Get the latest gossip
Laurie Anderson: Ark: United States V review – a long and winding bid to make sense of America
Contemplating a world of catastrophe and collapse, the veteran artist’s new three-hour show, though much too long and diffuse, has moments of poignancy – and joy
That production included her eerie, eight-minute-plus masterpiece O Superman – a surprise No 2 hit in the UK in late 1981 after the support of Radio 1 DJ John Peel, which led to an eight-album deal with Warner Bros. Meshing together the familiarity of a phone call from mother with the failed attempt to rescue US hostages in Tehran in early 1980, she told 60 Minutes presenter Anderson Cooper in 2022, it was a song about how “technology cannot save you”. The tale of her uncle returning shellshocked from war and screaming in the attic is a perfectly sharpened American short story O Superman doesn’t feature tonight, although other songs and elements of Anderson’s past do, including her arresting 1982 track Walking and Falling. The songs, a mixture of avant-garde jazz and dub reggae pulses, fall flat and are muddily mixed, although musician Doug Wieselman and percussionist Kenny Wollesen are fun to watch, nimbly swapping between instruments as they wander into sets created by projected films.
Or read this on The Guardian