Laurie Anderson pioneered new techniques and aesthetics in performance art, becoming its first and most enduring superstar. In this book, author S. Alexander Reed dives into the wonderfully strange making and meanings of her album Big Science from 1982, and its creator’s long artistic career.

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How does our experience become memory?

Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Table of Contents

I. FINDING THE NOW IN BIG SCIENCE
II. TOO BIG TO FAIL
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III. DESCRIBING SIDE 1
IV. FLIPPING THE RECORD
V. DESCRIBING SIDE 2
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VI. NEW MUSIC vs. NEW WAVE
VII. THE GENDERED MAKING OF UNGENDERED STYLE
VIII. BIGNESS AS USUAL
Acknowledgements
Works Cited

About the author

Dr. S. Alexander Reed, Associate Professor of Music and Integrative Studies at Ithaca College, is a musician and scholar of subculture, pop, and technology. Author of the acclaimed book Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, he has also published in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series, Slate, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and several more. As a musician, producer, and remixer, he has dozens of recording credits. Reed teaches at Ithaca College, and has previously been on faculty at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, The University of Florida, and The College of William and Mary.

Paperback, published in 2022, 188 Pages | 17 figures