We Who Are About To Crash Offer You A Smoke

We Who Are About To Crash Offer You A Smoke

LAURIE ANDERSON

Big Science

(Warner Bro.)

Mitchell Cohen

by

•�I no longer love the way you hold your pens and pencils� is a line that any one of a thousand writers might write. But not many would have that line accompanied by bagpipes, or have those bagpipes do the Raelettes part in a call-andresponse based on �What�d I Say.� Laurie Anderson would, and did. Bagpipes are, of course, inexcusable. The joke, however, is a good one.

•The surprise about last year�s hotc ha-single-by-critical-consensus �O Superman�/�Walk The Dog� was how playful it was, how unsolemn. Anderson is an artmusic type, with non-linear eccentricities, snip-and-paste lyrical methods and en garde musical thrusts, but she�s funny in a flip, deadpan way. She�s likely to toss off a wicked Dolly Parton imitation or toss in a couplet like �Well I feel so bad, 1 feel so sad/But not as bad as the night I wrote this song� (from �Walk The Dog,� not on this LP debut).

•Anderson, who half-talks halfchants her way through most of her pieces, picks up on the impersonal nature of so much social communication: airplane pilot to passengers, answering machines to callers. She sounds, sometimes, like an electronic tour guide pointing out interesting facts at World�s Fair exhibits.

The music can get fidgety, panicky, cranky; the voice stays cool, keeps ironic distance, plays �Simon Says� as a plane prepares for a crash landing.

•She proposes: �Let X = X.� Let Rickie Lee Jones* Peggy Lee singing �Is That All There Is� at Smokey Joe�s Cafe. Then let Laurie Anderson = Keely Smith singing �That Old Black Magic� at the Sugar Shack.

•Piecing together American idioms, non sequitur asides and seemingly free-association phrases, Anderson sends her collages after big game. The American abyss. Big Science is comprised of sections from a longer, ambitious performance piece called �United States I-IV,� and it�s an America in which father is a captain/caveman and mother holds her citizens in military arms. Unlike Fonda and Hopper, Anderson finds it a snap to find America—she just asks directions, and is pointed past malls, freeways, sports centers, drive-in banks. Progress is tied to isolationism (�Every man for himself�), and �I$ig Science� becomes part of a chant, a prayer: �Hallelujah/Yodellayheehoo.�

(•About this yodellayheehoo� business, a linguistic puzzle: if you speak, as Anderson does, the word �yodellayheehoo� in a flat, un-Slim Whitman way, are you still yodelling? Does the word imply the action, or does �yodellayheehoo� require those acrobatic frills to become yodelling?)

•The briefer pieces—�Sweaters,� �It Tango,� �Walking & Falling�— eschew the approach of found phrases flung together, and instead latch on to one subtle notion, i.e., a he responding to everything a she asks him by saying �Isn�t it just like a woman?,� or a sober little meditation on the simultaneity of two physical actions. �Walking & Falling,� come to think of jt, is a very Yoko Ono c. Grapefruit notion.

•She plays the Farfisa (and the violin, quite seductively on �Born, Not Asked�), and electronics figure significantly in her music, and she quotes from �Secret Agent Man,� but Laurie Anderson is a rock artist primarily by corporate association. Rock has let in boho-cerebral sorts before, and Big Science isn�t far from Patti Smith�s Horses as an assertion of personal style (no electric guitars, though, an omission which would bar her from airplay on radio ethiopia, let alone WPLJ), or from the earliest discs of Talking Heads (Anderson, too, has big country ideas and an affinity for burning buildings; you could call this album More Songs About Airplanes And Cigarettes). The way she rummages through a catalog of absurdities, cultural markers and personal observations makes her a pop artist. Her liveliness of thought and cleverness of musical conjunctions makes Big Science a strange and amusing work.