Flipping the Record

This interstitial chapter considers the discourse of postmodernism as it applies to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. Placing the concept in its historical context, the chapter ultimately downplays postmodernism, using Sara Ahmed’s feminist critique of its apparent relevance to “everything.” In recognizing what postmodernism fails to encompass or relate to, the chapter likewise notices the qualities of everythingness on the album and points out the gaps and cracks therein. It also takes up the circa 1982 concerns of the vinyl LP as a physical medium for music.

New Music versus New Wave

This chapter offers a reception history of Big Science, showing the ways listeners constellated the album within fields of genre. In doing so, it offers a definition of genre that differentiates between concerns of audience and concerns of style, framing generic tags as the provisional result of ongoing negotiations between musical stakeholders. In particular, the chapter asks how listeners heard Big Science as either new music or new wave. It unpacks the aesthetics and underlying ethics of both of those genres, highlighting their overlap in concerns of timbre, race, gender, geography, and low-context aesthetics.

Bigness as Usual

This chapter revisits themes of magnitude first articulated in the book’s second chapter, comparing the state of megasystems in the 1980s to those of the twenty-first century. In so doing, it recognizes the often-discussed prescience of Big Science and Laurie Anderson’s work in general. In a final analytic move, the chapter argues that Big Science structurally gestures beyond itself, modeling to listeners a reality or a way of being in which they might be free from the grip of the world’s ubiquitous megasystems.

Describing Side Two

This chapter offers the first in-depth musical analysis of Big Science’s second half. Using the paradigms of chronos and kairos explained in chapter 1, it uncovers historical origins, intertextualities, structural characteristics, and the remarkable signs of the songs. Tracks discussed are “O Superman,” “Example #22,” “Let X = X,” and “It Tango.” Particularly noteworthy is the new historical research into the origins of “O Superman,” Laurie Anderson’s top-charting and most well-known song.

The Gendered Making of Ungendered Style

This chapter notes the discourse alleging androgyny, genderlessness, and/or asexuality in the work of Laurie Anderson. It then argues that such claims are shortsighted and that, in fact, the seeming illegibility of Big Science’s sexuality was the result of a highly gendered multiyear artistic strategy. Shedding rare new light on Anderson’s early artwork from the 1970s, the chapter demonstrates a progression away from sexual frankness that is congruous with both her increasing fame and the sexist pressures externally placed on her either to conform to, deviate from, or otherwise speak for women’s sexual archetypes. Central to this process is Anderson’s development of a strategy that the chapter dubs “doing-not-telling,” which becomes a signature move in her later works.

Describing Side One

This chapter offers the first in-depth musical analysis of Big Science’s first half. Using the paradigms of chronos and kairos explained earlier, it uncovers historical origins, intertextualities, structural characteristics, and the remarkable signs of the songs. Tracks discussed are “From the Air,” “Big Science,” “Sweaters,” “Walking and Falling,” and “Born, Never Asked.”

Finding the Now in Big Science

This chapter articulates how Laurie Anderson’s work obscures its own origins and processes. After providing an overview of her biography and output (most notably, the Big Science LP), it declares an intent to find a “now” in the music. In this case, “now” refers simultaneously to the now of the album’s circa-1980 making (chronos), the now of our hearing it moment by moment (kairos), and the cultural now of the twenty-first century. As an introduction to the book, the chapter also describes the structure, methodology, and audience for the total volume.

Too Big to Fail

This chapter explores the importance of magnitude as a theme in Laurie Anderson’s work, particularly Big Science. It begins by tracing histories of the titular phrase and then investigates the semiotics of bigness. Particularly with reference to individual identity, big systems, big edifices, and big collections of data all suggest superhuman states of consciousness. Accordingly, big knowledge systems such as linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the occult are all discussed. The chapter then reconciles their superhuman scale (and the attendant kinds of awareness it implies) with the paradoxical fact that such tokens of bigness are themselves human-made. Throughout, it draws connections between these notions and the album.

Laurie Anderson's Big Science

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson’s artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record’s grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately, in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Correction

A clarification on the SHINE X-ray free-electron laser mentioned in the article “Big science booms in China” in the Physics World Big Science Briefing.