Let’s Get Small

(top): Photo by Kevin Kennefick (bottom): Photo by Paul RuschaIs the '80s revival over yet? I hope so. The worst thing about that particular outburst of necrophilia was how wrong they got it. I was there, man, and the '80s I remember were more than just trickle-down economics, padded shoulders and A Flock of Seagulls. Some of the weirdest and most ambitious music ever to be considered mainstream surfaced in the '80s — Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Kate Bush's The Dreaming, Peter Gabriel's Security: deep, dark, sexy, literate, hook-filled rock like no music on radio (or TV) these days (except maybe TV on the Radio). Weirdest and most ambitious of all was Laurie Anderson's spooky electronic standup and warped fiddling on Big Science, whose single "O Superman" was plucked from obscurity and improbably launched to the Top of the Pops in 1981 by the recently late BBC DJ John Peel.

Anderson's subsequent career has been anomalous, to say the least. Alternately dismissed as a sellout by art-world protectionists and as a quirky niche geek-rock songwriter by the music world, she has nevertheless managed to forge her own path outside these narrow borders, amassing an innovative and idiosyncratic body of work that defies category. Though hailed for her pioneering music videos and TV broadcasts, the enormously influential theatrical production United States I — IV(from which Big Science derived), her consistently compelling recording career, pioneering digital media like the award-winning CD-ROM Puppet Motel (not to mention being saddled with the unenviable and ill-fitting pop-cultural mantle of the archetypal Performance Artist), Anderson hasn't really gotten her due, because her art is rarely considered as the genre-devouring Gesamtkunstwerk (how's that for an '80s word?) that it is.

Taken as a whole, Anderson's oeuvre constitutes one of the most significant creative projects of the last quarter-century, and while her cultural currency may have diminished as the '80s waned, the ominous global dread and McLuhanesque slapstick of her early work have suddenly taken on a profound new potency since 9/11. Her latest solo show, The End of the Moon, which recently played at UCLALive and returns to Santa Barbara, Davis and San Diego in January, feels more like "O Superman" than most of the work that came in between. This is due in part to the validation of some of Anderson's more claustrophobic political allegories — "Here come the planes" indeed. The middle portion of a proposed trilogy whose first installment, "Happiness," recounted Anderson's adventures on an Amish farm and behind the counter at McDonald's, The End of the Moon seems to be equally engaged with the spiritual and political realms to a degree not evident since the Big Science era, contemplating such lofty concepts as the nature of time and beauty, while grounded in the day-to-day surreality of living 10 blocks from Ground Zero.

One story that perfectly captures the portentous humor of her early work recounts Anderson's recent retreat to a mountaintop cabin in Northern California with her dog Lolabelle: Everything is idyllic until one day when Lolabelle is nearly snatched by an enormous bird of prey. Afterward, the dog's entire way of relating to the world is altered as she constantly checks over her shoulder for death from above. Which somehow strikes Anderson as strangely familiar.

The End of the Moon, occasioned by her gig as the first artist in residence for NASA, has strong formal links to Anderson's early work as well, in spite of the absence of the multimedia whistles and bells that many expect from her.

Over the years, she has, in fact, pretty much oscillated between extending and reducing the theatrical components of her storytelling — from the state-of-the-art information overload of her 1995 Nerve Bible tour to the sparse, hypnotic spoken-word CD The Ugly One With the Jewels. The End of the Moon falls somewhere in between, with a minimal set and only occasional AV components, but a powerful array of music software backing up her electric violin and vocals. It's the language — fragmentary, anecdotal, cyclic, tragicomic — that most harks back to the halcyon days of Reaganomics. As recent election results indicate, the future is in the hands of the best storytellers. Thank God one of them's on our side. If only Karl Rove had stuck a yam up his ass instead of that Big Stick!