nearly inaudible on previous CD issues. It's not nearly as fancy or expansive as some of the recent reissues (similarly Warner-affiliated) Rhino has done for The Cure or Depeche Mode, but it does make Big Science appear more to be the classic record it actually is.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Big Science" by Laurie Anderson
Nonesuch Records
Originally released 1982
Re-issued 7/17/07

Produced by Roman Baran
38 min.

SONGS: From the Air - Big Science - Sweaters - Walking and Falling - Born, Never Asked - O Superman - Example #22 - Let x=x - It Tango


Recommended: Yes