kissell@flairvax.UUCP (Kevin D. Kissell) (03/13/84)
When I was first exposed to Laurie Anderson a couple of years ago, I
was at at once pleased and saddened. I quite enjoyed her vision and
humor, and found her use of vocoder and vocal loops tasteful and clever,
but at the same time I had a sense that she had come too far, too fast
commercially, a NYC avant garde dabbler suddenly caught up in the
Entertainment Industry. I thought "Big Science" was wonderful, but
figured that she would be too heavily indulged by those around her to
do anything else of consequence. I'm sorry to say that I seem to have
been correct.
"Mister Heartbreak" embodies all of the worst and precious little of
the best that LA was/is capable of doing. The compositions are minimalist
fluff, one of the worst of them, surprisingly, co-written by Peter Gabriel.
Adrian Belew, Bill Laswell, David van Tiegham (?), and Phoebe Snow (!)
all contribute, but have to move on tiptoe to keep from upstaging LA.
Sometimes her deliberately indisciplined keyboard work generates an
interesting phrase, and "Gravity's Angel" isn't too bad, but for the
most part, the music is wallpaper. That would be OK, if there were
something going on within the wallpapered room, as there was on
"Big Science". Alas, the lyrics are, for the most part, empty and
despirited exercises in pretention. Example:
"Ooee, Sharkey, he's Mister Heartbreak
Ooee, Sharkey, he's a slow dance by the side of the lake."
Reminds me of Laura Nyro on airplane glue.
She sums it up all to well in another line:
"Ha ha ha, you've already paid for this"
I don't like to malign artists of any sort, particularly not ones that
have brought me enjoyment in the past, but I'm afraid that, were I to
leave Mark Colan's review unanswered, some of you might go out and buy
one of the most disappointing records of 1984 (so far).
Kevin D. Kissell
Fairchild Research Center
Advanced Processor Development
uucp: {ihnp4 decvax}!decwrl!\
>flairvax!kissell
{ucbvax sdcrdcf}!hplabs!/