Back in the days of jukeboxes in pubs, a favourite game for the bored and disaffected was to tip in some coins, select the same record five times on repeat, wait to see people’s reactions when the second play started, and then walk out, gleefully imagining the scene to come. The ideal record for this exercise combined two qualities: it was annoying or bewildering to the average punter, and, at eight minutes and 25 seconds, it was very, very long. In 1981, the perfect choice was Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman (For Massenet)”.
Anderson’s career seemed unlikely to take her within a whisper of the top of the charts (it was kept off the top spot by “It’s My Party” by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin). She was a performance artist, none-more-Downtown, whose repertoire included standing in ice skates encased in a block of ice while playing a tape-bow violin until the ice melted. She experimented with tape distortions, slowing her voice until it achieved an uncanny masculine timbre, a parody of male authority figures. She played with repetition, she defamiliarised the quotidian, she stretched and compressed time; she dropped in awkward pauses; she articulated unspoken anxieties about air travel in a riff where cabin announcements turn into a nightmarish version of Simon Says. It was all gloriously uncommercial until — for a brief moment — it wasn’t. As the critic Greil Marcus has noted, punk opened the world’s ears to sounds that were not themselves punk but would without it have been unimaginable.
“O Superman” begins with a fast vocal riff — “ah ah ah” — that establishes itself as the song’s rhythm, a constant Reichian pulse. Anderson narrates the story, more Sprech than Gesang, her voice fed through a vocoder like an accompanying choir of an infinity of robots. Roma Baran, her producer, throws in a series of minimal patterns on a cheap Casio keyboard that both brighten and cheapen the sound, and lets darkening chords rumble underneath as the lyrics become more and more disquieting.
After a nod to the French composer Jules Massenet, the argument of the song juxtaposes personal and geopolitical disassociation, becoming a meditation on the botched rescue of American hostages from Iran in 1980. “This is the hand/the hand that takes/here come the planes/they’re American planes/made in America.” The song quotes the unofficial motto of the US postal service, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”, originally a description of the horseback couriers of imperial Persia, the precursor of the new enemy.
On the back of the single’s success in the UK, Anderson brought her eight-hour show United States to the Dominion Theatre in London, featuring an extended version of “O Superman”, and the loyalty of casual fans was tested by watching lengthy sections of Super-8 footage of a stars and stripes revolving inside a washing machine. After that, for many years the song dropped out of her live repertoire.
Several artists have sampled “O Superman”, notably the German house duo Booka Shade on “O Superman” in 2008, but it is a hard song to cover wholesale; the only full version seems to be the live rendition performed on David Bowie’s 1997 tour. By this point in his career Bowie was deep into drum’n’bass, probably the era that has weathered least well. And yet, in recordings of that tour, the energy in both band and audience palpably lifts at this point. The main narrative is taken by Gail Anne Dorsey, with Bowie joining in as the bass voice, the two of them delivering what Anderson does on her own, to a funked-up backing. “Here come the planes,” they sing, stretching their arms out wide to their sides. “They’re American planes,” adds Dorsey, and Bowie snaps off a crisp salute. At the climax, guttural keyboards thrash, baritone saxophone moans, and the drummer throws in frenetic breakbeats.
Four years later, in the wake of 9/11, the line about the approaching planes felt newly prophetic. Playing at New York’s Town Hall a week later, Anderson reinstated “O Superman” to her set. It felt, she said, “like I had written it yesterday”. Although the germ of the song was the Iranian desert, it now seemed “part of a longer conflict that continues to rage between the worlds of Islam and the west”. This performance was quiet, slow, intimate, clearer than the original. When she came to that central verse, she stretched out the last word of “here come the planes” to almost unbearable length. “Your petrochemical arms/your military arms/your electronic arms.” When the keyboard figure came in, it now sounded like an elegy, with no remaining hint of novelty song.
What are your memories of ‘O Superman’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Nonesuch; Get Physical Music
Picture credit: Brian Rasic/Getty Images