Laurie Anderson

One of the most important albums of the ’80s has been re-released with two appealing extras: the video for the breakthrough hit “O Superman” and its vinyl 45 B-side, “Walking the Dog.” Big Science has also been remastered to restore the low-end sonics of the original vinyl pressing. When you listen 25 years later, it’s chilling how prescient Anderson’s vision — inspired by her travels around the country during the Carter and Reagan years — of a technologically and culturally faltering America has proved. In the age of Homeland Security, “O Superman,” with its low-key industrial throb and raspy vocoder-processed lyrics, rings its warning of fear-fed fascism even more loudly. This disc’s nine original tunes became the foundation of her expansive examination of American life, United States, but “O Superman” — which turned Anderson from a scrappy downtown NYC artist into an international star after British DJ John Peel began spinning her original self-made single — was a wake-up call. It launched the home-studio revolution by validating the efforts of solitary musical tinkerers everywhere, and it paved the way for the mainstream acceptance of early electropop trailblazers like Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark and Depeche Mode. Anderson outlines the process of creating the album and, in particular, “O Superman” in this set’s liner notes; she also explains her own reckoning with “O Superman” as timeless. “In September 2001,” she writes, “I was on tour and played ‘O Superman’ at Town Hall in New York City. The show was one week after 9/11, and as I sang ‘Here come the planes/They’re American planes,’ I suddenly realized I was singing about the present."

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