Okay, so @JakeOC_Music asked what makes Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" remarkable.

I'll venture a few observations, some of which overlap with my book on Laurie Anderson's music, which I finished writing...

*checks watch*

…this morning.

1/?

The first thing you hear is "ah ah ah." In your mind's eye, you picture a picture a woman singing middle C.

Imagine it's your first encounter with the song. You don't know what's coming.

How many digital repetitions of "ah" does it take before you stop seeing a person?

2/?

So you realize something is OFF because the repetition is exact in a way that you've never heard. Also it never turns to speech or melody—it is just tonal stasis, rhythm, and timbre.

Is she laughing? At you? Is she a woman or a robot?

Are we all robots? Are robots people?

3/?

These thoughts occur to you in the first five seconds of the song. She hasn't even begun "singing" yet.

So then she does, through a vocoder, no less.

In 1981 pop, technology was the background to the voice's "natural" foreground. This does the exact opposite. Spooky.

4/?

And what does she say?

"O SUPERMAN."

(Set aside the song's roots in Massenet's "O Souverain"…)

It's weird how we've come to expect vocoders to signify übermensch-like, superhuman stuff.

Daft Punk: Bigger Faster Stronger
Kraftwerk: The Man Machine
Taco: "Super duper"

5/?

So yes, this instantly matches a semiotic profile. Hailing Superman, judge, mom, dad, she calls on authority.

Most readings of the song touch on the juxtaposition of faceless authority/tech with intimacy/maternality. Valid.

But there are reasons why that combo works here.

6/?

The juxtaposition is stark because it is ultra-low-context. Anderson spent the second half of the '70s progressively trimming away context from her art and narrative. Her really early stuff is florid, gabby, and highly personal. It left her in many ways exposed to audiences.

7/?

So she developed some interesting strategies that both

1.) provided personal distance between her, the work, and the audience, and
2.) didn't rely on telling her own stories all the time.

Later this year you can read my chapters about this. I call it doing-not-telling.

8/?

But long-story-short, it's a technique where she *subjects* the audience to experiences in real-time, instead of telling them about things that happened to her. Thus her surviving a plane crash becomes "From the Air," where she stages the audience's peril.

9/?

And so for "O Superman" we have no sense of whether this mother is

• our actual mother?
• Anderson's mother?
• Anderson as [someone's] mother?
• some cyborg replacement of the above?

Nor do we know who Superman is, or the judge, or where home is, or whose home it is…

10/?

The low-context style of Anderson's songs sometimes comes across as "random," which is part of why they're funny.

Her: Here come the planes…

You: Wait. What planes? Huh?

Her: They're American planes…

You: That… does not help.

But it's also truly alienating. Scary.

11/?

It hits fever pitch when "the voice" (whose identity we of course never learn) begins reciting the US postal creed. Random, but elevated and IMPORTANT somehow. It underscores just how much context we're missing.

12/?

Of course answering machines do the same thing. They take away the body, the gestures, the eye-contact, the immanent presence of a person. They reduce. Back in the 70s and 80s people HATED answering machines for all these reasons. They made us feel alone and misunderstood.

13/?

There's more to say about the text:

• the hand that takes vs. Adam Smith's invisible hand of market capitalism

• the similarity to Lao Tzu at the end

• military arm[ament]s

• Anderson's tape-bow-era fascination with palindromes: O, Mom, Dad

But let's talk music.

14/?

So that pulsing "ah"… can you think of any other important works of American minimalism that start with a pulsing C?

The resemblance is not necessarily important, but pointing it out will definitely impress your classmates.

15/?

More importantly, the C anchors the harmonies.

There are moments when sounds like it's in Ab major. ("Here come the planes" and "So hold me Mom").

By the end it sounds like it's in C minor (esp. w/ the saxophone's D-natural).

Briefly it hints at Eb too ("O Mom and Dad").

16/?

The Ab/Cm axis suggests I-iii (à la Brian Eno's "2/1" from Music For Airports), or alternatively VI-i (à la Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers"). A very modern pairing without any old-timey baggage of the dominant.

Anyhow, so what's the key?

17/?

Silly rabbit, it's BOTH Ab and Cm. But any sense of the tonic is really only achieved by sheer monolithic emphasis, rather than harmonic inflection.

Again, low-context writing. The fewer notes you have, the more ways there are to hear them.

18/?

If you want to get into binary oppositions between Ab major and C minor as chords/keys, knock yourself out. Happy/sad! Mom/machine! Home/absent! Before long you'll start to suspect it's not about either/or but both/and. Slippage. Bleedthrough. Breaking the binary. Yowza.

19/?

And if you really want to run with these ideas, read Susan McClary's chapter on Anderson in Feminine Endings, and consider applying Derrida and Haraway to the song too. (And once it becomes "about" the traffic between poles, Deleuze!)

But I digress, maybe.

20/?

Going back to that initial observation about "natural" versus processed sounds, you might also look into the birdsong. It appears only when Mom appears, and it's the only uncomplicatedly "natural" sound in the whole song (though it is a 7-second loop). What does it mean?!?!

21/?

In grad school I had a whole theory about the birdsongs and spectral analysis. I think it's bunk these days, but if you care, the tweeting fills in the 1600-3200Hz band, which is the only octave unvoiced by the timbre of her "ah" vowel.

I took this as significant.

22/?

Something about "spectral aggregates" being achieved when the birdsong appeared. To back up my argument, I looked at the sax ostinato that closes the song, arguing that its aggregation of the song's total frequency range made timbral fullness a marker of emotional fullness.

23/?

That is an idiotic approach.

Moving on, someone might bring up the song's origins. Famously, its roots lie in:

1.) hearing Charles Holland sing Massenet's "O Souverain" and

2.) a botched rescue mission during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis, where 8 US troops died.

24/?

And these are both really interesting stories. But here's the thing: Anderson is so keen on removing context that there's almost no way a listener in 1981 (or now) could know these origins from hearing "O Superman." It is not clearly "about" these things.

25/?

It's duly "about" its own "non-about-ness."

She gives the breadcrumb of (for Massenet) in the song's title, but only baritones steeped in the Romantic aria repertory know "O Souverain." Its opera (_Le Cid_) is almost never performed. Even McClary got confused on this one.

26/?

As far as audiences in the 21st century are concerned, it's just as much "about" 9/11 as anything. This was a song (along with Duran Duran's "Edge of America" and a few others) that suddenly meant WAY MORE.

"They're American planes—made in America. Smoking or non-smoking."

27/?

Anderson knew this too. She released a live album recorded a week after the attacks, in which she broke out the song for the first time in 18 years.

"Meaning" is never fixed. It's always changing. She knows that very well. So do her audiences. They relish the uncertain.

28/?

There are all kinds of ways that Anderson's music *tells you* that the uncertainty is not a problem to be "solved." Even if through gnostic revelation you suddenly knew how and why the song was written, it wouldn't all make sense like an M. Night Shyamalan film.

29/?

For instance, her calm voice and her appeals to authority both tell us that The Situation Is Under Control. In short, you are not meant to understand. It's Kafka-esque.

(The fact that it's a woman staging this—doing-not-telling— really unnerved and impressed people, btw.)

30/?

So to get back to the initial question: what makes this song special?

All of the above. But make no mistake, this was Anderson's modus operandi for a few years. You can hear similar things going on from 1980 to 1985 or so. People latch onto "O Superman" for a few reasons.

31/?

Notably, they'd never heard anything like it. It was her first major-label single (boosted by John Peel), and novelty counts for a lot. There's a whole story of how it got to #2 in the UK in '81, but as with any #2 single, marketing, money, and chance steer a lot of it.

32/?

As such its myth has become self-perpetuating. To normies, it's wacky and eerie. To music geeks, it's a successful (and highly modern) merging of new music and new wave sensibilities, performed by a radiantly smart and competent feminist. You can see why she was ADORED.

33/?

As for postmodernism (the class context in which the question arose), sure it ticks off the many boxes by which people classify the postmodern.

I personally recommend not getting hung up on postmodernism. Here's why.

34/?

Postmodernism purports to be about STRUCTURES and RELATIONS. To do this, it uses repetition, radical juxtaposition, self-reference, double-meaning, and negative space. Postmodern media seeks less to communicate than to expose its own status as communication. So far so good.

35/?

But postmodernism, especially in the 80s, has a habit of staking out these relationships always (ALWAYS) in realms that are urban (or else the desert), moneyed (or else abject), hi-tech, professional, cold. Beyond the structure and method, there's a look and feel to it.

36/?

Postmodernists never cop to this 'cause it fades into their background.

Bluntly, a sociology of the postmodern reveals it as white bourgeois imperialist stuff. They THINK they're talking about architecture but they're mostly talking about their ability to claim whole eras.

37/?

Importantly this does not negate that actual claims of how postmodern structures work. Those are in fact pretty liberating for a certain type of westerner—Reich, Glass, Anderson, me, maybe you.

But we should be skeptical. Lemme cite Sara Ahmed ( @SaraNAhmed)…

38/?

"[W]ho is the 'we' that inhabits postmodernism ('the way we live now')? The fantasy of a generalisable and unbounded postmodernism translates quickly into a fantasy of an inclusive postmodernism: a postmodernism that speaks to and for all of us…"

39/?

"…[T]his postmodern 'we' is constituted through acts of exclusion and othering—that the apparent 'unboundedness' of the postmodern both constitutes and conceals its boundaries…"

40/?

"…We could hence ask the following question: who is the 'not-we' of postmodernism that lets this 'we' take place, or take its place?"

(Ahmed, Sara. Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 5.)

AND SO...

41/?

It's easy to see why many of Anderson's most enthusiastic fans were *exactly* the same people who imagined that postmodernism applies to everything and everyone. College professors. NPR donors. People who enjoy Douglas Hofstadter, James Gleick, and Captain Beefheart.

42/?

And yes, Anderson's refusal to take a side in Ab vs. Cm, Mom vs. machine etc. "does" postmodernism, as does her inversion of the natural and the mechanical. And all of this is facilitated by her low-context style.

43/?

But I strongly encourage folks to listen beyond the framework of postmodernism. How does the song speak to (or exclude) what Ahmed calls the "not-we" of postmodernism—the minoritarian listeners, the global south, the disabled?

44/?

Because I think it really does. Or at least it can. And I think in the 21st century this sort of hearing has gotten easier (which tells us that the song was "ahead of its time"—if you like that sort of hero worship).

45/?

In my book I situate Anderson's signature method of "doing-not-telling" in feminist discourse.

I myself don't wish to venture a hearing of "O Superman" that perceives its sexless roboticism as the only viable way a woman could talk about "serious" global stuff in 1981…

46/?

But someone sure could make that argument.

And there's more that can be said about its flutes and its limited harmonies as reaching for some idealized Eastern-ness. Again, this is not my argument to make.

47/?

But you'd be daft to ignore the utter fascination that American minimalism has with all things Asian—musically, spiritually, textually. This fascination is shared by postmodernism, by the way: see Blade Runner and Brazil.

48/?

All this to say that postmodernism and "O Superman" can teach you a bit about each other, but they both benefit by taking the analysis outside of the constrictive reality tunnel.

I hope this helps.

To anyone else reading, check out my book on _Big Science_ out late 2020.

49/49