Laurie Anderson - An interview

The interview reproduced on this cassette was recorded at Riverside Studios in London on October 11 1981. Interview by William Furlong.

from Audio Arts supplement 1981

Transcript

This interview with Laurie Anderson was recorded at Riverside Studios when she was in London in October 1981 to present sections from Parts One (‘Transportation’), Two (‘Politics’) and Three (‘Money’) of her work United States (1981). Shortly afterwards her single ‘0 Superman’, originally released by Bob George of One Ten Records in New York, reached number two in the British pop charts. The following extracts are taken from the interview made on that occasion.

Laurie Anderson: Social criticism is, of course, an element in my work but the most important thing to me as an artist is not to be didactic but simply descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I don’t have any answers ... well, it’s hard to think of a situation in which information is presented with total neutrality. First of all, when you’re presented with what’s called news in your country, it is not non-filtered, it’s heavily filtered news, so that when I use my own filters to present information I don’t consider them any more or less tilted than the kinds of information that are available.

Maybe this ‘0 Superman’ song, for example, is a kind of love song for an idea of a country. One of the reasons that I use so many different kinds of media is to parallel the way one gets information. You read it in the newspapers, someone tells you on the phone, you listen to the radio, watch TV, go to the movies. It comes at you in so many different ways. I try to structure the work so you receive it in those ways as well.

One of the things about the music in the work is that there’s no classical bass line at all. The ground of this music is generally to establish a very monotonous beat; it’s a metronomic situation rather than a musical one. Almost all of these things have a pulse that’s very, very even and this then frees you to use real talking styles over that, rather than being locked into a verse structure. So you can work outside of meter and use language the way it is used in an everyday sense, with all the stumblings and repetition and pauses and that kind of improvising with words.

Everyone has at least fifty voices, minimum. Their interview voice, their hailing a taxi voice or talking to their friends voice, their bureaucratic voice. Without getting theatrical, I try to go through that range of everyday uses of the human voice and this, combined with other kinds of official voices – the commentator, the moderator, the news reporter – makes up the chorus of this work.

This piece is made up of a whole series of highly structured codes but I don’t want people necessarily to see the codes sticking out. The most important thing to me is that the work is essential; it’s conceived that way and then later, if you want to, you can pick through the structure and see how it’s all built.

The United States as a country is absolutely AM pop culture – period. And the audiences that go to different kinds of events in the United States are very distinct. People who go to rock and roll concerts wouldn’t be caught dead at a downtown theatre or vice versa. To some extent that’s loosening up. But my hope has been for American artists in particular to decide possibly to enter their own culture.

A lot of this work is essentially digital; it’s made up of movable parts.