The Mose Allison song Laurie Anderson says defines the modern world
The fact that Laurie Anderson concurred with David Bowie’s endorsement of Lou Reed and Metallica’s universally panned album Lulu is a testament to her oblique artistic outlook. Of course, Anderson’s warm appraisal could be influenced by the fact that Lulu was one of her husband’s final artistic offerings before his death in 2013. Either way, she knows her stuff when it comes to abstract and experimental art.
Anderson is a polymath, having dabbled for half a century in spoken word, music, visual art, and state-of-the-art technology to create multi-media artistic experiences. She first rose to prominence in the 1970s and is perhaps best known for ‘O Superman’, an enduring single from her 1982 album Big Science. Thanks to its lead single, the album reached unforeseen heights of commercial success and became an iconic piece of avant-garde pop music.
Anderson is of such a disposition that obscure artistic nuances stick out less like a sore thumb but like a beckoning finger. Minds like these will often guide art into the future, presaging fashions well ahead of their time. We’re still waiting for Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music to come into vogue, but Bowie and Anderson may be onto something with Lulu.
When picking out nine of her all-time favourite songs for a 2021 feature with The Line of Best Fit, Anderson lauded Reed and Metllica’s 2011 album. “Lulu was a record that was not well received and wayyyy ahead of time,” she said, selecting the epic closer ‘Junior Dad’ as a favourite. “I remember that David Bowie told me at that time that it was Lou’s best record. And it takes at least 20 years for people to realise. It came out, it was a flop, and yet – what a record.”
In my humble opinion, the album is so-so: better than it’s given credit for, but surely not Reed’s greatest work. Elsewhere in her selections, Anderson touched down on less contentious ground with discerning selections from Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Brian Wilson and Captain Beefheart. Although we associate Anderson with artistic extravagance, the lyrics found in most of her selections are markedly lucid and meaningful.
Perhaps the most simple yet thought-provoking track on Anderson’s list was ‘Young Man Blues’ by the legendary jazz and blues composer Mose Allison. “I love this because it’s short, and cool, and true,” Anderson explained. She continued to describe the song as a single “observation that just works. It’s really sharp. ‘It’s an old man’s world, but I’m a young man’. What happens to young energy? This is really well put by Mose Allison.”
In the lyrics, Allison candidly posits that “a young man ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days” because “nowadays, it’s the old man—he’s got all the money.” He first recorded the song in 1957, but its message seems increasingly resonant in the modern sociopolitical climate. “I think it’s something that could have been the theme song for a lot of young guys for the last four years in the United States,” Anderson pointed out.
Anderson noted that Americans are “living in an old man’s world and an old man’s mind.” This statement could also allude to the then-newly inaugurated Joe Biden, but as she continued, Former President Donald Trump seemed to fit the bill. “Kind of like a monomaniac’s mind,” she continued. “To me, monomaniacal means that it’s very focused and single-pointed, but it’s also crazy. Single-pointed craziness. And very narcissistic. Living in the craziness of this one person who’s gone really crazy.”
Whether Anderson referred to Trump’s narcissistic tendencies or Biden’s apparent senility of late, Allison’s words apply to an ageing establishment in the Western world. This is, of course, nothing new, but before Trump, only Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan had held office during their 70s. At age 81, Biden is a record-setting octogenarian.