Laurie Anderson

If you consider the continuum of pop music and all its itinerant shifts between styles of production and genre favorites across the decades, it’s still hard to explain the near-household status of Laurie Anderson. Sure, “O Superman” was a bit of a hit three decades ago, but its computerized vocals and distant menace remain absolute outliers, part of a song that should have bound Anderson forever to the fringes rather than push her reputation into the international consciousness. She is, after all, a performance artist whose chosen mode is a multi-media mix of spoken-word verses and cooed refrains, accompanied by visuals and a revolving spool of partners. Part of the appeal, though, must be Anderson’s uncanny ability to make us feel uneasy about ourselves, to reexamine the lenses through which we examine the world on every level: Her Big Science and its mothership, United States, explored our collective modes of operation. “Another Day in America,” the Cosmos­­-likeepic of her 2010 LP Homeland, teased our expectations of constant renewal, enabled by capitalism and technology. Her most recent work, a strings-and-electronics work with the Kronos Quartet entitled Landfall, examines the beauty and peril of Hurricane Sandy and the forces that enabled it. Anderson remains, then, the incredulous observer in the back of all of our minds, asking the questions and telling the truths that we’re sometimes too busy or too afraid to translate ourselves. Of course she once crossed into pop; she’s precisely the kind of performer that every generation must hear.