What is it about vocoders? They add a distance to the human voice that, in the skilled hands of Laurie Anderson, renders it omnipotent, supernatural. And marching through the uncanny valley right alongside her processed singing is that “ah ah ah” ostinato, both weirdly neutral and unsettlingly robotic. The simple mi-re-do-ish tune, with its comforting tonal harmonies, lies in creepy conflict with the unsettling ransom-note lyrics. Somehow this song manages to get at something sinister about empire and technology while remaining catchy, funny, and oddly touching.
J. S. Bach: Agnus Dei (Mass in B minor)
In my mind, J. S. Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived. I know that he never wrote an opera, but my first...
Despite the subtitle, it took a long while before I realized the song riffs on “O Souverein” from Massenet’s Le Cid, which apparently made a big impression on Laurie when she saw it at The Met.