Laurie Anderson

Langue D'Amour

Let's see, uh. . .

It was on an island, and there was a snake.
And this snake had legs.
And he could walk all around the island.

Yes, that's true.

A snake with legs.

And the man and the woman were on the island too,
and they were not very smart.
But they were happy as clams. Yeah.

Let's see, uh, then one evening,

the snake was walking about in the garden,
and he was talking to himself,
and he saw the woman and they started to talk.

And they became friends.

Very good friends.

And the woman liked the snake very much,

because when he talked,
he made little noises with his tongue,
and his long tongue
was lightly licking
about his lips
like there was a little fire inside his mouth.

And the flame would come dancing out of his mouth,

and the woman liked this. Very much.

And after that, she was bored with the man,

because no matter what happened
he was always as happy as a clam.
What did the snake say? Yes, what was he saying?
Ok, I will tell you.

The snake told her things about the world.

He told her about the time when there was a big typhoon on the island,
and all the sharks came out of the water, yes.
They came out of the water and they walked right into your house
with their big, white teeth.

And the woman heard these things.

And she was in love.
And the man came out and said,
We have to go now.
And the woman did not want to go.
Because she was a hothead.
Because she was a woman in love.

Anyway, they got into the boat and left the island,
but they never stayed anywhere very long
because the woman was restless.
She was a hothead. She was a woman in love.

And this is not a story my people tell;

it is something I know
myself.
And when I do my job
I am thinking about these things,
because when I do my job,

that
is what I think about.

Oooo la la la la. Voici. Voilà.

Ooo la la la la. Voici le langage de l'amour.
Oooo la la la la. La la la.
Voici. Voilà. La la.
Voici le langage de l'amour.
Ah! Comme ci, comme ça. Voilà. Voilà.
Voici le langage de l'amour.
Attends! Attends! Attends!
Écoute. Écoute. Écoute.

Yeah. La La La La. Here. And there.

Oh yes. This is the language of love.
Here it is. There it is. La la.
This is the language of love.
Ah! Neither here nor there.
There. There.
This is the language of love.
This is the language of love.
Wait! Wait! Wait!
Wait! Wait! Wait!
Listen. Listen. Listen.

Only An Expert

Now only an expert can deal with the problem,

Because half the problem is seeing the problem,
And only an expert can deal with the problem.

So if there's no expert dealing with the problem,

It's really actually twice the problem,
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Cause only an expert can deal with the problem.

Now in America we like solutions,

We like solutions to problems.
And there's so many companies that offer solutions,
Companies with names like Pet Solution.
The Hair Solution. The Debt Solution. The World Solution. The Sushi Solution.
Companies with experts ready to solve the problems,
Cause only an expert can see there's a problem
And only an expert can deal with the problem
Only and expert can deal with the problem.

Now let's say you're invited to be on Oprah

And you don't have a problem.
But you want to go on the show, so you need a problem.
So you invent a problem.
But if you're not an expert in problems,
You're probably not going to invent a very plausible problem
And so you're probably going to get nailed.
You're going to get exposed.
You're going to have to bow down and apologize
And beg for the public's forgiveness.
Cause only an expert can see there's a problem
And only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem

Now on these shows, the shows that try to solve your problems
The big question is always: How can I get control?
How can I take control?”
But don't forget this is a question
for the regular viewer. The person who's barely getting by
The person who's watching shows about people with problems.
The person who's part of the 60% of the U.S. population
1.3 weeks away, 1.3 pay checks away from homelessness.
In other words, a person with problems.
So when experts say, “Let's get to the root of the problem,
Let's take control of the problem,”
if you take control of the problem, you can solve the problem.”
Now often this doesn't work at all
because the situation is completely out of control.
Cause only an expert can deal with the problem.
Only an expert can deal with the problem.

So who are these experts?

Experts are usually self-appointed people or elected officials
Or people skilled in sales techniques, trained or self-taught
To focus on things that might be identified as problems.
Now sometimes these things are not actually problems.
But the expert is someone who studies the problem
And tries to solve the problem.
The expert is someone who carries malpractice insurance.
Because often the solution becomes the problem.
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Cause only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem.

Now sometimes experts look for weapons.

And sometimes they look everywhere for weapons.
And sometimes when they don't find any weapons.
Sometimes other experts say, “If you haven't found any weapons,
It doesn't mean there are no weapons.””
And other experts looking for weapons find things like cleaning fluids.
And refrigerator rods. And small magnets.
And they say, “These things may look like common objects to you,
But in our opinion, they could be weapons.
Or they could be used to make weapons.
Or they could be used to ship weapons.
Or to store weapons.””
Cause only an expert can see they might be weapons
And only an expert can see they might be problems.
Cause only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem.

And sometimes, if it's really really really hot

And it's July in January,
And there's no more snow and huge waves are wiping out cities,
And hurricanes are everywhere,
everyone knows it's a problem.
But if some of the experts say it's no problem,
And other experts claim it's no problem
Or explain why it's no problem,
Then it's simply not a problem.
But when an expert says it's a problem,
And makes a movie and wins an Oscar about the problem
Then all the other experts have to agree that it is most likely a problem.
Cause only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem.

And even though a county can invade another country,

And flatten it. And ruin it. And create havoc and civil war in that other country,
If the experts say that it's not a problem
And everyone agrees that they're experts good at seeing problems
Then invading that country is simply not a problem.
And if a country tortures people
And holds citizens without cause or trial and sets up military tribunals,
This is also not a problem.
Unless there's an expert who says it's the beginning of a problem.
Cause only an expert can deal with the problem.
Only an expert can deal with the problem.

Only an expert can see there's a problem

And see the problem is half the problem
And only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem

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O Superman

O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.

Hi. I'm not home right now. But if you want to leave a message,
just start talking at the sound of the tone.

Beep!
“Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?”

Beep!
“Hello? Is anybody home?
Well, you don't know me,
but I know you. And I've got a message to give to you:
“Here come the planes.”
So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come
as you are, but pay as you go. Pay as you go.”

And I said: “OK. Who is this really?”

And the voice said:

“This is the hand, the hand that takes. This is the hand,
the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?”

And the voice said:

“Neither snow nor rain nor gloom

of night shall stay these couriers
from the swift completion
of their appointed rounds.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.

And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!”

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,

Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.

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Sharkey’s Day

Sun's coming up. Like a big bald head. Poking up over the grocery store. It's Sharkey's day. It's
Sharkey's day today. Sharkey wakes up and Sharkey says: There was this man... And there was this
road...And if only I could remember these dreams... I know they're trying to tell me...something.
Ooooeee. Strange dreams.(Strange dreams). Oh yeah. And Sharkey says: I turn around, it's fear. I turn
around again And it's love. Oh yeah. Strange dreams. And the little girls sing:Oooee Sharkey. And the
manager says: Mr. Sharkey? He's not at his desk right now. Could I take a message? And the little girls
sing: Oooeee Sharkey. He's Mister Heartbreak. They sing: Oooeee Sharkey. Yeah. He's Mister
Heartbreak. And Sharkey says: All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to
tell me. Listen! Trees are swinging in the breeze. They're talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs
together. They're all talking. They're talking to me. And short animals- They're bucking up on their
hind legs. Talking. Talking to me. Hey! Look out! Bugs are crawling up my legs! You know? I'd rather
see this on TV. Tones it down. And Sharkey says: I turn around, it's fear. I turn around again, and it's
love. Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. And Sharkey says: All night long I think of those
little planes up there. Flying around. You can't even see them. They're specks! And they're full of tiny
people. Going places. And Sharkey says: You know? I bet they could all land on the head of a pin.
And the little girls sing: Ooooeee. Sharkey! He's Mister Heartbreak. They sing: Oooeee. That Sharkey!
He's a slow dance on the edge of the lake. He's a whole landscape gone to seed. He's gone wild! He's
screeching tires on an oil slick at midnight on the road to Boston a long time ago. And Sharkey says:
Lights! Camera! Action! TIMBER! At the beginning of the movie, they know they have to find each
other. But they ride off in opposite directions. Sharkey says: I turn around, it's fear. I turn around
again, and it's love. Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. You know? They're growing
mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down. Sharkey says:
All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to its full height from a boggy
swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It's life! It's life! I turn around, it's fear. I turn
around again, and it's love. Nobody knows me. Nobody knows my name. Deep in the heart of darkest
America. Home of the brave. Ha! Ha! Ha! You've already paid for this. Listen to my heart beat. And
the little girls sing: Oooeee Sharkey. He's a slow dance on the edge of the lake. They sing: Ooooeeee.
Sharkey. He's Mister Heartbreak. Paging Mr. Sharkey. White courtesy telephone please. And Sharkey
says: I turn around, it's fear. I turn around again, and it's love. And the little girls sing: Ooooeee
Sharkey. Yeah. On top of Old Smokey all covered with snow. That's where I wanna, that's where I'm
gonna That's where I'm gonna go.

The Language Of The Future

Last year, I was on a twin-engine plane coming from Milwaukee to New York City. Just over La
Guardia, one of the engines conked out and we started to drop straight down, flipping over and over.
Then the other engine died: and we went completely out of control. New York City started getting
taller and taller. A voice came over the intercom and said:

Our pilot has informed us that we are about to attempt a crash landing.
Please extinguish all cigarettes. Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position.

Your Captain says: Please do not panic.

Your Captain says: Place your head in your hands.
Captain says: Place your head on your knees.
Captain says: Put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your knees! (heh-heh)

This is your Captain.

Have you lost your dog?
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We are going down.
We are all going down, together.

As it turned out, we were caught in a downdraft and rammed into a bank. It was, in short, a miracle.
But afterwards I was terrified of getting onto planes. The moment I started walking down that aisle,
my eyes would clamp shut and I would fall into a deep, impenetrable sleep.

(YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS ...

YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HERE ...
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR DOG?)

Finally, I was able to remain conscious, but I always had to go up to the forward cabin and ask the
stewardesses if I could sit next to them: “Hi! Uh, mind if I join you?” They were always rather irritated
—“Oh, all right (what a baby)”—and I watched their uniforms crack as we made nervous chitchat.

Sometimes even this didn’t work, and I’d have to find one of the other passengers to talk to. You can
spot these people immediately. There’s one on every flight. Someone who’s really on your
wavelength. I was on a flight from L.A. when I spotted one of them, sitting across the aisle. A girl,
about fifteen. And she had this stuffed rabbit set up on her tray table and she kept arranging and
rearranging the rabbit and kind of waving to it: “Hi!”“Hi there!”

And I decided: This is the one I want to sit next to. So I sat down and we started to talk and suddenly I
realized she was speaking an entirely different language. Computerese. A kind of high-tech lingo.
Everything was circuitry, electronics, switching. If she didn’t understand something, it just “didn’t
scan.” We talked mostly about her boyfriend. This guy was never in a bad mood. He was in a bad
mode. Modey kind of a guy. The romance was apparently kind of rocky and she kept saying: “Man oh
man you know like it’s so digital!” She just meant the relationship was on again, off again.

Always two things switching.

Current runs through bodies and then it doesn’t.
It was a language of sounds, of noise, of switching, of signals.
It was the language of the rabbit, the caribou, the penguin, the beaver.
A language of the past.
Current runs through bodies and then it doesn’t.
On again.
Off again.
Always two things switching.
One thing instantly replaces another.

It was the language of the Future.

Put your knees up to your chin.

Have you lost your dog?
Put your hands over your eyes.

Jump out of the plane.

There is no pilot.
You are not alone.

This is the language of the on-again off-again future.

And it is Digital.

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And I answered the phone and I heard a voice and the voice said:
Please do not hang up.
We know who you are.
Please do not hang up.
We know what you have to say.
Please do not hang up.
We know what you want.
Please do not hang up.
We’ve got your number:
One ...
Two ...
Three ...
Four.

Another Day in America

And so, finally, here we are at the beginning of a whole new era.
The start of a brand new world. And now what? How do we start?
How do we begin again?

There are some things you can simply look up–

Such as the size of Greenland, the dates of the famous nineteenth-century rubber wars,
Persian adjectives, the composition of snow.
And other things you just have to guess at.

And then again today is the day and those were the days and now these are the days.
And now the clock points histrionically to noon. Some new kind of north.
And so, which way do we go?

What are days for? To wake us up.

To put between the endless nights.

And by the way, here's my theory of punctuation: instead if a period

at the end of each sentence, there should be a tiny clock
that shows you how long it took you to write that
sentence.

And another way to look at time is this: There was an old married couple
and they had always hated each other.
Never been able to stand the sight of each other, really.
And when they were in their nineties they finally got divorced and people said:
Why did you wait so long? Why didn't you do this a whole lot earlier?
And they said: Well, we wanted to wait until the children died.

Ah America! And what will be America? A whole new place just waiting to happen.
Broken up parking lots, rotten dumps, speedballs, accidents and hesitations,
things left behind, styrofoam, computer chips.

And Jim and John, oh they were there. And Carol too, her hair pinned up
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in that weird beehive way she liked so much. And Craig and Phil moving at the pace of summer.
And Uncle Al who screamed all night in the attic. Yes something happened to him
in the war they said over in France. And France had become something we never mentioned.
Something dangerous.

Yes some were sad to see those days disappear. The flea markets and their smells, the war,
all the old belongings strewn out on the sidewalks. Mildewed clothes
and old resentments and ragged record jackets.

And ah these days. All these days! What are days for?
To wake us up. To put between the endless nights.

And meanwhile all over town, checks are bouncing and accounts are being automatically closed.
Passwords are expiring. And everyone's counting and comparing and predicting.
Will it be the best of times? Will it be the worst of times?
Or will it just be another one of those times?
Show of hands please!

And ah this world, which like Kierkegaard said, can only be understood when lived
backwards which would entail an incredible amount
of planning and confusion.
And then there are those big questions always at the back of your mind.
Things like: Are those two people over there
actually my real parents? Should I get a second Prius?
And you, you who can be silent in four languages;
your silence will be considered your consent.

Ah but those were the days before the audience, and what the audience wanted,
And what the audience said it wanted.

And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them.
We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow.
We can't flood them or burn them up or turn them out.
But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them.

Some say our empire is passing. As all empires do.

And others haven't a clue what time it is or where it goes or even where the clock is.

And oh the majesty of trees. An unstoppable train. Different colored wonderlands.

Freedom of speech and sex with strangers.

Dear old God, may I call you old? And may I ask: Who are these people?
Ah America! We saw it. We tipped it over and then we sold it.
These are the things I whisper softly to my dolls, those heartless little thugs dressed in calico kilts
and jaunty hats and their perpetual white, toothy smiles.

And oh my brothers and oh my sisters. What are days for? Days are where we live.
The flow and then the flow. They come, they fade, they go and they go.
No way to know exactly when they start, or when their time is up.

Oh, another day, another dime. Another day in America.

Another day, another dollar. Another day in America.
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And oh my brothers and oh my long lost sisters.
How do we begin again? How do we begin?

The Ugly One with the Jewels

In 1974, I went to Mexico to visit my brother who was working as an anthropologist with Tsutsil
Indians, the last surviving Mayan tribe. And the Tsutsil speak a lovely birdlike language and are quite
tiny physically; I towered over them. Mostly, I spent my days following the women around since my
brother wasn’t really allowed to do this. We got up at 3am and began to separate the corn into three
colors. And we boiled it, ran to the mill and back, and finally started to make the tortillas. Now all the
other women’s tortillas were 360°, perfectly toasted, perfectly round; and after a lot of practice mine
were still lop-sided and charred. And when they thought I wasn’t looking they threw them to the dogs.
After breakfast we spent the rest of the day down at the river watching the goats and braiding and
unbraiding each other’s hair. So usually there wasn’t that much to report. One day the women decided
to braid my hair Tsutsil-style. After they did this I saw my reflection in a puddle. I looked ridiculous
but they said, “Before we did this you were ugly, but now maybe you will find a husband.”

I lived in a yurt, a thatched structure shaped like a cob cake. And there’s a central fireplace ringed by
sleeping shelves sort of like a dry beaver down. Now my Tsutsil name was Lausha, which loosely
translated means, “the ugly one with the jewels.” Now ugly, OK, I was awfully tall by local standards.
But what did they mean by the jewels? I didn’t find out what this meant until one night, when I was
taking my contact lenses out, and since I’d lost the case I was carefully placing them on the sleeping
shelf; suddenly I noticed that everyone was staring at me and I realized that none of the Tsutsil had
ever seen glasses, much less contacts, and that these were the jewels, the transparent, perfectly round
jewels that I carefully hid on the shelf at night and then put for safekeeping into my eyes every
morning.

So I may have been ugly but so what? I had the jewels.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
And I alone am left to tell the tale.
Call me Ishmael.

From the Air

Good evening. This is your Captain.

We are about to attempt a crash landing.
Please extinguish all cigarettes.
Place your tray tables in their
upright, locked position.
Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees.
Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands.
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Put your hands on your hips. Heh heh.
This is your Captain—and we are going down.
We are all going down, together.
And I said: Uh oh. This is gonna be some day.

Standby. This is the time.

And this is the record of the time.
This is the time.
And this is the record of the time.

Uh—-this is your Captain again.

You know, I've got a funny feeling I've seen this all before.
Why? Cause I'm a caveman.
Why? Cause I've got eyes in the back of my head.
Why? It's the heat. Standby.

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane.
There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

An Essay Excerpt on Laurie Anderson,

from http://starling.rinet.ru/music/lauriec.htm

[…]

I would personally describe Laurie Anderson as one of the most important artists working in music in
the 80s.

Laurie Anderson is probably a minor figure in the history of music. It would be difficult to describe
her as musically influential (and many people writing about her work feel the need to add the
disclaimer that she is more of a "performance artist" than a "musician"). At the same time I think
United States Live is a masterpiece.

In the 80s a lot of artists in different fields tried various ways to address the ways in which technology,
identity, and gender were put in flux in an increasingly "wired" world. I think that Laurie Anderson is
one of the most successful people at addressing those issues in any medium and that she succeeds in
using music as an important part of that artistic statement.

Consider, from that perspective, the lyrics to the song "Mach 20"

"Ladies and Gentlemen. What you are observing here are magnified examples, or facsimiles, of
human sperm."

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"Generation after generation of these tiny creatures have sacrificed themselves in their persistent,
often futile attempt to transport the basic male genetic code. But where's this information coming
from? They have no eyes. No ears. Yet some of them already know that they will be bald. Some of them
know that they will have small crooked teeth. Over half of them will end up as women. Four hundred
million living creatures, all knowing precisely the same thing. Carbon copies of each other in a
Kamikaze race against the clock."

"Now some of you may be surprised to learn that if a sperm were the size of a salmon it would be
swimming its seven inch journey at five hundred miles per hour. If a sperm were the size of a whale,
however, it would be traveling at fifteen thousand miles per hour or Mach twenty."

"Now imagine, if you will, four hundred million blind and desperate sperm whales departing from the
Pacific Coast of North America, swimming at fifteen thousand miles per hour, and arriving in
Japanese coastal waters in just under forty five minutes. How would they be received? Would they
realize that they were carrying information? A message? Would there be room for so many millions?
Would they know that they had been sent for a purpose?"

The basic humor here is the way in which Science's tendency to abstract and mathematize the world
(and I say this as someone who was a math major) lends itself to category errors. The question, "how
fast would sperm swim if they were the size of a whale?" Is not one that anyone would think of based
simply on direct experience with sperm. It makes it clear distant scientific thinking "once we have an
equation we can plug in whatever values we want" is from day to day experience. (Note: for more
information on a related topic I highly recommend Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy). From the
point of view the fact (as far as I can tell) that Laurie significantly overestimates the swimming speed
of sperm, doesn't interfere with the humor at all -- rather it emphasizes how easy it can be to introduce
order of magnitude errors. If we think of Mathematics as a language this results in the equivalent of
nonsense words—another Laurie Anderson theme.

What's impressive, however, about this song is the way in which it is simultaneously evocative and
allusive while still having a point. The lyrics allow for a multitude of references without devolving into
being just references to other things. Is it, for example, an exaggeration to see the word "bald" working
partially as a reference to the absurdity of the fact that for all of the power of modern science/medicine
so much time and money has been put into trying to solve male baldness with so little results. Or
consider the comments ". . . all knowing the same thing" and ". . . carrying information? A message?"
as references to the "atoms vs. bits" debate. Are human beings just information? Is human
understanding and "knowing" logically similar to information encoded in genetic material? Those
examples suggest that the song is coldly and analytically critical but I think it's poignant as well. The
way Laurie sings the song the images of the race against the clock and the "blind and desperate" sperm
are given weight as well. The sperm that she sings about are both mathematical abstraction and, at
some level, still living cells.

These allusions have power because the central image— the eye of science (mathematics?) turned on
the most human of subjects treats it as simple matter, is strong enough to support them. That image is
not drowned in the other ideas and emotions (contrast, for example, Warren Zevon's "Transverse
City". A song that I love but that is nothing more than images. It has no core idea).

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Perhaps I have worked too hard on what is, ultimately, a throw-away song. But I do think Laurie
Anderson succeeds in giving us a musical language to express these ideas. It is both technological and
human (an analog synthesizer sampling the human voice on "O Superman," both distant and personal.
The music alternates between anxious and playful— both of which seem like reasonable responses to
encroaching technology.

I'm not sure that Laurie Anderson's music is noteworthy for any reason other than its ability to express
and reflect the content of her work (though in the right mood her songs can be beautiful) and that,
perhaps, is why she is more of a performance artist than a musician. But she is an artist who explores
important themes with a confidence and creativity that is difficult to match.

from
http://athena.english.vt.edu/~siegle/Postmodern/Performance/I.__Laurie_Anderson/i.__laurie_anderson.html

“It is perhaps not too much to suggest that Anderson manages to "deterritorialize" the United States, to
give her audience a sense that they are in some measure outside or wanderers within the very place
they live.”

from http://thefiddleback.com/issue-items/here-come-the-planes

(An essay which discusses the uncanny similarity between Anderson’s song, “O Superman.”
Focus on passages in bold)

Here Come the Planes

by Isaac Butler

[…]

[T]his song, with its curious title, "O Superman," and cold, borderline-cheesy lyrics and
seemingly endless repetitions was, briefly, a monster hit. Up to #2 in the UK. One very bad
recording of it on YouTube boasts that “this is what we all used to dance to back in the day.”

[…] Anderson’s work as a performance artist and musician relies heavily on distortions of her
alto voice. She pitch-shifts it down two octaves, becoming a male “Voice of Authority,” or adds
reverb and delay effects to punch home emotional beats. In both United States I-IV—the four
hour stage show where "O Superman" debuted—and Big Science—the commercial album it
appears on—Anderson sings through the vocoder, a kind of synthesizer that attaches your voice
to notes you play through an instrument. You’ve heard it used by Peter Frampton on his biggest
hits, or by Afrikaa Bombaata. The British also used it during World War II to send coded
messages, breaking the sound up into multiple channels for spies to assemble later.

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The opening lyrics of "O Superman" ("O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad") are a play on Le
Cid’s aria "O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere." In the opera, these words are uttered as a prayer of
resignation, the hero putting his fate in God’s hands. In the Laurie Anderson song, the three O’s
change meaning. First, she prays to Superman (Truth! Justice! The American Way!) but by the end she
longs for Mom and Dad, and gives this longing voice in a series of vocoded ah’s: "Ah Ha Ha-Ah Ah-
Ah-Ha."

Despite Anderson dedicating the song to Le Cid’s composer, the two biggest influences it draws from
are The Normal’s "Warm Leatherette" and the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the
Beach. Indeed, "O Superman" can in some ways be read as a marriage of the two, of the uniting of
brows both high and low, the repetition of minimalist opera lensed through the repetition of the dance
floor. 

Anderson is open about the debt she owes Einstein on the Beach. In interviews from the time, she cites
the show as opening up possibilities for what a stage show could be, a process that lead to United
States I-IV. "O Superman’s repetitive “ha” references the sung counting during Einstein’s opening, and
the keyboard lines not only sound Glassian, but the actual specific organ tone is one fans of the Philip
Glass Ensemble will recognize.

The relationship between "Warm Leatherette" and "O Superman" is more tenuous. Certainly "O
Superman" would not have garnered Anderson chart success and a seven-album deal with Warner
Brothers without The Normal’s game-changing single from three years prior. Several sawtooth waves
—chords, a siren gliss and a thwap-thwap rhythm—make up the entirety of “Warm Leatherette”’s
music, while Daniel Miller, The Normal’s sole member, delivers ominous couplets about sex and car
crashes. The song is essentially a musical setting of the JG Ballard novel, Crash, in which a car crash
awakens the novel’s narrator to the sexual possibilities inherent in the automobile and its destruction. 

[…] "O Superman" accesses JG Ballard’s apocalyptic vision of techno emptiness and Cold War
nuclear anxiety. "Warm Leatherette" echoes Crash’s alienated space in which everything
becomes simultaneously mechanized and eroticized. "O Superman," meanwhile, creates a space
of mechanization and alienation that also contains our human responses to this alienation:
paranoia, loneliness, and a kind of heartbroken yearning. No character in a Ballard novel would
ever beg to be held by Mommy, as Anderson does by the end of the song.

***

Coming as they do out of a theatrical tradition, Anderson’s songs, even at their most abstract,
tell stories. "O Superman" is no different. Here, more or less, is its story:

You sit in your apartment in New York City at night. You are alone. Perhaps this apartment is
on Canal Street, nearby the Holland Tunnel. It is 1981. 

You sit in your apartment in a chair rescued off the street. The day you found it, you felt grateful
that no one needed this chair anymore. This is the economy of New York furniture. People lug
their unused belongings to the curb: The televisions and air conditioners with yellow paper
taped to them, the word WORKS written in sharpie; the chairs that look fine, but might contain
bedbugs; the couches that get waterlogged while you try to round up friends to lug them up the
four flights of stairs to your apartment.
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Concrete Island lies open on your lap, off to your right on a stack of milk crates rests a glass of
cheap wine. Your violin leans against a nearby bookshelf, desiring your fingers and the bow.

Your phone rings. You decide that you will let the answering machine get it. People own analog
answering machines, with real tapes that run and run and run out in the middle of their friends’
loquacious messages.

You hear your own voice first. “Hi. I’m not home right now. But if you want to leave a message,
just start talking at the sound of the tone.”

A beep. And then. “Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?” You
hear need in her voice, along with a drop of reproach. Perhaps she didn’t approve of your
moving to a hellhole like TriBeCa to be an artist. You do not pick up the phone. You do not tell
her when you are coming home.

Another beep and then a voice you do not recognize. A man’s voice. “Hello? Is anyone home?”
You do not answer it; you are not in the habit of speaking to strange men on the phone in the
middle of the night. Instead of hanging up, however, he speaks more. “Well you don’t know me.
But I know you. And I have a message to give to you.” Uh oh. Is this a crank caller? A stalker? 

He speaks again. “Here come the planes. So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come as
you are. But pay as you go.”

You’ve had it with this man’s warnings and rhymes. You pick up the phone and say into it,
“Okay, but who is this really?”

When the voice replies, what he says is terrifying. “This is the hand, the hand that takes.” He
repeats it. He won’t stop saying it. You imagine just a mouth, the rest of the face shrouded in
shadow, rendered in grayscale, like in an old movie.

And then he says: “Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America. Smoking,
or non-smoking?” He babbles on about the post office, about love, justice and force. And mom.

You hang up the phone. Confronted with this warning, with this mysterious stranger, the hand
that takes, perhaps America itself, what can you do? You think about the first message. Your
mother. She called you. She wants you to come home.

Sitting in your apartment, stranded in the night in New York, which despite the population
density can feel like an island bereft of human company, you want your mother. 

So hold me mom, you think to yourself, in your long arms.

You are so shaken from the phone call that the vision of your mother holding you gradually
changes, becoming perverse and terrifying, but as it does so, you find yourself even more
comforted.

***

Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America.

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In 1981—the year of O Superman’s commercial release—Ronald Reagan broke the air-traffic
controllers’ strike and expanded the US military by the equivalent of $419,397,226.33 (adjusted
for inflation).

In 2010, we’ve lost great amounts of our manufacturing sector, but one area remains
triumphantly intact. We still make machines of war here in America. Boeing and Lockheed
Martin are still based in the United States, the former in Chicago, the latter right outside
Washington, D.C. Their plants also remain in this country, in places like Witchita, Kansas, Troy,
Alabama and Columbine, Colorado. The Martin F-35 Lightening II—of which the United States
intends to buy 2,443 for a price tag of over three hundred billion dollars—performed its first test
run in Fort Worth, Texas.

In 2001, Mohammed Atta flew a Boeing 767—manufactured in Everett Washington— into the
North Tower of the World Trade Center Building. 

***

If you haven’t guessed by now, I might as well come clean: I was obsessed with Laurie Anderson
in college. I tracked down out of print monographs of her work. I attempted to sneak her into
just about every paper I wrote. Laurie Anderson thus joins a long line of serial obsessions on my
part. She sits right between Eddie Izzard and Charles Mee if you’re ordering it chronologically.

I only knew one other person who loved Laurie Anderson. He discovered her via a twenty-six
CD series titled New Wave Hits Of The Eighties that he bought off of late night television when he
was in high school. 

Despite all of this, four months after graduating from college, on the actual day when the
American Planes Made In America finally showed up, I did not think about "O Superman." On
the actual day, U2’s borderline easy-listening track "Beautiful Day" took up unshakeable
residence in my skull.

It’s been said often enough to become a cliché, but the eleventh of September, 2001 really was
gorgeous. The sky blue and cloudless, the temperature perfect for a walk from my then-
girlfriend’s office on 56th and the West Side Highway to deep into the East Teens.

The blue sky loomed ominous, the way nights dark and stormy foreshadow murder in a
potboiler. If we couldn’t trust the weather to tell us how to feel, or what would happen next,
what could we trust?

[…]

Unlike most Americans, I did not see what had happened to my city until many hours after the
second tower fell. By then, our epic walk concluded, we sat on our friend Alison’s couch and
watched the BBC. Again and again the plane flew into tower two, again and again the orange
flower bloomed, again and again the towers collapsed and we jump cut to a POV shot of
someone running from a wall of dust.

One of us said what became a constant refrain. It looks just like a movie. And indeed it did.

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During the weeks to follow, we heard this idea everywhere. Just like a Bruckheimer film or I
thought they were showing a disaster movie, until I realized it was on all the channels, or Just like
Independence Day.

What we did not ask then is why. Why, at the height of our powers, had we imagined our own
destruction so often that we had a ready-made database of images to compare this moment to?

Instead, we clicked our tongues in disapproval. This showed, we believed, the shallowness and
alienation of our psyches. Now the time had come to end irony once and for all. We chose this
interpretation instead of acknowledging how in tune with our deepest fears mass entertainment
really was.

Through the nineties, when everything seemed so good that a blow job consumed media
attention for years, it turned out that we both knew and feared that the clock would run out on
our exceptional good fortune. The multiplex transformed into the only place to explore these
premonitions of what was to come. The movies responded by doing what they do best. They
thrilled us again and again, so we didn’t have to feel bad or, really, think much, about any of
this. 

We did not ask these kinds of questions in the aftermath because we did not have the leisure or
distance or time to ask them. Instead, we asked other questions. Questions like, Who did this?
And, Whose ass do we get to kick now? And—in certain circles of the left—Is it right that we kick
their ass?

The first two questions we immediately answered with a nebulous body known as “the Arabs,”
later refined to “Al Qaeda.” First thing we should’ve done, someone said to me at Thanksgiving
dinner that year, is turn the Middle East into a parking lot. Even on that day, when we had no
idea who had done this or why, we knew it must be “the Arabs.”

On her couch—which she invited us to stay on for as long as we want—Alison launched into a
monologue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She did not know that my girlfriend hailed
from a Muslim country and I, although a Jew, am not a Zionist. The story culminated with her
running into a Hasid on the street two hours after the second tower fell. “Hey man,” she recalls
herself saying, “I’m with you and Israel all the way.” 

[…]
***

"O Superman" contains three moments of wordplay. The first comes right after Anderson
mentions the planes, when she then asks, "Smoking or non-smoking?" Since we are not riding in
these planes but are instead being warned about them from a mysterious voice, the phrase takes
on a double meaning, becoming about corpses.

The second is when Anderson recites the Postal Creed: "Neither snow nor rain/Nor dead of
night/Will stop these couriers/From the swift completion/Of their intended rounds."

Because if (once again) we are talking of airplanes, and talking of the death they bring, then the
couriers become something different, and the package they are delivering is one you certainly

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don’t want. Nothing will stop them. A motto of American can-do becomes a motto of
uncheckable military aggression. 

Or, listening to the song today, dread of the unstoppable terrorist other. 

Over the 2010 holidays, as the privacy (and genitals) of white people unaccustomed to legally
sanctioned harassment were violated, America seemed to wake up to the absurdity of trying to
stop terrorists with the pat down and the extra-large zip-loc bag. If they can’t get on a plane,
they’ll blow up a subway car. They are nothing if not tenacious. Neither scanner, nor banning of
liquids, nor cavity search will stop them from the swift destruction of their intended targets.

The third moment of wordplay comes at the end as Anderson calls out to her mother. Like the
question about smoking, the yearning for mommy’s arms gives way to a pun, of all things.
"Arms," of course, contains two meanings, one of which is enshrined in our Second
Amendment. 

 And so, with a mournful, churchlike basso organ sound, Anderson’s mother turns from human
into weapon. Her arms progress from “long” to “automatic” to “electronic” to “petrochemical”
to “military” and back to “electronic.” 

When Anderson sings “petrochemical,” if you turn the volume up very high and listen very
closely, you will hear birds chirping.

In college, the merging of mom and machine struck me as a silly bit of early-80s “we are the
robots” kitsch. I realize now how I wrong I was. I know now that the comfort found in waging
war. I know that hurting others can feel like a familial embrace. 

Did our desire for this comfort—the comfort of anger, the comfort of righteousness, the comfort of
inflicting, rather than receiving pain—lead us so swiftly to retribution?

And what of other kinds of comfort?

I am at atheist. On 9/11, the only working phone I could find was in a Christian bookstore. I
made two phone calls while the employees praise-Jesused behind me. The first was to my
girlfriend to tell her I would walk to wherever she was, the second was to my mother. My father
works for Congress, and was in who-knows-what federal office building that morning. 

In the week that followed, everyone I knew in New York wanted to be held in some way, to be
comforted. A friend called me to tell me she had been to church that morning. I laughed into the
phone, finding it—and her—absurd. Like me, she was both a Jew and an Atheist. What possible
business did she have in a church?

“I was walking down the street and I saw this woman outside a church, and, she just, she just
looked at me, and I knew that that was where I needed to be.”

***

From the fall of 2001 until the Spring of 2010, I didn’t listen to "O Superman" or really anything by

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Laurie Anderson. It wasn’t until I left New York to drive across the country with my now-wife that I
played it again. We were all gone to look for America. We were all sorts of cliches. We didn’t care.

As the curving asphalt ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway unspooled before us, I click-wheeled over
to the song. The instant I pressed play it started to rain and we sat in silence and listened to it. And it
wasn’t until I got lost in the ha that I realized how long it had been since I had heard it. How did that
happen? How did a totem that I carried with me, loved so hard, like it was a person, like it belonged to
me, like I made it, how did I abandon this thing for so long?

Right before Anderson’s two-minute litany of different kinds of arms, I looked over at the driver’s
seat, seeking approval. Now-wife displayed the face of a champion poker player. On the stereo,
Anderson paraphrases the Tao Te Ching, singing, "‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice,
and when justice is gone, there’s always force, and when force is gone, there’s always mom." And
then her voice breaks a little, and in a rare moment of humanity Anderson says, "Hi, mom."

It felt like letting her read my diary from before we met. I wanted to be known better by this woman I
would soon marry and move from New York with. I wanted to let her see the embarrassing parts that
resist verbalization and need the true falsehoods of art. Part of me felt, in this moment, like all young
men who like imposing their tastes on their loved ones—that somehow my self-worth was caught up
in this moment in this purple Honda listening to this song. 

Why had I stopped listening to O Superman? The answer seemed obvious now. After that sunny
September day, her work became unbearable to me. The song contained too much of what I
tried not to feel and not to recognize about the world and myself and the country in whose name
horrible things were being done. 

Instead, the song went into a cardboard box in a dusty attic closed off from my soul. Also in that box: a
book of plays that lay, spine cracked on my windowsill collecting mysterious black and grey and green
dust from September 12th through 15th. It sits on my bookshelf now, spine facing the wall, unopened,
a guardian against destruction.

***

At the end of the song, Anderson repeats a vocodered melodic line from the beginning: "Ah Ha
Ha-Ah Ah-Ah-Ha." This time, however, she interrupts herself with a synthesized string line that
once again feels like it could come out of the Philip Glass playbook. 

This string figure references the vocoder melody off of the song "From The Air," the track right
before "O Superman" on Big Science.

"From the Air" is a song about a plane crashing into New York City.

Via crossfade, an honest-to-god tenor saxophone replaces the synth strings. The only instrument
to appear in the song without some kind of treatment on it, it makes its realness known by being
slightly out of key.

And then, at the very end, everything cuts out, giving way once again to the ever-present,
omnipotent Ha, repeating itself solo for seventeen seconds.

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If you turn the volume up very high and listen very closely, you will hear sirens in the
background.

***

As the song ended, we feared for our lives. The storm transformed the Pacific Coast Highway into
something treacherous, slick, unknowable. The next pulloff onto more trafficked streets lay tens of
miles ahead of us. Did we have enough gas to make it? Would our stomachs give out amidst the twists
and turns? And—most importantly—did my now-wife like the song?

“Huh. Wow.”

“It’s kinda brilliant, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s also kinda unlistenable at the same time.”

Kinda brilliant, kinda unlistenable is about as close to a judgement of the aesthetic quality of "O,
Superman" as I can offer.

An odd component of post-9/11 American life has been the failure of art to address the event itself.
Many—including some of our greatest living artists—have tried.

Instead, we’ve had to turn back to before the smoking day to find art that resonates. Some claim that
Radiohead’s Kid A is the best album ever made about 9/11, despite coming out years before.
Immediately after the event, the pundits on television wanted so badly to believe in our president that
they told us to reach back to Shakespeare’s Henry V to understand how a drunken spoiled brat could
become a Good Christian King. 

Why not, then, appropriate "O Superman"? Laurie Anderson herself remains unclear as to the
inspiration of the song. She claimed in one interview that she wrote it in response to the Iran-
Contra scandal, which broke over five years after the song’s improbable chart climb. Like JG
Ballard claiming to have seen the flash over Hiroshima from Hong Kong, this memory is
impossible, invented but right nonetheless.

Our claiming of these artifacts as being “about 9/11” shows that—rather than changing
everything—that day recapitulated and unleashed what lurked, buried underneath us like one of
Lovecraft’s ancient Gods. As much as we said this was the day we’d never forget, it revealed how
much we’d already forgotten.

--------
Isaac Butler lives in Minneapolis where he is getting his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the
University of Minnesota.

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