Laurie Anderson’s Glorious, Chaotic New York

Saw her today while walking on the High Line. She was smiling a beatific smile, and seemed to just be enjoying taking everything in. What a light.

Close your eyes and imagine a world with many, many more Laurie Anderson's. They're out there, I'm sure. And what a vibrant, smart, perceptive, engaging, open-hearted place it can be. Anderson is an original and this profile captured her to a T. Thank you, John Leland.

As an expatriate American Midwesterner who has lived in Australia for almost 40 years, I've always paid attention to Laurie's thoughts, recordings and performances, as an important barometer of the true state of American society. Her intelligence, humour and insight continue to inspire, and thankfully she blessed us with appearances Down Under from time to time. Hi ho.

So, she wasn't smart enough to head west?

I always get a little nervous with the romanticizing of drug use. Many young people and artists who look up to people like Laurie Anderson think that they need to do that to in order to attain success.

It worked out of her, but for many others it leads to a tragic downfall. I've seen it many times.

i love these pieces where describing a life evokes the color of the period. i'm not concerned about the future of the avant garde. Every time creates it's own bohemia. New York will always be the refuge for those who won't accept conformity. here's a little bio of a late lion that, i hope, evokes it's time as well.
https://newsornotnews.com/2017/04/23/not-news-speaking-bills-memory/

Laurie Anderson is a person that has entertained me , inspired me and made me laugh for a really, really long time. Thank you so much NYT for recognizing her unique and upbeat genius. Thank you Laurie Anderson for indulging your crazy, technical and intellectual bonfires.

A very fine article about a fascinating New York original. Thanks to Ms. Anderson for living such a wonderful, creative and interesting life, and thanks to Mr. Leland and the Times for giving us a taste of it.

Can't thanks her enough for her art. An amazing teacher! She makes me feel alive and connected.

I've admired her since the early days in Soho, was lucky enough to meet her several times in recent years. What a stunning, compassionate, kind person she is.

Grateful to her for her profound love of animals, music, justice, generosity and everything else that makes being alive so moving.

It's unfortunate bohemia no longer exists in NYC. NYC now is like any other boring American city. All the creative and interesting people disappeared after 1990.

While driving a late night cab in 1979 NYC I witnessed the same chaos that inspires the work of Laurie Anderson. I would come home overwhelmed and exhausted wondering how I would face my day time life in architecture school. Ms. Anderson, on the other hand, dissects and mashes that same chaos in order to produce succinct aural diamonds.
Thank you for not being afraid of your unnerving talent - the world is better for it.

'O Superman' is one of a small number of songs I keep on a personal list titled, Songs That Stopped Me In My Tracks. It is hard to believe that this amazing work came out 35 years ago. It is just as arresting today when I listen to it, as it was when I first heard it way back then. Surely that is a true testament to the power of song, and to the genius of the songwriter who composed it.

Since the early '80s when I first heard Big Science I have been a true fan. Thank you, Laurie Anderson, for expanding our view of art, music, humanity, and life, and thank you to my old friend MAD for gifting me the 4-cd gift set, which I loved for years. And thank you to the NYTimes for this update. Maybe because Laurie rocked an androgynous image, I never regarded her as strictly a woman artist. The older I get (I am now 54), the more I realize how much I appreciate her as a woman. Artist. And I realize how much I am drawn to women artists and musicians, always have been, but because they were artists and musician, not gendered (thank you, LA, for ambiguity). Finally, thank you, for Strange Angels, which is my person anthem. My life has been enriched by you.

Interesting that Reed and Bowie both appeared to have attempted vehemently to deny they were homosexuals as they neared the end of their lives. Hypocrisy? Was it all a scam, then?
Anyhow, I've always loved Anderson. Hope she stays true.

Am I the only one who finds the invocation of 1970s New York as La boheme by someone best known for her haircut a bit tiring?

"I didn't see it as collapse, I saw it as a very exciting thing."

Thank you heroin, mugging, homelessness, rape, South Bronx. dirty boulevards, arson-for-hire and AIDS, Without you Laurie might never have been on MTV.

She's the mirror opposite of "Street Hassle."

Thank you so much for this wonderful article.
I heard this in the 80's and loved it but listening to it now in my 60's, and you must LISTEN, not play it in the background, I can experience it on a much deeper level. It's so wonderfully evocative. Poetry in music.
Lines like, 'you're walking but you're falling at the same time'.
She captures the moments in between the moments of life.
A true artist. We're lucky to have her.

Laurie Anderson has been a role model for me since my first visit to New Orleans where I learned of her in the early 80s. I still use Superman as another inspiration piece. Also, I have lost too many family members and her strength is again an inspiration. Soon I am returning to the US and Laurie has given me the courage to face the coming future.

Thanks to Laurie for sharing these memories of Lou. Looking back on his writing, he was also a journalist - chronicling the characters of a now bygone New York City scene. She's right about that abrasive persona and the heart underneath. "But anyone who ever had a heart
Oh, they wouldn't turn around and break it
And anyone who's ever played a part
Oh, they wouldn't turn around and hate it..."

I have a great memory of one of Laurie Anderson's first performance pieces called "automotive". She was visiting Rochester Vermont, where I live and where I enjoyed band concerts in the park every Sunday growing up. I think Ms. Anderson liked the fact that many of the audience would stay in their cars and after the band had finished playing would honk their car horns. She auditioned cars in the parking lot of the local grocery and then gathered them on the park and conducted them in a musical piece. I didn't quite know what to make of it but thought it was kind of cool. Also interesting is the fact that Pete Seeger played on that same park on more than one occasion. I feel pretty lucky to have been able to witness these events.

Thank you NYT for an excellent piece of writing about parts of an interesting person. I was introduced to the later Lou Reed and loved his music right away including wanting to throw Laurie's ex-lovers off the roof of Canal Street into the path of a bus. Clang.

Laurie Anderson is a deeply interesting person who lives her life with complexity and depth of expression. I loved 'Heart of a Dog.' She complimented Lou Reed's artistry with balance and her own artistry. My exposure to her has come relatively recently, through her film, her performance on Letterman, and her collection of films on Sundance Now. This article informs me further. Thanks.

Great piece. I was in Architecture School at Rensselaer back in Early 80's. As Architecture professors tend to be, ours, the beloved Ken Warner was a soft spoken wild haired radical who's recommendations and insight were prized by any student smart enough to recognize it. It must have been the second or third day of freshman Architecture School and he comes in sits a Cassette player boom box on the lectern and hits the button. And out came Laurie Andersons' 'O Superman'. He let it play out fully. The 55 or so of us sitting in that room were collectively shocked. It was something we had never heard before. He finished, hit the Pause button and chuckled to himself. No one knew what to say next except he grumbled.. 'well, i wanted you to hear what music could sound like'. It was a moment that influenced us all and was a jumping off point to John Cage, Philip Glass and that generation. In a separate and perhaps related incident, the famous story about Philip Glass goes something like this: He was driving a Taxi to make ends meet and a passenger got into his cab, reviewed his name and commented to him 'You know, you have the identical name as a very famous composer.'
Ta Da, Dump.

Only the very best to you Ms. Anderson.

Oh Laurie! Such a profound voice in my youth....I saw her concert in LA and never looked back. What a poet....Je vous aime, Laurie!

Great read, in the same way that Patti Smith's "Just Kids" evoked NYC in the 60s and 70s. It makes me wonder about the next generation of artists who come to New York to make it on their own, as opposed to running in a herd. Where will they be able to live?

I've loved Laurie Anderson since I found a four-cassette boxed set of her BAM performance United States Live at a record shop when I was probably fourteen years old. I would listen to it repeatedly on my Sony Walkman on the way to school on the bus. I "got" Laurie Anderson and it seemed like Laurie Anderson understood me when no one else seemed to in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Some of the short pieces from that concert are pure genius. "You're walking, and you don't always realize it, but you're always falling at the same time. Every step you take, you fall forward a little bit and then catch yourself from falling." This from memory, thirty years later. Love you, Laurie.

Great article, Thanks.
I was in England when O Superman became such a hit. I still have the vinyl record, which I recently spun up for my daughter on her new(!) record player. It made me feel so edgy, so modern again - like maybe there are a few gems left to pass on the the "kids". Something that is still so new and unlike any music they know. Next I'll put on some Philip Glass.
Thank god for artists who help us through these harrowing times, and connect our experiences through generations.

I've been in NYC since 1972 and l love to think about and read what it was like back then. Ms. Anderson is great. Thanks for this.

Great story! Interesting to hear New York then and New York now. Thanks Laurie!

This is very nice piece/profile of Laurie Anderson. My mother Holly Solomon
started the first alternative space called 98 Greene Street Loft with Gordon Matta-Clark in 1969. 98 did art exhibitions, poetry, performance, and events at the loft from 1969-1973/74. At the same time was 112 Greene Street Workshop-an artists space,(called White Columns now), that artists Jeffrey Lew, Alan Saret, Joseph Kosuth, Tina Girouard, Dickie Landry, Gordon Matta-Clark and many others participated in this space for young artists to show their work without the commercial concerns. My mother started her gallery at 392 West Broadway in 1975 to show new artists who did not have representation and any commercial backing. Laurie was one of the artists that my mother loved and supported and showed for a number of years at her gallery. For my father's 50th birthday(1979),my parents rented Little Carnage Hall and Laurie performed "Americas on the Move, Part One" before it premiered at BAM. Laurie has always made amazing art both using found objects(the newspapers NY Times and China times handwoven together), performance narrative based photo-text pieces, sculptures, and installations as well. Her MOMA projects show of a table where one sat down and conducted the sound through your own body was a brilliant and memorable piece. Her art using information and technology-the invented sound tape bow violin with imagery projected behind has developed her own vision and aesthetic unlike any other artist.

Interesting woman. I wonder what she would say today about her song "Only an Expert" (in which she mocks the idea that "only an expert can deal with the problem"). Because now we have a non-expert president dealing with the problems....

The visual of "the herd" is so interesting. It speaks to that part of a generation of people who don't really create, they assimilate. They become what they are supposed to become. The division of art and commerce continues to die. It really was different back then, and that is not the sad musings of an older person. The only god we worship any longer is money and what it can buy.