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Musical social commentary lands cool, calm, direct punch
By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Classical Music Critic
Jul 24, 2008
NEW YORK - Laurie Anderson's relationship with mainstream pop music has always been offhand: Sure, she'll traffic in that world if it suits what she has to say. And if not? The 1980s new-wave music that first made her famous couldn't have been further away amid the lush, multimedia imagery of Songs and Stories From Moby Dick , or the more-literary-than-musical End of the Moon . So her current return to pop in Homeland - a collection of 16 songlike meditations with such titles as "Mambo and Bling" and "Callin' 'Em Up" that was unveiled Tuesday at the Lincoln Center Festival - perhaps left her uptown fans cynically wondering if she's making some sort of standard record-promotion tour, while her downtown fans perhaps declared, "It's about time."
Her reasons for returning to this world are probably no different than they are for any other genre she dips into: Anderson's social commentary has rarely been more direct. With little visual distraction and a more emphatic musical manner, she airs her views on what's on many minds: War without end, experts making non-expert decisions, and fears that the planet is stumbling toward a deeply unpleasant conclusion.
The show hasn't the near-operatic emotional density of her more sophisticated efforts (which Lincoln Center's Rose Theater could handily accommodate). But Homeland is certainly right for these times. The songs are loosely constructed to give her plenty of space to talk in her usual dreamy, oh-by-the-way manner - on a stage littered with about 50 votive candles, suggesting that either a religious sermon or an earnest campfire chat is at hand.
She has been partners with Lou Reed for some years now, and her music has taken on some of his punch. In other words, Anderson is out to communicate in no uncertain terms.
Her six-person band shores up her limited singing ability with two backup singers and an odd assortment of instruments - whatever fell out of Lou Reed's attic? - including accordion and the usual electronic voice-alteration device that allows Anderson to adopt a male, professorial tone.
Reed himself even showed up, looking cranky and mercurial, for the song "Lost Art of Conversation."
Typical of Anderson, her fanciful observations on everyday life have a verbal spareness that lets the audience enter with its own meaning. Best among them is "Underwear Gods," which plays with the idea of underwear models coming down off their billboards and striding around New York City. The metaphysical Anderson is much in evidence in "The Lark," a meditation on a time before the creation of Earth when there were only birds with no place to land.
What gives Homeland its distinctive tone, though, is "Only an Expert," with lyrics that snake from possibility to possibility with barely implied punctuation: "Even though a country can invade another country and flatten it and ruin it and create havoc and civil war in that other country, if the experts say it's not a problem and everybody agrees. . . ."
Though there's nothing so unusual about such observations, hearing them articulated by Anderson feels like the release of a pressure valve. As reasons for everyday angst escalate in our troubled new century, there are certain realities of urban life (airport security lines, for example) that one can't confront often and remain psychologically functional.
Anderson's calm, cool, objective persona is particularly welcome these days. Since her charisma has nothing to do with sex, she's almost a sisterly presence and an extremely well-informed one. The way she re-contextualizes the everyday and the fantastical (underwear models, for example) gives Homeland a cumulative effect that feels like you've ingested a year's worth of Time magazines, but with the random juxtapositions that come from reading every other paragraph on every other page.
The literal, the absurd and unthinkable don't simply shake hands; in her show, they're one and the same. And didn't you always suspect that's the true reality of whatever version of The Matrix we're now living in? I like to think of Anderson with a flashlight and a miner's hat, venturing into any given heart of darkness, but with less fear than most people, and lots of extra batteries.
Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at dstearns@phillynews.com . Laurie Anderson's "Homeland" plays through Saturday at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater in New York, N.Y. Tickets: $30-$60. Information: 212-721-6500 or www.lincolncenter.org .
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