That new track from Bullion has been doing the rounds for a couple of weeks. It makes no bones that it samples Laurie Anderson’s O Superman.
I was chatting to someone about this and I was startled to learn that they had no idea what I was talking about. O Superman has been covered, sampled and parodied many times over the years. But listening to the original recording, it’s not surprising that it receives little airplay now. It’s surprising that it received any airplay in 1981 when it was released.
We’re talking about a minimalist synth recording built around a natural “Ha” sound looped in an unnatural cycle, an audio example of the uncanny valley hypothesis, a record imbued with an unsettling familiarity. It’s over eight minutes long. It’s based on an aria by Jules Massenet. It’s by a performance artist who was little known at the time. It’s synthetic and detached, with lyrics bordering on gibberish.
I find it utterly beguiling. But I can understand if you don’t.
