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"Processing Encrypted Failure: Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman'"

This talk was presented at the 2020 American Musicological Society annual meeting. Abstract: The failed rescue missions of the Iran hostage crisis, in particular, “Operation Eagle Claw,” during which helicopters malfunctioned and eight American service members were killed, is the subject of Laurie Anderson’s multimedia piece “O Superman” (1981). The piece featured the innovative use of an Eventide Harmonizer, a studio processor first released in 1975 with pitch-shifting, delay, and feedback capacities among other effects, and a vocoder, a speech synthesis encoder, which originated in Bell research laboratories and developed as a voice encryption military technology. The song charted internationally the year of its release and has continued to circulate widely and in uncommon settings to frame public anxiety regarding the intersection of technological advancements and international political strife, such as amassing attention again after the Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s and following the 9/11 attacks in NYC, and, in 1988, the Italian Health Ministry employed it in a television campaign for AIDS awareness and education. More recently, at the 2016 PEN World Voices Literary Festival in New York City, Anderson appeared alongside Chelsea Manning, queer and transgender rights activist and famed military whistleblower. While discussing Anderson’s piece “O Superman,” Manning suggested that Anderson’s work encourages a necessary re-evaluation of past failures of the American government. This paper investigates “O Superman” as a case study to consider the genealogy of voice processing as a military encryption technology and the politics of failure. Situating the piece within musicological discourse on the subversion of teleological forms (McClary 1991), the tension of drastic/gnostic divides (Abbate 2004), and voice as a mechanism of political constitution (Eidsheim, 2015, 2019; Ochoa Gautier, 2014) I take up “O Superman” through the lens of failure, both as a queer method (Halberstam, 2011) and a frame of war (Butler, 2009; Puar 2007, 2017). I re-evaluate the circulation of “O Superman” to demonstrate how failure is encrypted into expressions of national security, imperial logics, and the promise of endless war.