The first officially grown-up thing I ever did was go to a Laurie Anderson concert by myself. This was in Vermont in 1984, and Anderson was touring behind her second album, Mister Heartbreak. I was 14. I’d been saving up pocket change, and I walked downtown and bought a ticket without telling anyone where I was going. I remember the sparseness of the crowd—filthy Burlington hippies, it seemed, had little use for robot art music. I also remember my confusion. I’d been to a few folk concerts with my parents, so I had some rudimentary ideas about what a show should be like. This wasn’t it. Anderson’s huge video projections, electronically processed voice, and tape-bow violin made it feel like I’d stumbled into the 21st century.
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In 2003 she accepted a two-year commission as NASA’s first (and last) artist in residence. The piece she’s performing on her current tour, Delusion, she wrote for and premiered at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Though Anderson describes herself as simply “an artist” and “a geek,” she enjoys privileges few art geeks can dream about. Powerful institutions, public and private, tend to treat performance artists as unruly, attention-starved children who can’t be trusted not to pull something scatological or obscene. But at least a few of those institutions are perfectly comfortable with her.
Anderson’s fans, on the other hand, seem to want to reinvent her, or at least to exalt her. Year after year they’ve ratcheted up the praise until, in 2011, she’s a “tireless innovator” whose music is “daring,” “legendary,” “masterful,” and possessed of “crushing poignancy.” (Sounds dangerous!) Increasingly, Anderson is described in the kind of language you used to hear applied to Walter Cronkite—she’s treated as a barometer of the national zeitgeist.
Live in New York (2002). Mourning in America. If there were ever a national moment that called for a dose of soothing Manhattan artiness, this was it. Anderson stepped up like a champ, and the 23 tracks here come from two New York concerts she delivered less then ten days after 9/11. The stark, antiseptic font on the album’s cover (the word “live” serving as both descriptive adjective and defiant verb) belies the intensity of the performances. The inevitable recital of “O Superman,” with its talk of “American planes,” is worth a shiver or two. Wisely, “From the Air,” with its more nihilistic cockpit speech (“We are all going down together”), is absent.
