I was not so blown away by the Laurie Anderson concert a few Fridays ago here in Toronto, but everyone else was. I better keep it to myself I thought. I first saw her first in 1980 at the Arthur Street gallery in the old part of downtown Winnipeg. Twelve of us were the whole audience. She was just back from Europe I heard someone say. There were no records yet. I could not speak the rest of the night following her performance, walked into walls, stoned from work that astounded me. Second best performance ever.
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A few Fridays ago she started by telling a story about how one time, many years ago, she had an art teacher who found her paintings heavy handed. The teacher suggested she try intentionally making something bad. We all laughed on cue and in a deadpan voice she offered us all the teacher’s view, “see what you can do with that” she said looking out at 1200 of us. I agree with the old teacher but that’s also why I didn’t like everything in the show. I found the political messages heavy handed, not as ticklish as I found her years earlier, commenting on lovers in the modern age, “satellites are out tonight”.
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She made a joke about Yoko Ono and how when she was asked what she thought about Trump winning the election, her response was screaming uninterrupted for three minutes. That was funny but 2016 was almost ten years ago. Don’t they have intense crime, immigration problems, cost of living concerns and a out of control homelessness in recent years? Gas is seven dollars a gallon for the Americans. Is it taboo to challenge the current people in positions of power? Is Biden truly less corrupt than Trump? Truly more intelligent than Trump?
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She played violin, it generated a beautiful tone and though I was seated far away I think it was a midi violin triggering samples. The tone was rich and warm. There was an effect on it. Every bowed single note generated two more delayed tones a 3rd or a 5th that echoed. If she bowed quicker more intervals followed and soon a little a little choir of random violin notes congregated. It was cool and pleasant and probably unique for most of the audience though a pretty ordinary plug-in common to digital audio workstations. She played the songs from 40 years ago which was fun though more amazing when we were only an audience of a dozen persons.
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Soon she called a professor from the University of Toronto up onstage to demonstrate some radical new technology. Software which instantly projects images over speech using AI. Speech to text apps are fairly ubiquitous on smartphones, this addition of instant imagery was cool but I wondered where she was going with positioning it as so incredible. Is it really any different than the delayed notes when bowing the violin when she started? They the two of them explained to us these types of instant images buttressing speech could be easily used for propaganda. She added it had to be kept in the right hands. That type of thinking disappoints me. I don’t think you can control who does what with free speech. I loved that time in the 80s when America debated free speech, when 2 live crew’s As Nasty As They Want To Be created so many problems over offensive lyrics – whether a musician could say dirty things or shocking things. A record store was busted for selling a CD to an undercover police officer. Rolling Stone ran an issue where various musicians weighed in on the lawsuit against explicit lyrics in rap. Cindy Wilson of the B52s impressed me most when she chimed in that freedom of speech included the freedom to be really stupid. That was the mic drop moment for me.
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Then the U of T professor’s software crashed – twice. I especially liked that part of the show, suddenly more improvisational. When he got the software running again she gave an example of a “random speech” of images married to text. She addressed the border and people who believe immigrants can be a ruinous force. The images propped up dense populations, lined up, hungry. I found that also not exactly right or heavy handed. There are so many accounts about their broken or mismanaged immigration process yet she was implying to be critical meant one is a xenophobe.
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The economics of performance amaze me. The ticket my brother bought me was $120 and there were about 1200 people there. I think almost 150k was grossed that night. She concluded by getting the entire audience to do tai chi. This followed teaching positions called the “decapitator” and “pizza delivery” which were names her late partner Lou Reed used instead of the Chinese titles. Cute. A few minutes before that she played footage of him reciting a poem while she improvised violin underneath. I enjoyed that the most.
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In 1980 I was transfixed. I loved the way she would assume a voice of detachment and describe something alarming or shocking. This is your pilot speaking now jump out of the plane, there is no pilot, etc. But at the show a few Fridays ago when she did those things I was unfortunately waiting for something more special to happen. It did not inspire me as profoundly as did the first best performance I ever saw, Sun Ra in New York in 1985.