Words for the Music 019: LAURIE ANDERSON

LAURIE ANDERSON

c 1982

 LET X = X

LAURIE ANDERSON

from the 1982 Warner Bros LP Big Science

LET X = X

I met this guy

And he looked like he might have been a hat check clerk

At an ice rink

Which in fact

He turned out to be

And I said:

Oh boy

Right

Again

Let X equal X

You know

It could be you

It's a sky blue sky

Satellites are out tonight

Let X equal X

You know

I could write a book and this book 

Could be thick enough

To stun an ox

Cos' I can see the future

And it's a place 

About seventy miles east of here where it's lighter

Linger on over here

Got the time? 

Let X equal X

I got this postcard

And it read

It said:

Dear

Amigo

Dear partner

Listen, uh…

I just want to say thanks

So… 

Thanks

Thanks for all the presents

Thanks for introducing me to the chief

Thanks for putting on the feedbag

Thanks for going all out

Thanks for showing me your Swiss Army knife

Oh and uh ––

Thanks for letting me

Autograph your cast

Hug and kisses

Ex ex ex ex

Zero zero zero zero

Oh yeah

PS

I

I feel

Feel like

I am

In a burning building

And I gotta go

Cos' I

I feel

Feel like

I am

In a burning building

And I gotta go

 

 

 

 

 

[This YouTube clip includes the next LP track It Tango]

Words and music 

© 1982 Laurie Anderson

 

 

 

 

 

It seems nothing short of miraculous that an artist as uncompromisingly non-commercial as Laurie Anderson not only landed a record deal with a major US label but that her debut album for that label –– titled Big Science and released in 1982 –– delivered an unexpected hit in the form of O Superman, a minimalistic spoken word piece that clocked in at an unthinkable nine minutes.  It defies all logic, economic and otherwise, yet somehow it happened, launching the career of one of the world's most genuinely experimental artists and introducing an entire generation of clueless teenagers, myself among them, to the undiscovered pleasures of avant-garde electronic music. 

To the casual listener it may appear that Anderson isn't really doing very much in Let X = X.  The track begins as a quirky little tale about a guy who works at an ice rink and ends with what purports to be a direct quotation from a postcard, backed by gently pulsing synthesizers and subtle percussion enhanced by ethereal robotic vocal effects.  Anderson's beguiling vocal performance is a masterpiece of irony, each word carefully positioned and precisely phrased to emphasize its oddity and maximize its aural impact.  Let X = X transcends its various parts to emerge as a compellingly unified whole, part humorous anecdote and part sci-fi prophecy, quintessentially modern even as it seems to recall (and perhaps mourn for?) the vanished pre-digital world of 1950s North America. (How many hat check clerks do you ever meet these days?  And if you do meet any, how many of them are ever employed at ice rinks?)  

Some may argue –– and I used to be acquainted with several people who believed it to be their sworn duty to do so –– that Anderson's work depends on the listener reading their own meaning into what is essentially the audiophonic equivalent of a blank page.  But I'll say to you what I used to say to them –– isn't that the case, not just with her music, but with virtually every piece of music a human being is exposed to over the course of his or her lifetime?  Don't we all project our individual thoughts and emotions into the music we listen to, be it Let X = X or Ride of the Valkyries or Mood Indigo or Thank U, Next by Ariana Grande?  Consciously or not, we value a musical composition for its ability to transport us into the private realm of our mind and keep us temporarily suspended there without evoking unpleasant sensations of ennui, restlessess or both.

Of course, the work of an artist like Laurie Anderson does not just 'happen' as though it's the product of some benign cultural accident.  She had a long grounding in the world of performance art, beginning with her first symphony, written for automobile horns, which received its debut performance in 1969.  By 1981 she was sharing the bill with writers John Giorno and William S Burroughs on the spoken word LP You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With and establishing herself –– with her waifish persona, trademark spiky hair and glowing electric violin –– as an artistic force to be reckoned with.
 

But it was the release of O Superman, part of an extended stage work titled United States, that introduced Anderson's music to a wider and surprisingly receptive audience.  Originally released on the small independent label One Ten Records, the piece became a breakout hit in the UK following repeated airplay by influential BBC disc jockey John Peel.  So many orders were received for this esoteric electronic curiosity that the buzz it generated brought Anderson to the attention of Warner Bros Records who quickly signed her to a seven album contract.  The timing could not have been better, given the changes that were beginning to occur in the early 1980s in relation to how popular music was recorded, promoted and marketed.  Suddenly, any music that sounded even vaguely futuristic was deemed to be 'cool' by mainstream urban audiences, while the film-clip for O Superman became something of an audio-visual cult object in itself which would go on to become a staple of the early MTV era.

Big Science was an album that reflected its time while simultaneously transcending it to become, in the truest sense, timeless.  And I'm far from being the only person who holds that opinion.  In her marvellously insightful review of the album posted on Discogs (and her own Bandcamp page), fellow Anderson fan Jenell Kesler does a superb job of capturing what continues to make Anderson's music so fascinating nearly forty years after its original release:

Laurie Anderson’s Big Science touched my heart in 1982. The movie Blade Runner was just out, with Laurie’s music sounding for all the world like some futuristic bedtime stories, designed to make us all feel comfortable in the electronic age… it was accessible, perplexing, intoxicating and dreamy, just listening to these tracks was akin to walking spiraling up through the Guggenheim museum. The album can be a bit scary, due mostly to Anderson’s deadpan delivery, while other tracks often come off as being prophetic and filled with nonchalant wisdom… In the end, Big Science, as the androids in Blade Runner, resounds with more humanity than almost anything you’ve ever, or ever will hear… where if you fall in love with a hat check clerk at an ice skating rink, then there’s actually hope this weary old world might spin on for a few more days. 

If you haven't been exposed to the work of Laurie Anderson then you're missing out on something very special.  I would urge you to seek out a copy of Big Science at your earliest opportunity, always remembering as you listen to it to keep your mind fully open along with your ears.

 

 

Use the links below to visit the website of North American artist, composer, musician and director LAURIE ANDERSON and read the complete review of Big Science by JENELL KESLER on the Discogs music website.  (Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

 

 

 

http://www.laurieanderson.com/

 

 

https://www.discogs.com/Laurie-Anderson-Big-Science/master/60816

 

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere. 

 

 

 

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Last updated 14 October 2021 §

Words for the Music 018: FRANK ZAPPA

FRANK ZAPPA

21 December 1940 — 4 December 1993

JEWISH PRINCESS

FRANK ZAPPA

from the 1979 Polygram/Zappa Records LP  

Sheik Yerbouti

JEWISH PRINCESS

I want a nasty little Jewish Princess
With long phony nails and a hairdo that rinses
A horny little Jewish Princess
With a garlic aroma that could level Tacoma
Ah… Lonely inside
Well she can swallow my pride

I need a hairy little Jewish Princess
With a brand new nose who knows where it goes
I want a steamy little Jewish Princess
With overworked gums who squeaks when she cums
I don't want no troll
I just want a Yemenite hole

I want a darling little Jewish Princess
Who don't know shit about cooking and is arrogant looking
A vicious little Jewish Princess
To specifically happen with a pee-pee that's snappin'
All up inside
I just want a Princess to ride 

[Awright, back to the top…everybody twist]

I want a funky little Jewish Princess
A grinder, a bumper with a pre-moistened dumper
A brazen little Jewish Princess
With titanic tits and sand-blasted zits
She can even be poor
So long as she does it with four on the floor

[Vapor lock!]

I want a dainty little Jewish Princess
With a couple of sisters who can raise a few blisters
A fragile little Jewish Princess
With Roumanian thighs who weasels 'n lies
For two or three nights
Won't someone send me a Princess who bites
Won't someone send me a Princess who bites
Won't someone send me a Princess who bites
Won't someone send me a Princess who bites

Words and music by Frank Zappa

© 1979 Polygram/Zappa Records

In 1986 Frank Zappa released an LP titled Does Humor Belong In Music? and even today the question remains a problematic one for even the most open-minded of music fans.  Before Zappa burst upon the scene in 1966 as founder and creative director of The Mothers of Invention the notion of humor in popular music was largely confined to presenting familiar material in deliberately unsuitable arrangements, often featuring eccentric instrumentation as exemplified in the work of 'zany' 1940s bandleader Spike Jones.  (This is not to cast aspersions on the talent of Mr Jones, who was to his style of music what Duke Ellington was to jazz.)  Humorous lyrics rarely accompanied this 'funny music' because record companies had a financially motivated horror of offending and potentially alienating any section of the record buying public that didn't already belong to a marginalized and therefore ignorable minority.  (Blues artists could get away with loading their songs with humorous double entendres because their material was primarily aimed at that same ignorable minority.) 

On the rare occasions when they were featured, humorous lyrics tended to be of the nonsense or patronizingly racist and/or sexist variety or, if their creators were working in the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley tradition, so witty and urbane that they were deemed too sophisticated to be considered legitimately offensive.  Think, for example, of Cole Porter's enduringly popular song Let's Do It in which one partner attempts to persuade the other, more reluctant partner to engage in the act of sexual intercourse by listing all the creatures who deem said activity to be not only biologically necessary but physically enjoyable.  The song didn't offend the audience for whom it was written, just as it seldom offends anyone today, because Porter was careful to avoid any direct mention of the sexual act itself, instead offering the listener a dazzling array of clever and entirely apposite rhyming couplets to tell his risqué little tale.  Humor was also a key element of many early rock and roll songs, with tongue-in-cheek tunes like Chantilly Lace by the Big Bopper and Monster Mash by the delightfully named Bobby (Boris) Pickett and The Crypt-Kickers going on to become well-loved if somewhat unlikely classics of their respective eras.  

It took the Vietnam War, ongoing battles over segregation and social injustice, the assassinations of a US President and a prominent black civil rights leader and the rise of the alternative 'hippie' counter-culture to rid rock music of whatever sense of humor it may have possessed in its infancy.  And the situation was even less promising in avant-garde music which, then as now, was not exactly known for being a barrel of laughs.  Zappa was unique in that he straddled both worlds –– rock and the avant-garde –– and refused to modify his outlook to satisfy the preconceived expectations of either audience, many of whom were as antagonistic to the idea of deviating from the well-established norm as those whose outmoded notions of normalcy they claimed to be so boldly reacting against.  Zappa told it like it was even when his observations, nearly always funny and nearly always confronting, angered and offended large sections of the North American population who, while outwardly supportive of the right to free speech as granted to them by their nation's Constitution, were nevertheless appalled to find themselves being lampooned and satirized by a master of the art.

Jewish Princess, a tune featured on Zappa's 1979 LP Sheik Yerbouti, offended so many members of the North American Jewish community that they took their grievances to the Anti-Defamation League which demanded that he publicly apologize for daring to release it.  Zappa characteristically refused to do this, later telling the ADL via a 1991 interview in Spin magazine that 'Unlike the unicorn, such creatures do exist –– and deserve to be "commemorated" with their own special opus.'  He went on to state that the organization's demand was tantamount to claiming that '…there is no such thing as a Jewish Princess.  Like I invented this?'

I've always wondered if the song, which I find screamingly funny in spite of (or perhaps because of) its unapologetic lack of political correctness, would have become the object of such outrage had it been written and performed by a Jewish comedian instead of an Italian-American composer long identified (if mistakenly) with the 'weird' and threatening WASP counter-culture.  Jewish humor has a long and proud tradition of self-deprecation and astringent self-criticism –– traditions which continue to make it appealing to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike.  The fact that Zappa, a high profile non-Jew, dared to make such trenchant observations about one small segment of the Jewish community made him a threat to people who perceived, wrongly in my view, that he was attacking them on racial or religious grounds.  Is his song really any more offensive than Lenny Bruce making jokes about gay Jews and high-ranking members of the Catholic clergy?  Or Joan Rivers appearing on national television a few years after 9/11 and suggesting that the $2 million compensation payment received by the widow of a fireman was perhaps preferable to living with the deceased for the remainder of her life had he not perished in the terrorist attacks launched on the Twin Towers?  Granted, these are not polite observations.  But, despite what many wilfully ignorant people would have us believe, ours is not and never has been a polite or even vaguely courteous world.

Jewish Princess was neither the first nor last example of a song that would earn Zappa the condemnation of his hypersensitive countrymen.  The track Bobby Brown Goes Down, featured on the same 1979 LP, is another exercise in scathing but extremely accurate satire, poking fun at yuppies, the gay leather scene and –– horror of horrors! –– the sacrosanct 'American Dream' itself.  Subsequent LPs saw him take aim at sexually active Catholic girls who strive to keep their sex lives a secret from their parents (Catholic Girls), clueless female residents of California's San Fernando Valley (Valley Girl, with lyrics and vocals by his daughter Moon Unit Zappa), Elvis Presley (Elvis Has Just Left The Building), Michael Jackson (Why Don't They Like Me?), former US Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (Dickie's Such An Asshole) and televangelists (Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk) among other conspicuously notable targets.  Love his music or loathe it, it's impossible to deny Zappa's originality or his uncompromising honesty –– qualities alarmingly absent in a culture obsessed with retrospectively editing itself to promote what are often misguided if not altogether spurious notions of good manners and inclusiveness.

But the final word on Jewish Princess should rightly come from Mr Zappa himself, who stated the following during a 1981 interview on The Dr Demento Show:  

It's a fine song and if you're a Jewish Princess and you haven't heard it yet it's on the Sheik Yerbouti album.  You go out there and listen to it and remember –– that until somebody writes a song about you, you don't exist.  And I wrote a song about Jewish Princesses and I provided certification for the whole bunch of you.  It's got all of your stuff in there.  It tells about what you do with your zits, what you do with your nose, what you do with every part of your body.  I care.  I wrote a song about you.  And what do I get for my trouble –– the ADL jumps up and down, ungrateful wretches. 

Use the links below to visit the website of North American composer and musician FRANK ZAPPA (1940–1993) and to watch a brief clip from the 1979 FRANK ZAPPA interview conducted by DR DEMENTO:

 

 

https://www.zappa.com/

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRVVKZUVFpQ

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

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Last updated 12 October 2021 § 

Think About It 028: FRANK ZAPPA

Failure is one of those things that 'serious people' dread.  Invariably, the persons most likely to be crippled by this fear are people who have convinced themselves that they are so bitchen they shouldn't ever be placed in a situation where they might fail.
      Failure is nothing to get upset about.  It's a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings.  Success is rare –– that's why people get so cranked about it.

The Real Frank Zappa Book [with Peter Occhiogrosso, 1989]


 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American musician, composer and astute social commentator FRANK ZAPPA (1940–1993):

 

http://www.zappa.com/

 

 

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