Laurie Anderson’’s Big Science

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s 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?

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 this singular album and of its creator’s long artistic career. 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.

Dr. S. Alexander Reed 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, the Journal of Musicological
Research, Perspectives of New Music, Popular Music and Society, ImageTexT, the Journal of Popular Music Education, and elsewhere. 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.