Laurie Anderson & Talking Heads // Brian Eno

[J. Peter Alfke <alfke@csvax.caltech.edu>]

Bill Hsu writes:
>If you missed Laurie Anderson's appearance on Saturday Night Live on
>4/19, you didn't miss much. She did two songs which I didn't recognized,
>more funky than most of her other stuff. She played some electronic
>keyboard and was obviously running her voice through something (vocoder?)
>which lowered her pitch. Also had several backup singers and musicians,
>kind of like Laurie Anderson tries to do Remain in Light but with a
>stripped-down, less interesting sound.

I.e. like "Speaking in Tongues".

>Are the two songs from her new album? I certainly expected much more.
>Then again, it took me awhile to get into Big Science, so maybe I should
>reserve judgement until I hear her new album. It would be sad to
>see another formerly innovative artist go the way of Talking Heads (sigh).

Listening to the new album really gives me this impression, except that while
Talking Heads took four albums to build up to their climax, "Remain in Light",
Laurie Anderson hit her peak with her first album, "Big Science", and is
gradually falling into the same rut as the Heads did on "S.I.T.".

I'm starting to wonder whether that sound -- art-school funk -- will
become the Progressive Rock of the 80's.  It really is getting to sound
cliched, at least to me.  I looked at the credits on "Home of the Brave"
and thought: Adrian Belew, yup, Bill Lasswell, yup, Dolette McDonald and
Janice Pendarvis, of course . . .

At least Ms. Anderson can still write those lyrics, although I thought
the nuclear-holocaust imagerie at the end of the reworked "Sharkey's
Night" was a bit trite.  Nuclear war is the central image of
postmodernism, and is thus overused, but I thought someone as lyrically
innovative as Laurie Anderson should be able to pull it off better.

/////////////////

Just a short plug here for Brian Eno's "Before and After Science".  I
have his other two "pop" albums, and had heard that this one was also
great, so I finally went out and got it.  WOW!  One side of great happy
pop music (esp. "No One Receiving", "Backwater" and "King's Lead Hat")
and one side of nice intelligent mellow songs.

Highly reccommended to just about anyone reading this.

Incidentally, if I tape it, what should I put on the other side?  I
already have a tape of "Here Come the Warm Jets" and "Taking Tiger
Mountain".  I suppose this is really a question of "What other pop-like,
or non-ambient, Brian Eno albums are there?".

						--Peter Alfke
						  alfke@csvax.caltech.edu
"It will come, it will come,
 it will surely come!"