Laurie Anderson: "Our situation is not normal, it's the demise of government."

We can talk about regression.

Eighty percent of the time I have the current situation on my mind, because it's not normal; it's the demise of our government. Two nights ago, I went to a beautiful performance by the Brooklyn Youth Choir, a beautiful piece about World War II, and I considered it as the historical backdrop for what's happening now, which is very disconcerting. They told me they've been cut off from funding, but they were told they could get it back if they did shows that focused on the military and Christianity. It's very serious.

It's hard to imagine Jesus going to war.

This is undoubtedly their version, which is militant and exclusive, all white. They want white music with a God in charge. You've seen the meme of the president dressed as a pope.

He said it was a joke...

Now it's pop culture. The current president of what I call the old United States doesn't care. It's his reign, but it's a reign of terror, and people are very afraid. You're on the train and there are immigration agents up and down the train asking for your papers.

You were in the Vatican recently.

In March, I was in Rome for a few weeks, working on a book, and I received a message from the Pope asking us to meet, to come to the Vatican to give a talk on prisons. Let's just say I'm not a big fan of the Catholic Church, but I am a big fan of people helping people. There's always a struggle, regardless of the organization you're in, to have an open heart and not be crushed by bureaucracy. Whether it's in the Church, a newspaper, or the art world, everyone has their rules. He worked for the good of the people, and I respect that.

They had met before...

Yes, a few years ago at a conference where we invited about 50 artists... and only two of us were women.

What a surprise...

They could try harder: you can break the rules, which were made by humans and are meant to be broken by humans. You can look at the world and say: that's not fair, let's change it. In fact, that's what the president of the United States is doing now: he says the laws we have aren't good, but his rules are.

He denounces him as an artist.

I've always talked about situations like this because they're stories, and this is a story of how America is changing. There's a scene in a Western movie where a kid runs into the saloon and yells, "There's trouble at the mine, come here!" And everyone drops what they're doing and runs to help. That's not an American story anymore. I think Americans are very good at heart, I really am, but they're caught in this trap of fear. So now my image of the American West would be a little house in the middle of nowhere, with all the American families with guns in the windows shooting people. That's part of our story today, as much as we'd like to say it isn't. But people live in a psycho-bubble, which has turned dialogue into idiotic things or crazy rhetoric that has co-opted the language of democracy and freedom. So I try to approach all of these things as stories because I don't want to lecture politically.

It's all politics, after all.

Of course. What's the story of progress in making America great again? When was it great? In the 1950s, with the ridiculous image of a happy white family where the father rules?

You have been a pioneer in several artistic fields.

I don't know what progress is, nor do I mind being the first. I like to explore things. If I'm the last, I don't mind, because to me it's new, and everyone has their own idea of ​​what's new, and I love seeing people inventing things; it's very beautiful.

He has also worked a lot with technology, and with artificial intelligence.

We musicians have been working for many years, maybe 50, including arpeggios and all sorts of generated things to make music, so it's not scary. Once it becomes language, it's a very different thing, but only because people don't play with language enough, they don't see the fun in how silly AI can be, which can sometimes be a great poet, so tomorrow maybe I'll read some AI-generated poetry, because it's quirky and can be a good collaborator.

Many people are afraid of AI.

It's funny. I think whoever programs ChatGPT's algorithms is a bit Buddhist, because its underlying essence is non-confrontational interconnection; it's non-combative. But we can't count on it being a truth machine. It's just a toy, albeit a dangerous one, and in fields other than art, in the workplace, it will destroy the economy. It's already doing so.

Privatize knowledge.

Part of the destruction of our government has to do with the companies that will come: they'll destroy the postal service, and they'll invent another one, but its engine will be AI, and the same with healthcare and education. Everything will be replaced by corporate and private, for-profit companies. This talk of rights and freedom is, to me, a smokescreen to hide the greatest theft in history.

After everything you've done, how would you define yourself as a musician, singer, performer, poet, artist? First, for me, it's stories, and you can tell them in a painting, music, film, or simply by speaking them, but that's the driving force. Right now, I'm actually working on a book of stories about stories; that's what I was doing in Rome. One of them is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, where there's a wonderful scene that has to do with the change of narrative, because ultimately, I'm interested in things like what part of you is the narrative or how much fiction there is. Because of course, everything is fiction when you narrate. Will this interview also be fiction? Of course, the form is fiction. But anyway, what matters to me is communication, telling stories. You say you don't advocate self-expression, but your work remains very coherent. It's just that everyone has their own style, which is distinct from personality or even branding . When I started making records, people asked me what my style would be. I defined myself by making a joke of it, with photos of myself acting silly, like a cartoon. I think young artists now take branding very seriously, the way they're perceived. Speaking to students the other day, they're terrified of how others will see them, how they'll define them. They're really caught up in what capitalism took, selling themselves. They sell themselves as products and have to have a coherent brand. All influencers and opinion leaders create a brand, and they get trapped in their brand. That's terrifying because it's hard enough to understand yourself or hear your own voice, and if you rely on other people to define you, you're lost because they don't know you. You can call yourself an artist or whatever, but few people actually care what you call yourself. Was it hard to make a name for yourself or did it come naturally? Look, the thing is, I'm a snob, I admit it. As soon as people started liking my stuff, I thought, "What's wrong with you?" I wanted to be exclusive. The Happy Few . So it was never my goal to reach anyone. In fact, I thought: the more people like your work, the worse it probably is. But that's just snobbery, and I'm trying to overcome that. It was about finding your own way... Do you have to be the best, the brightest, the most outlandish? Well, that can be fine, sometimes it works and it's fantastic. I don't have any rules about it; whatever people want to try, I'm open to seeing what they do. I don't judge them, really.