In early 2001, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a music message-board community called ILX. Someone thereupon had expressed an opinion about a certain band that – shock, horror – ran pointedly contrary to my own, and I zealously jumped into the fray to offer my equally pointed dissent. In short order, however, I found lots of similarly inclined souls with lots of interesting things to say, and I duly stuck around. Here in 2024, ILX is surprisingly still around, although I stopped regularly contributing quite some time ago. That said, many of the individuals I first encountered and befriended on ILX are now my friends on various social media platforms and even in “real life.”
In any case, one of these individuals invoked a Spotify playlist, early this week on Facebook, and it got me thinking about the subject in greater detail. Basically, my friend Mike observed that the platform’s algorithms, in the assembly of a playlist dubbed their “Anti-Anxiety Mix,” made some laughable choices, specifically the inclusion of Laurie Anderson’s haunting, signature single from 1981, “O Superman.” Calling it “one of the most portentous songs” he’d ever heard, Mike wondered aloud how a song with the recurring refrain of “Here Come the Planes…” could ever be considered anything other than the quintessence of anxiety writ large. Indeed, with cryptic lyrics like “Well, You don’t know me, but I know You” and, of course, “This is the Hand …the Hand That Takes,” the deceptively gentle sprawl of “O Superman,” to my ears, doesn’t exactly equate with any peaceful, easy feeling so much as a languid infusion of quietly encroaching dread.
Accounts have differed, from time to time, but Anderson herself has alluded that the song was inspired by Operation Eagle Claw, the U.S. Army’s failed 1980 mission to rescue 52 members of the American Embassy’s staff who were being held hostage in Iran. The song, however, remains vague enough for listeners to project their own impressions and associations. During an interview for a documentary about iconic British disc jockey John Peel (who almost single-handedly made Anderson a household name by first playing the unthinkably bold single when no one else would touch it), Anderson described “O Superman” as both “kind of a national anthem” and also a “kind of weird, warped lullaby.”
Like so many other pivotal records, “O Superman” first revealed itself to me by way of the adventurous tastes of a friend of mine. On a snowy day in late 1981, my friend Jeremy and I repaired to the Crazy Eddie’s on East 57th street (above), just steps from Third Avenue. As expressed on other posts, prior to my discovery of the multitude of independent record shops in Greenwich Village, SoHo and the East Village (most of them long gone, here in 2024) and prior to the arrival of Tower Records (which wouldn’t arrive in NYC until 1983), myself and my fellow Upper East Side kids regularly procured our music at places like Crazy Eddie’s, Disc-O-Mat and King Karol. To be fair, there was one indie record shop near Jeremy’s place on about 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue called Revolution Records (long gone …there’s a pizza parlor in its place today), but for the most part, we made do with the aforementioned chains. This Crazy Eddie’s, meanwhile, had an enviable collection of exotic British imports.
In any case, while I’d been slowly immersing myself in all things Punk Rock (as detailed in this recent post), I still harbored a stubborn hankering for more conventional fare, and I’d set my sights on picking up Moving Pictures, the then-latest album by the brazenly not-at-all punky trio, Rush. My friend Jeremy -– who I’d met the previous summer being astonishingly irresponsible on the rifle range of our sleep-away camp, Great Oaks -– usually opted for stuff from further afield, selecting the debut LP by the Tom Tom Club (featuring the at-the-time ubiquitous “Genius of Love,” later ruined by a tenacious association with Mariah Carey) and this freaky looking 12” single by some lady called Laurie Anderson.
Back at Jeremy’s mom’s palatial apartment on 63rd and Park, I sidled up to their ridiculously expensive sound system and sloppily dropped the needle on “Tom Sawyer” by Rush, doubtlessly scaring their well-heeled neighbors with that whalloping opening note and assumed a rote routine of clench-jawed, air-guitar poses. But the noodling, rock-virtuoso heroics of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart left my friend Jeremy entirely unimpressed, and the long-suffering, pricey stylus was shortly relieved from that weighty task. Since I’d already asserted my fatigue of hearing the inescapable “Genius of Love,” Jeremy cued up his mysterious “O Superman” purchase and the energy in the room immediately changed.
In case you’re unfamiliar, here it is now ...
Like so many others, I was mesmerized. When Laurie released the full album, Big Science, a year later, I picked that up, and have pretty much been a fan ever since. But while Anderson has gone onto release several albums and ambitious multi-media projects (and, at some point during the proceedings, married Lou Reed), “O Superman” continues to be her most well-known work and something of a timeless classic.
During my college years, I was a disc jockey at my school's radio station – WDUB, 91.1 FM in Granville – and frequently spun “O Superman” during my late-night shift. Beyond its hushed, chilling brilliance, it was a great track for a disc jockey to cue up when you had to go to the bathroom. I remember doing just that, one very late evening, and ducking out of the station (which, at the time, was housed on the ground floor in the rear of a building full of classrooms, directly beneath the sociology/anthropology department) and quickly jogged towards to the men’s room. As Laurie’s pulsed sequence of “ha … ha… ha…”’s echoed creepily down the long, empty corridors of the building, I heard the heavy door to the radio station slowly close behind me and the sound its lock clicking into place. I scrambled to the security phone down the hall to fetch the nearest guard on duty to let me back in. Amazingly, he made it, unlocked the door and I sprinted back in just before the song’s eight minutes and 21 seconds had elapsed. I don’t believe I ever made it back to the men’s room, that night.
Similarly, “O Superman” was a go-to track late into the evenings during my tenure at the TIME Magazine news desk. From about 1996 until the end of 2005, I used to work as a news-desk editor for two overnight shifts a week, and in the dead of night, when broken news didn’t need attending to, I’d frequently cue up music to hasten the hours and fill up the otherwise oppressive silence (beyond the three, muted television screens showing CNN, MSNBC and FOX News). Prone to freaking myself out, I’d often dial up vaguely disquieting tracks like “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle, selections from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II and “O Superman,” again marveling at the steady, deliberate undercurrent of unease buried in that sound as it echoed down the empty hallways of the TIME offices.
Inspired by all this, I strolled home from work, last night, from the bottom of TriBeCa along the Hudson River with “O Superman” – both the original studio version and the live version from Live in New York, recorded just about a week after the events of September 11, 2001 – in my ears, unintentionally replicating the back cover photograph of Nonesuch Records’ 2008 re-release of Big Science, which found Laurie walking north along that same strip, away from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. As mentioned above, given some of the song’s ominous lyrics, many have projected a disquieting prescience to “O Superman” with regards to 9/11, an interpretation that was probably not lost on Anderson during that fragile, strange 2001 live recording.
More recently, I just learned, “O Superman” has enjoyed another, odd uptick in popularity and exposure, that via the unlikely realm of TikTok. It seems someone featured a snippet of the track in a video to convey some semblance of implied poignance to a coincidence, and it suddenly become something of a trend on the platform. Given that I can’t speak to TikTok in any meaningful capacity, I’d encourage you to watch the below video if you’re at all curious about that.
At the very least, it’s encouraging people to seek out this amazing music, and that can’t be bad.
Side notes:
- Another odd inclusion on Spotify's "Anti-Anxiety Mix" is Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Sky," basically a song about the psychological rigors of living in England during the Blitz.
2. Beyond “O Superman,” I would have to say that my very favorite Laurie Anderson album is The Ugly One with The Jewels. It's ostensibly a spoken word record, although there is a lot of ambient music woven throughout, as Laurie spins a series of suitably surreal anecdotes and fragments of larger narratives. It’s strangely hypnotic and tranquil.
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