Various artists - O Superman Remix (Staalplaat)
The '80s were, in hindsight, brought in with an odd pair of songs. In
1981, at a time when the LP ruled, two singles were released (initially
not appearing on full-length albums) by women who were more important
as conceptual artists than as musicians. Yoko Ono was 43 when she
released "Walking On Thin Ice," recorded with husband John Lennon but
released after his murder. Laurie Anderson, at 34, was her junior, and
"O Superman" was her official foray into recorded music after much
installation and event art that revolved around the idea of
music. (Unfortunately, there isn't really a rock star spouse parallel
to draw, since Lennon would be killed before Laurie and Lou got
together.) Both were hailed as significant releases, and if they
weren't major commercial events, well, nobody would have thought they
would be.
Critic Gene Santoro once wisely noted that Ono didn't ruin Lennon's
career, but rather he ruined hers. It's difficult to gauge what Ono's
reputation might be today had she not been hanging out with rock stars
in the '70s. But her work did grow less interesting as she went from
event artist to sound artist to songstress (and while some of her
recordings are atrocious, most people are wrong about which ones those
are). "Walking on Thin Ice" was the first sound to come out of the
Dakota after Lennon was shot in front of the building where they lived,
and the song's brittle cynicism made it a poignant statement, even
while being an unconvincing attempt to harness the ideas coming out of
the nascent new wave movement. She was mourning, and we could only but
forgive her invocation of the triumvirate cliche in the song's chorus
("Walking on thin ice/I'm paying the price/for throwing the dice/in the
air").
Soon after, another single from another New York weirdo got some
underground acclaim. Laurie Anderson had, like Ono, incorporated
musical ideas into her gallery work before embracing music as an end in
itself. She had presented a car horn symphony and various spins on the
idea of a violin recital before actually committing to wax something
for mass consumption. "O Superman" was a much bolder creation than
Ono's song, and while the tenor of the times forced Anderson into the
new wave camp as well, she had created something quite her own. The
repeated staccato vocal of the rhythm track was cold and odd at a time
when sampling technologies hadn't yet made cold and odd de rigeur. The
song wasn't quite robotic, but it was still of some less-than-human
future and the lyrics were a sarcastically reassuring voice for the
Cold War years ("Here come the planes/they're American planes/made in
America").
Two new discs reexamine those singles with a series of remixes. The
discs are geared at different audiences and meet different levels of
success in finding something new in the old. Anderson gets the glitch
treatment while the Ono album producers go for the dance floor. (Indeed
the new record went #1 on the dance charts, realizing Lennon's prophecy
that the song would be Ono's first hit single.)
The original "Walking On Thin Ice" isn't a bad song, but it was one of
Ono's worst up to that point. While fans were certainly divided about
her primal scream vocals in the early '70s (most falling into the anti
camp), there is something compelling about those records. It was an
attempt at avant pop, and Ono was neither the singer nor the lyricist
to pull it off. Ono and producer Rob Stevens gathered a cast of
moderately interesting djs to work with the equally interesting
material. By and large, they go for rote regurgitation of the song,
sometimes stealing motifs -- Danny Tenaglia borrows from Kraftwerk and
Pet Shop Boys from themselves -- to broaden the palette.
The problem, quite simply, is that nobody thinks of anything to do with
the vocal track, so each mix is anchored to the original. Rui da Silva
comes close, but loses confidence and starts to lean too heavily on the
song's bass line halfway through. To his credit, though, his is one of
the few tracks that maintains the less-than-dancefloor-friendly vocal
wretching from the original, masking it with enough reverb and delay to
only be sort of sickening. Peter Rauhoffer sidesteps the problem by
focusing on the spoken part of the song, but still fails to deliver
something interesting. Orange Factory's track might be the most
successful, if only because it's the most unabashedly dancehall, with
fast synth lines that spin and fly all over the place.
What separates Ice from the O Superman mixes, and makes
the latter a much better record, is the willingness of the performers
to reinterpret. Rather than presenting a weary hour of slight
modifications, the Anderson mixers make the song their own; sometimes
minutes can pass without immediately recognizable Superman
sources, making it not just possible but enjoyable to listen to the
disc all the way through (I defy anyone, even at a dance club, to
listen to Ice from beginning to end).
O Superman Remix opens with the familiar vocal backing line and
an electronic drone, immediately both familiar and new. Anderson says
"Hi" (sampled from later in the song) and then Com.a's thin, fast beats
kick in. From there on, the song is filtered through a number of
convolutions. Team Doyobi make a bit of pornography and Massimo creates
a fearsome, dynamic racket. Overall, the disc moves well. As on
Ice, the mixes tend to be beat oriented, but the disc works like
a collage; individual tracks don't stand out, although some are further
ranging and more inventive.
There's something quaintly nostaligic about revisiting these two
singles, and if Anderson and Ono weren't entirely prescient, they knew
where to look for inspiration: not just Kraftwerk, but M Factor, DEVO
and others were already playing with the idea of pop music made by
machines. By now, with the sorts of artists featured on these discs,
the model has more or less been perfected (in Britain, the term
"post-human music" was even used to describe dance electronica). But in
the '80s it was fresh and a little scary, and ladies your momma's age
were in on the freak fest.
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