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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
As for this classic album, Reed's three-dimensional excavation and explication of the musical and conceptual components of every song, made the end result even more impressive. * Jeremy Shatan, anearful blog *
[Reed] also doesn't shy away from musicological dissection when it seems useful, but always provides a way in for the uninitiated, using musical examples that almost everyone will know. * Jeremy Shatan, Anearful *
Reed's fascinating multi-perspectival account of Big Science is a carefully argued and much needed exposition of this enigmatic work. Historical, contextual, and textual insights deftly examine the intersecting personal, cultural and philosophical themes Anderson explores, both in Big Science and in her work leading to and from it. * Sean Albiez, Ph.D., Co-editor of Brian Eno: Oblique Music and Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190926021
Author S. Alexander Reed
Format Paperback
Page Count 188
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions(mm) 141mm * 208mm * 13mm