Big Science. Laurie Anderson. 1982. Warner Bros.

 Mythology—that baroque antecedent of perspective—triangulates with beauty and morality as points for understanding the way we live now. Laurie Anderson approaches her subject—the inscrutability of modern culture, and its alienating effects—with an earnestness both playful—“You know, I think we should put some mountains here, otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of?” she asks, mapping the vast landscape of our strange and artificial country—and solemn. The two intonations are lifted directly from the commercial world of pop, whose conventions Anderson shrewdly exploits with an intensely cool tenderness that gives her performance the added air of ritual mystery. In Big Science’s inspired pairing of normality and the sinister as the prevailing dispositions of the national consciousness, it echoes Talking Heads’ great album closer The Big Country. But the similarity ends there. What Talking Heads achieved, the band’s unequivocal success, took place within the rock and roll tradition. No matter how idiosyncratic their style or challenging their song forms, Talking Heads’ career output is recognizably rooted in preexisting twentieth century rhythmic structures. To tell the story of how the US became America after big science—the country that struggles to read itself by its signs and semiotics but can only repeat to themselves words that have lost their meaning—Anderson and percussionist David Van Tieghem recreate premodern rhythms that suggest the pulse of real time at the epoch of origins, and the primordial stirring of mythological American history. Big Science is the tale of a populace unmoored from its stated principles as it negotiates a culture struggling to survive the collapse of its language. It predicted, with frightening brilliance, our current reliance on a deliberately unimaginative rhetoric to generate the appearance of a national will for morality, as uninspiring and unprovocative as the glare of our brightly lit man made landscapes.