Music Arcades: Laurie Anderson: O Superman b/w Walk the Dog

I didn't buy this at the time it was a hit in 1981. I kind of liked it then for its relentlessness, but I knew its success owed more to the tradition of novelty hits in the UK charts than to any new dawn of the avant garde. Its popularity had more in common with The Birdie Song than John Cage.

No, I bought it about four years later (I think I found a copy in the racks of Andy's Records on Mill Lane, but I could be making that up). By which stage I guess you could call it an anal fanboy completeness purchase (see yesterday and the day before). The studio version of Walking the Dog, the B-side, was not available anywhere else. It's another of Laurie's meditations on the abyss between signfier and signified, this time with particular reference to Dolly Parton and the truth value of her claim that she wants to go back to her Tennessee mountain home. "Oh! I feel so bad. I feel so sad," Laurie narrates, "…But not as bad as the night I wrote this song." I wonder if Jarvis Cocker and Billy Bragg didn't communicate a similar idea with more elegance and economy in lines like "I wrote this song two hours before we met" and "I was 21 years when I wrote this song; I'm 22 now but I won't be for long" respectively. But then I realise that to make that objection is to ignore Laurie's métier, which is precisely to magnify the little slips of meaning that others only touch on in passing, if at all.

The Wikipedia page is good on what O Superman inherited from Massenet and how its "Here come the planes / They're American planes" took on an added chill after 9/11. There was one other thing I read in an interview (I think it was in Artforum) in the eighties, about the ah-ah-ah pulse that runs throughout the piece. Laurie this said this came from the approach to teaching sounds and the alphabet in Steiner schools, maybe as part of eurythmy, where the teaching of sounds and letters is always linked to emotions — and the 'ah' sound is linked to fear. (Here's some translated corroboration if you don't believe me.)

I've never seen this video before. The lip synch seems to be out of synch, but judging by how Laurie looks, it must date from the original release (the single was re-released in 2007, presumably to draw attention to the remastered and expanded version of Big Science).