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Review: Laurie Anderson’s Big Science , by S. Alexander Reed

2024; Wiley; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jpms.2024.36.2.127

1533-1598

Maria Murphy,

History of Science and Medicine

Anderson's first studio album Big Science (1982).Nonesuch Records commemorated the milestone with a flashy red vinyl re-release, sparking renewed interest in and reexaminations of the album's persistent relevance both as a strikingly insightful account of American politics and as a commentary on emergent communication technologies' alienating effects and expanding corporate power in the late 1970s and early 1980s.S. Alexander Reed's engaging and informative Laurie Anderson's Big Science is one such re-evaluation that addresses the political and creative contours of Anderson's multimedia practice.Throughout eight chapters, Reed's book weaves together detailed analysis, new archival gems, and convincing theoretical framings that offer fresh perspectives on the album and Anderson's career more broadly.This book was published as part of the Oxford Keynotes series that features publications dedicated to a single composition or album.Reed situates Big Science in the here and now, following nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg's conceptualization of "big science," through a historical lens. 1 Reed deftly connects narratives of progress, early manifestations of capitalist realism, and the objects that exemplify this neoliberal shift in the 1980s.Those objects include the proliferation of big data, the constant engine of corporate America, and its concomitant power to anonymize both individuals and any possible sense of a public or collective.Reed considers Big Science according to scale, by analyzing how Anderson structurally taps into the vast, corporatethe "big"-structure of Big Science as well as through individual musical characteristics and sonic processes.Reed commits to a methodology of description, following Anderson's complaint that critics and scholars rarely describe her work in detail and instead often offer interpretations or shoehorn her work as examples into arguments about literature and philosophy.The book provides careful and extensive descriptive analyses of each track, pulling together the conceptual and analytical construction of each piece.For example, Chapter 3 provides an overview of the album's minimal harmonic structure and goes into detail 1.