8. Laurie AndersonBig Science
I still to this day find the cover very odd and striking. I know for a fact that ‘O Superman’ was my first listen to a Laurie Anderson song in general. There was a point in time in the mid-2000s when I had a Lou Reed obsession and her connections to Lou might have driven me to check out her music. I picked up Big Science after looking her up online and being blown away by the slowly intensifying minimalism of ‘O Superman’ and the effects on her voice and the way her words and her tone of voice and the very stern spoken word qualities of what she does penetrated my psyche.
I think listening to her music is kind of a mindfuck, if you can appreciate the abstractness of it. Big Science is a really excellent record. I would say ‘O Superman’ is the only song on there that sounds like that, but listening to the entire thing, it is a very consistent album because there are creative through lines through a lot of the tracks that bring it all together. There are weird violin pieces, other spoken word pieces that take on a much more serene tone. I think she’s pretty essential in my appreciation of spoken word music, being as significant a genre as it is, artistically speaking. The album is a great representation of the New York avant-garde scene at that time. She is a groundbreaking artist in bringing together lots of different styles of music in her stuff, whether that be electronic or classical or ambient, she’s a real true blue creative director.
