Interviews: Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson 

Gets Hungry

While I sat going over my notes in the back of a cab hurtling downtown from the RockBill offices on 57^th Street to Laurie Anderson’s Canal Street loft, the turbaned cabbie blasted Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf.” Great, I thought, I got to deal with this distraction when I’m trying to get into the head space to interview one of the most innovative and provocative artist of the times, a woman who took performance art to an unprecedented level of subtly and popularity with her hit song “O Superman,” and in a masterpiece of an album, Mister Heartbreak, as well as a dozen other astounding accomplishments (again, this is why God invented Wikipedia, look her up), including, much later on, marrying Lou Reed. But here I am with the cabbie singing along with one of the most plasticene, corporate-pop pabulum bands ever,

“In touch with the ground, I’m on the hunt, I’m after you

Smell like I sound, I’m lost in a crowd, and I’m hungry like the wolf.”

“Smell like I sound?” What the bloody hell does that mean? And the worst part, the terror, was that as we crossed 14^th Street I started singing along, too.

“Mouth is alive with juices like wine, and I’m hungry like the wolf.”

What the frak? Laurie Anderson is a serious artist. I have serious questions. There are allusions to Foucault deconstructionism here. There are ironies to investigate about using technology to subvert technology, and I’m wailing, “Hungry Like The Wolf” to the prostitutes and drug dealers down 8^th Avenue.

It’s so bad that as I ride the elevator up to the top floor of a converted warehouse overlooking the Hudson River, I think I hear that song reverberating behind the walls of Laurie Anderson’s apartment. When she slides open the door, I naturally catch my breath to see her in person.

I swear she had candlelight dancing in her sea-green eyes. She greeted me warmly, a smile brightening her beautiful face. She wove her paint-flecked fingers through her trademarked pixie hair, and welcomed me in.

Her apartment had all manner of musical instruments and artistic supplies, books, albums, the accouterments of a busy and deeply curious mind, including a telescope by the wall-sized windows overlooking cargo ships on the river and New Jersey factories beyond that.

I gave her a copy of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map, the only geographically accurate map of the world ever made. Reciprocating, she gave me a t-shirt printed with the same map. Turns out we were both Fuller fanatics.

We sat down and I pulled out my tape recorder and my incomplete notes when I heard the radio play (because God may be dead but irony isn’t) Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf.”

   “Oh my God,” I said, feeling like Gig Young in a forgotten episode of The Twilight Zone.

   “I know,” she said. “I just love this song.”

   “Yeah,” I said, too cowardly to come out of the closet and agree, “but why?”

   “I don’t know.” She laughed. “I hear the words, ‘hungry like the wolf.’ I know what they mean. But it’s emotional. I feel it more. You don’t have to believe in a song to like it. That’s where art works differently than ideas. With ideas, you can either believe them or not. Art comes to you sensually. You have very few defenses against it. Art can trick people into accepting ideas they don’t even see coming and they wouldn’t accept otherwise. It’s why someone like Reagan was so successful. He was more of an artist, than an ideas person. Politics is close to art. The emotion politicians work with is fear. We all ask ourselves questions such as, ‘What am I working for? Why do I get up in the morning?’ Well, in the United States, at least, the answer is practical. ‘I get up to go to work to get paid to pay the rent and to buy stuff.’ Most political arguments, whether about taxes or immigration, come down to how one candidate can get you more of what you want. Everybody’s worried they wont be able to get what they want in the future. People talk about how bad things are and how much worse things will get. But the emotion is excitement, as if they’re rooting for the end of the world. Our hearts beat faster. There’s something spectacular about the thought of the TV going off and the sirens going on. There is a romance about an impending holocaust, an apocalypse. Maybe it’s a relief. Freud recognized this years ago. We are as attracted to death as we are to life. Perhaps more so to death. But wouldn’t it be incredible and wouldn’t it change our expectations and maybe also our reality if we got as excited about peace, maybe even love? Love is a type of gravity. ‘Falling in love’ is the obvious comparison. The difference is there are very few places where you can escape gravity. It’s the opposite with love. Love is not omnipresent. In fact, it’s hard to find. It’s what we’re the most hungry for.”

   “Like the wolf.”