Laurie Anderson’s musical tribute to Amelia Earhart

Obwohl sie viele Instrumente beherrscht, bleibt Laurie Andersons bevorzugtes ihre Stimme. Seit mehr als vierzig Jahren erhebt sie das „Storytelling“ zu einer Kunstform. Dabei schwankt ihr Singsang zwischen lässiger Slam-Poetry, formalem Nachrichtentonfall, zweifelndem Fragen und intimem Flüstern. In ihren mäandernden Geschichten zele­briert sie die Sätze und Wörter regelrecht, zieht sie wie eine Illusionistin mit hörbarem Vergnügen überraschend hervor, wendet sie hin und her und verleiht ihnen schlussendlich eine verführerische Tönung.

Gerade erst avancierte Anderson zur Tiktok-Ikone wider Willen: Ihr Überraschungshit „O Superman“ von 1981 ging plötzlich viral. Song-Zeilen wie „You don’t know me, but I know you, and I’ve got a message to give to you“ trafen exakt das Selbstverständnis von Millionen Tiktok-Nutzern: Selbstdarstellung und geheimnisvolle Inszenierung zugleich. Der elek­tronisch verfremdete Gesang, wie von einem Roboter erzeugt, schien perfekt das gespenstische Zugleich von vergänglichen Selbstbildnissen und ein bisschen Berühmtheit zu illustrieren. Dabei lautet die unterschwellige Botschaft von Andersons Vocoder-Stimme: Keine Technologie kann uns retten!

Das Dauerthema, wie Menschen und Technologie sich verbinden können, prägt auch ihr neues Album „Amelia“. Zugleich demonstriert es Andersons Gespür für den richtigen Tonfall und die Sinnlichkeit von Sprache. Halb Hörspiel, halb Songzyklus: Die zweiundzwanzig Stücke auf „Amelia“ ranken sich um den letzten Flug der Flugpionierin und nimmermüden Frauenrechtlerin Amelia Earhart 1937.

Even as a young girl, Anderson was fascinated by Earhart’s flying adventures. Her courage and self-determined nature must have had an enormous appeal to the student. She saw in Amelia the tough type that she herself would have liked to embody as a teenager. “She said to herself, if I manage to fly around the world, then maybe I can also get girls to take part in craft classes in schools and no longer be stigmatized as being technically untalented.” In her youth, Amelia loved to go rat hunting with an air rifle, climb the highest trees and collect newspaper articles about women in male-dominated professions. Later she worked as a social worker and teacher and in another twenty-six jobs. Against all the resistance of those around her, she eventually became a professional pilot. She repeatedly emphasized that she wanted to use her popularity to “get women out of the cage of their gender.”

The sky soon became a natural element of life for Amelia. Here, too, Anderson sees personal parallels: “Even as a child, I fell in love with the sky, with its beauty, the freedom it promises – as if I could float around in it forever,” she recently confessed on BBC Radio 4. At the same time, she felt the tempting adventure of such a blind flight: “I still remember the euphoric state when I ran into the darkness – with my arms outstretched like an airplane, with my eyes closed, just running.”

In 1932 – five years after Charles Lindbergh – Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. On May 21, 1937, she set off from Miami to circumnavigate the world at the equator – an insane undertaking at the time. On July 2, she wanted to complete the last leg of her journey, the Pacific, from New Guinea. Amelia had planned to make a final stop on the small Howland Island. Unfortunately, she never got there. After a search lasting weeks with sixty-four aircraft and eight warships – the largest search operation in the history of aviation to date – the investigation was called off.

Amelia Earhart was declared missing, “probably dead”. This did not stop the public from indulging in wild speculation about an emergency landing on Gardner Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Phoenix Islands, and the Japanese capture of Earhart and her navigator on the mini-atoll. Over the years, repeated attempts have been made to find the missing plane. It was only in January of this year that it was believed that a sonar signal had been used to locate the supposed wreck at a depth of around 5,000 meters about 160 kilometers off the Howland Island between Honolulu and Australia. However, only an investigation with a diving robot can provide definitive information about the whereabouts of the ill-fated plane.

Since the premiere of “Amelia” at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2000, Anderson has been obsessed with the flight fanatic’s fate: she has expanded and perfected her performance program in repeated attempts. On the current album, she quotes from Earhart’s pilot’s diaries and the telegrams she wrote to her husband. But first and foremost, she tries to imagine, in blurred dream images, what a woman thinks about when she flies around the world. The warm, soft melodic contours of the songs are commented on, then contradicted again, by turbulent string sounds from the Brno Philharmonic under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies. Anderson also relies on the support of singer Anohni, violinist Martha Mooke, guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wolleson. They all create music that is dynamic enough to be heard, seen, felt and tasted.

Reflections on wind speeds, cloud formations and sunlight alternate with meditations on the colors of the sky. Sensations of the emptiness and vastness of desert formations are translated into wafting sounds. Fluctuating between one and four minutes, the sound miniatures deliver something like “sonic landscapes” as the aviator may have imagined them. But there are also naturalistic pieces: While “Take Off” collages the sounds of takeoff preparations, “Howard Island” tries to make the chaos of radio traffic on the navigator’s fatally wrongly selected frequency audible. The voice of Amelia Earhart herself can also be heard: “This Modern World” turns out to be a mini-lecture about the discrimination against women in technical professions.

Subliminally, Laurie Anderson’s new album seems to be referring to Joni Mitchell’s song “Amelia” from 1976. In her lyrics, which find no answers and could easily have been written by Anderson, Mitchell compares herself to Earhart’s self-chosen fate: “She was swallowed by the sky or the sea, she had, like me, a dream of flying, like Icarus, rising on beautiful, foolish arms.”

Laurie Anderson: “Amelia.” Nonesuch (Warner) 0075597904765