Real Life Rock Top Ten – September 2010

(1) Laurie Anderson: Homeland (Nonesuch).  “Only an Expert” is not anything anyone could have expected from Laurie Anderson: a pop song.  It moves quickly on a stuttering but unpredictable beat.  The verses are like a stand-up comedy act where the comic is constantly winking at the audience, but not exactly to indicate everyone in the privileged room is in on the joke.  You can’t tell what the wink is saying, and it exerts its own pull of fascination.  The chorus is is pure pop, the singer taking pleasure in the momentum of a few words that quickly cease to mean anything—they could be doo-wops.  The music is that cool, that unafraid of itself.  The bits of Lou Reed’s feedback running in the deep background of the piece as it moves on, each fragment curling in on itself like a paper in fire, suggest that there’s a lot to this song that isn’t being said, even though it has over 900 words.

Like a lot of this album, with its Department of Security title—the Nazi word Homeland saying that everywhere else is Empire—“Only an Expert” moves quickly into the traducing of the Constitution and the morals of American history by George W. Bush and his administration.  But as such it’s a novelty song, which I once heard defined as a song that was funny and not about love.  This song is very funny for more than seven and a half minutes, and it gets funnier the more you listen to it.  Its currency is disbelief: everything it describes is presented with an expression of well-what-did-you-expect acceptance, which in every other moment turns into you must be kidding, which, as you listen, over and over, can change into nightmare, hate, fear, self-loathing, and fantasies of murderous revenge.

Except perhaps on The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories, from 1995, Anderson’s best album until this one, her voice has been a raised eyebrow: arch, knowing, sometimes sneering, even smug.  It’s no different here.  What is radically different is that here Anderson has built a context—on an expanding, old-fashioned zeitgeist album that means to translate everything into its own language, to replace a diffuse and fugitive frame of reference with one the singer has built herself—in which everything she says, her every tone of voice, is suffused with such regret and pain over what has happened to the country the singer has to describe that the arch, the knowing, the sneering, and the smug are revealed as hopeless, worthless masks.  Song by song, through play, surprise, tunes that drift like dreams in and out of the words and textures of “O Superman,” that soft-spoken Jeremiad that across nearly...