Laurie Anderson

Based on Wikipedia: Laurie Anderson

In 1981, an eight-minute experimental song about answering machines, technology, and alienation climbed to number two on the British pop charts. The song was "O Superman," and its creator was Laurie Anderson, a New York performance artist who had pressed only a thousand copies expecting to sell them at art shows. When orders started flooding in from the United Kingdom—tens of thousands of them—she found herself signing a seven-album deal with Warner Bros. Records.

It was one of the strangest success stories in music history.

The Ice Skates and the Violin

Before the hit single, before the record deals, Laurie Anderson was playing violin while standing on ice skates frozen into blocks of ice. The performance would end when the ice melted. This was "Duets on Ice," one of her signature pieces from the 1970s, and it captures something essential about her work: the collision of music, time, technology, and the body.

Anderson was born Laura Phillips Anderson in Chicago on June 5, 1947, one of eight children. She grew up in the suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, spending her weekends in two worlds that would later merge in unexpected ways. On Saturdays, she studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. She also played with the Chicago Youth Symphony. Art and music, from the beginning, were never separate disciplines for her.

She moved to New York in 1966 and graduated from Barnard College three years later with honors in art history, earning both magna cum laude distinction and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the United States. Then she went to Columbia University, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture in 1972.

But sculpture, as it turned out, was too quiet for what she wanted to say.

Horns, Comics, and the New York Scene

Her first performance piece, in 1969, was a symphony played entirely on automobile horns. It's hard to imagine a more pointed rejection of traditional concert halls and string quartets. The following year, she drew an underground comic called "Baloney Moccasins," published by George DiCaprio—the father of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was then a collector and distributor of underground comics before his son became one of the most famous actors in the world.

Throughout the early 1970s, Anderson worked multiple angles. She taught art. She wrote criticism for Artforum, one of the most influential art magazines of the era. She illustrated children's books, starting with "The Package" in 1971, a mystery told entirely through pictures. She was building skills, making connections, and searching for the form that would let her do everything at once.

New York in the 1970s was fertile ground for this kind of searching. The city was nearly bankrupt, crime was high, and rents were low. Artists could afford to experiment. Anderson performed throughout the decade, building a reputation in the avant-garde world. Her early recordings appeared on compilations of experimental music, including releases from Giorno Poetry Systems, a label run by the poet John Giorno, who had been one of Andy Warhol's early lovers.

In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention, a legendary gathering of countercultural figures. The lineup read like a who's-who of American artistic rebellion: William S. Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch"; Philip Glass, the minimalist composer; Frank Zappa, the rock iconoclast; Timothy Leary, the psychedelic evangelist; John Cage, who had once composed a piece consisting entirely of silence; and Allen Ginsberg, whose poem "Howl" had been the subject of an obscenity trial two decades earlier. Anderson belonged in this company, though she was younger than most of them and hadn't yet had her breakthrough.

She also worked with Andy Kaufman, the comedian whose performances blurred the line between reality and fiction so completely that audiences often couldn't tell if they were watching an act or a breakdown. In this context, Anderson's ice-skating violin performances seemed almost conventional.

The Accidental Pop Star

Then came "O Superman."

The song is strange by any commercial standard. It runs over eight minutes. The lyrics include lines like "Here come the planes / They're American planes / Made in America." The vocal effect—Anderson's voice processed through a vocoder, a device that imposes the characteristics of speech onto synthesized tones—creates an eerie, robotic quality. The backing track is built from a single repeated syllable, "ah ah ah ah," looped and layered.

Anderson released it on a small label called One Ten Records, run by B. George. She pressed about a thousand copies. But BBC Radio 1, the main pop station in Britain, started playing it. Orders came pouring in from the UK. Warner Bros. Records signed her and re-released the single. It climbed to number two on the British charts.

This was 1981. The UK charts that year included songs by ABBA, Phil Collins, and Adam and the Ants. "O Superman" was not like any of them.

The song was actually part of a much larger work called "United States Live," a massive performance piece that Anderson would present in its complete form in 1984 as a two-evening stage show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The recording of that show filled five vinyl LPs, later condensed to four compact discs. But before all that, Warner Bros. released her debut studio album, "Big Science," in 1982, which included "O Superman" and other excerpts from the larger work.

Inventions and Instruments

Anderson is not just a performer and composer. She is an inventor.

Throughout her career, she has created new musical instruments and modified existing ones to produce sounds that didn't exist before. This puts her in a small and distinguished tradition. Les Paul, the guitarist, invented multitrack recording. Robert Moog built the first commercially successful synthesizers. Laurie Anderson made a violin with a tape head instead of a body, so the bow—strung with recorded audiotape instead of horsehair—would play back sounds when drawn across it. She called it the tape-bow violin.

She has also experimented extensively with vocal processing, particularly the vocoder technology that made "O Superman" so distinctive. The vocoder was originally developed in the 1930s for secure military communications—it could encrypt voice signals for transmission over radio. Musicians discovered that it could also make a human voice sound like a synthesizer, and Anderson used this capability to create what she called "the voice of authority," a deep male-sounding alter ego that appeared in many of her performances.

This character evolved over time. In 1986, she created "The Clone," a digitally altered masculine counterpart who first appeared in a short film called "What You Mean We?" for the PBS series "Alive from Off Center." Anderson hosted the series in 1987, and The Clone would "co-host" with her, raising questions about identity, gender, and authenticity that were decades ahead of our current conversations about digital avatars and artificial intelligence.

Films, Soundtracks, and Spalding Gray

In 1986, Anderson starred in and directed a concert film called "Home of the Brave." The title is a typically layered Anderson reference—the phrase comes from the American national anthem, but in Anderson's hands it becomes a question rather than a statement. Whose home? What kind of bravery?

She composed soundtracks for two films featuring Spalding Gray, the monologist whose autobiographical performances influenced a generation of solo performers. "Swimming to Cambodia" (1987) documented Gray's experiences as a bit actor in the film "The Killing Fields," spiraling out into meditations on Cambodia's history, American intervention in Southeast Asia, and the nature of performance itself. "Monster in a Box" (1992) followed Gray as he struggled to complete a novel while the world kept interrupting.

Both films required music that could support Gray's voice without overwhelming it, that could shift tone as rapidly as his monologues did. Anderson provided exactly that.

She also contributed music to a theatrical production of "Alcestis," the ancient Greek play about a woman who agrees to die in place of her husband, directed by Robert Wilson at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wilson was known for creating theatrical experiences that lasted for hours—sometimes for days—and moved with a dreamlike slowness that demanded new ways of thinking about time and attention.

Learning to Sing

Anderson's 1989 album "Strange Angels" was delayed for more than a year. The reason was simple but surprising: she had decided to take singing lessons.

This might seem strange for someone who had been a professional recording artist for most of the decade. But Anderson's earlier work had relied heavily on spoken word and vocal processing. Her voice had been a tool, an instrument to be modified and manipulated. For "Strange Angels," she wanted to actually sing—to use her natural voice in a more traditional way.

The single "Babydoll" became a moderate hit on what was then called the Modern Rock Tracks chart, the Billboard ranking for alternative and college radio. It was perhaps the closest Anderson ever came to conventional pop stardom, and she immediately stepped back from it.

Multimedia and Moby-Dick

In 1994, Anderson released a CD-ROM called "Puppet Motel." For younger readers, a CD-ROM was a compact disc that contained interactive software rather than just audio. In the 1990s, they represented the cutting edge of multimedia experiences—a way to combine text, images, audio, and video into something you could explore at your own pace. Most CD-ROMs were either games or educational software. "Puppet Motel" was neither. It was an art experience, more like walking through an installation than playing a game.

The late 1990s saw Anderson working on another ambitious multimedia project, this one inspired by Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." Titled "Songs and Stories from Moby Dick," it premiered in 1999 and toured into 2000. Melville's novel about obsession, the whale, and the sea had long attracted experimental artists—it resists easy adaptation, which makes it perfect for work that wants to interpret rather than simply illustrate.

Anderson had become interested in exploring how technology changes the way humans relate to each other and communicate. This theme runs through much of her work, but it became more explicit as digital technology began reshaping daily life in the 1990s and 2000s. The answering machine in "O Superman" was an early harbinger; the questions Anderson raised about mediated communication only became more urgent as email, text messaging, and social media emerged.

Lou Reed

In 1992, Laurie Anderson met Lou Reed.

Reed had been the lead singer and principal songwriter of the Velvet Underground, a band that barely sold any records in the 1960s but influenced almost everyone who heard them. As Brian Eno reportedly said, the first Velvet Underground album only sold thirty thousand copies, but everyone who bought it started a band. After the Velvet Underground dissolved, Reed had a long solo career that included the hit "Walk on the Wild Side" and decades of uncompromising, often difficult music.

Anderson and Reed began collaborating almost immediately. Reed contributed to tracks on Anderson's albums "Bright Red" (1994), "Life on a String" (2001), and "Homeland" (2010), which he also co-produced. Anderson appeared on Reed's albums "Set the Twilight Reeling" (1996), "Ecstasy" (2000), and "The Raven" (2003), the latter a concept album based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

They married in 2008 in a private ceremony. Reed died in 2013 from liver disease. He was 71 years old.

Anderson later created a virtual reality film about their relationship and about death called "To the Moon," which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. She also wrote a book, "All the Things I Lost in the Flood," about Reed, about loss, and about the difficulty of holding onto anything in a life devoted to the ephemeral art of performance.

NASA's First Artist in Residence

In 2003, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration did something unprecedented: they appointed an artist in residence. That artist was Laurie Anderson.

The residency inspired a performance piece called "The End of the Moon," which toured internationally. Anderson also visited Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, named after Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and observed mission control operations. She participated in an event at the Roundhouse in London to reflect on her experiences with space exploration.

This wasn't entirely unexpected territory for Anderson. Her work had always engaged with technology and the way it shapes human perception. Space travel is the ultimate expression of technological ambition—the use of machines to put human bodies in places those bodies could never survive without mechanical assistance. Anderson was interested in what happens to human identity when it becomes so dependent on technology for survival.

The Olympics, Twice

Anderson was part of the creative team for the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. The Olympics opening ceremonies have become massive multimedia spectacles, requiring hundreds of performers and cutting-edge technology to tell stories about national identity and human achievement to a global television audience of billions.

She returned to the Olympics in 2010, this time the Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada. There she premiered a new theatrical work called "Delusion," commissioned by the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad and the Barbican Centre in London. The piece explored questions of reality and perception—appropriate themes for someone whose career had been built on making audiences question what they were seeing and hearing.

Dreams and Drawings

In 2005, Anderson opened an exhibition at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York called "The Waters Reglitterized." According to the gallery, the work was "a diary of dreams and their literal recreation as works of art." Anderson had been recording her dreams and then attempting to render them in visual form—drawings, prints, and high-definition video.

The following year, she published a book of these dream drawings, titled "Night Life." It was a departure from her performance work but also deeply connected to it. Dreams are performances we stage for ourselves, narratives assembled from fragments of memory and desire, often incomprehensible upon waking. Anderson had spent her career creating performances that operated by dream logic. Now she was going directly to the source.

Homeland

Anderson's album "Homeland" took years to develop. She performed material from it at small work-in-progress shows in New York in May 2007, supported by a band and live-mixed video. The show toured Europe, Australia, and Russia before its official premiere.

When the album was finally released in June 2010, Anderson performed the song "Only an Expert" on the Late Show with David Letterman. The song is a sardonic commentary on credentialism and the way modern society demands expert authority for everything. "Only an expert can deal with the problem," Anderson sings, the irony cutting deeper with each repetition.

The same day her song appeared on Letterman, another Anderson track, "Gravity's Angel," was featured on the Fox television show "So You Think You Can Dance." It was a strange juxtaposition—the avant-garde artist appearing simultaneously on a late-night talk show and a reality dance competition—but Anderson had always existed in multiple worlds at once.

Teaching and Recognition

Throughout her career, Anderson accumulated the kind of honors that institutions bestow on artists whose work has become impossible to ignore. She received an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, before "O Superman" made her famous. A Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Film followed in 1982. The University of the Arts in Philadelphia gave her an honorary doctorate in 1987. Columbia University, where she had earned her MFA, awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2004. Aalto University's School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Finland added another in 2013.

She served on the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1991. She was named the inaugural Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2012. She received the Women's Project Theater Woman of Achievement Award in 2010.

These honors recognize what Anderson has accomplished, but they also reflect how thoroughly she has reshaped what experimental art can be. When she started in the 1970s, performance art and pop music existed in entirely separate worlds. Anderson crashed through the wall between them, proving that work could be conceptually rigorous and commercially viable, that you could play a violin until the ice melted under your skates and also reach number two on the pop charts.

The Connection to Ebru Yıldız

Laurie Anderson's influence extends far beyond her own work. She helped establish the template for the artist who refuses to choose between high culture and popular culture, between technology and humanity, between seriousness and play. Her innovations in vocal processing, her invented instruments, her multimedia performances, and her willingness to take conceptual art into commercial spaces have all shaped the work of artists who followed.

Photographers like Ebru Yıldız, who document the contemporary music and art scenes, are working in a landscape that Anderson helped create. The boundaries between performance art, rock music, electronic experimentation, and visual art are far more porous than they were before Anderson demonstrated that one person could move freely among all of them.

Anderson is now in her late seventies. She continues to perform, create, and experiment. Her career offers a lesson about the possibilities that open up when an artist refuses to accept the categories they're offered. She was supposed to be either a sculptor or a violinist, either an art critic or a performer, either an avant-garde figure or a pop star. She became all of these and none of them, carving out a space that didn't exist until she made it.

The ice always melts eventually. What matters is what you play while you're standing on it.