Dance of Electricity
Laurie Anderson

A while ago, I got a call from the Tesla Institute in Belgrade, long distance. The voice was very faint and it said, “Understand do we that much of your work has been dedicated to Nikola Tesla and do we know the blackout of information about this man in the U.S. of A. And so we would like to invite you to the Institute as a free citizen of the world ... as a free speaker on American Imperialist Blackout of Information .. Capitalist resistance to Technological Progress ... the Western World’s obstruction of Innovation. So think about it.” He hung up. I thought: Gee, really a chance to speak my mind, and I started doing some research on Tesla, whose life story is actually really sad.n Basically, he was the inventor of AC current, lots of kinds of generators and the Tesla coil. His dream was wireless energy. And he was working on a system in which you could plug appliances directly into the ground. A system which he never really perfected.n Tesla came over from Graz and went to work for Thomas Edison. Edison couldn’t stand Tesla for several reasons. One was that Tesla showed up for work every day in formal dress--morning coat, spats, top hat and gloves--and this just wasn’t the American Way at the time. Edison also hated Tesla because Tesla invented so many things while wearing these clothes.n Edison did his best to prevent conversion to AC and did everything he could to discredit it. In his later years, Edison was something of a showman and he went around on the Chautauqua circuit in upstate New York giving demonstrations of the evil effects of AC. He always brought a dog with him and he’d get up on stage and say: “Ladies and gentlemen! I will now demonstrate the effects of AC current on this dog!” And he took two bare wires and attached them to the dog’s head and the dog was dead in under thirty seconds.n At any rate, I decided to open the series of talks in Belgrade with a song called “The Dance of Electricity” and its beat is derived from an actual dance--an involuntary dance--and it’s the dance you do when one of your fingers gets wedged in a live socket and your arms start pumping up and down and your mouth is slowly opening and closing and you can feel the power but no words will come out.


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Lyrics by Laurie Anderson

  A Curious Phenomenon   Another Day in America   Baby Doll   Babydoll   Bagpipe Solo   Beautiful Pea Green Boat   Beautiful Red Dress   Beginning French   Big Science   Blue Lagoon   Bodies In Motion   Born, Never Asked   Bright Red   Broken   Cartoon Song   City Song   Classified   Closed Circuits   Coolsvile   Coolsville   Dark Angel   Dark Time In The Revolution   Day The Devil   Democratic Way   Difficult Listening Hour   Dream Before   EngliSH   Example #22   Excellent Birds   Falling   False Documents   Finnish Farmers   Four, Three, Two, One   Frames For The Pictures   Free Fall   Freefall   From The Air   Gravity's Angel   Hey Ah   Hiawatha   I Dreamed I Had To Take A Test   In Our Sleep   In Our Sleep [Instrumental][Mix]   It Tango   It Was Up In The Mountains   John Lilly   Kokoku   Language is a Virus   Langue D'amour   Late Show   Let X = X   Let X=X   Life on a String   Lighting Out For The Territories   Looking For You; Walking And Falling   Love Among The Sailors   Mach 20   Maria Teresa Teresa Maria   Monkey's Paw   Muddy River   My Compensation   My Eyes   My Right Eye   New Jersey Turnpike   New York Social Life   Night In Baghdad   O Superman   O Superman (For Massenet)   Odd Objects   On The Way To Jerusalem   One Beautiful Evening   One White Whale   Only an Expert   Over The River   Pieces and Parts   Poison   Poison [Instrumental][Mix]   Private Property   Puppet Motel   Ramon   Red Hot   Same Time Tommrow   Same Time Tomorrow   Say Hello   Sharkey's Day   Sharkey's Day (Single Edit)   Sharkey's Night   Slip Away   Smoke Rings   So Happy Birthday   Someone Else's Dream   Song For Two Jims   Speak My Language   Speechless   Speechless (The Eagle and the Weasel)   Statue of liberty   Steven Weed   Stiff Neck   Strange Angels   Strange Perfumes   Structuralist Filmmaking   Sweaters   Talk Normal   Talkshow   Telephone Song   The Beginning of Memory   The Big Top   The Cultural Ambassador   The Day the Devil   The Dream Before   The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin)   The End Of The World   The Geographic North Pole   The Guests   The Healing Horn   The Hollywood Strangler   The Island Where I Come From   The Lake   The Language Of The Future   The Mailman’s Nightmare   The Mysterious "J"   The Mysterious \   The Mysterious "J"   The Night Flight From Houston   The Ouija Board   The Puppet Motel   The Rotowhirl   The Salesman   The Soul Is A Bird   The Stranger   The Ugly One With The Jewels   The Visitors   Thinking Of You   Three Songs For Paper, Film And Video   Three Walking Songs   Tightrope   Time And A Half   Transitory Life   Turning Time Around [Lou Reed]   Voices On Tape   Walk The Dog   Walking & Falling   Walking & Falling   Walking Falling   Washington Street   White Lily   Word Of Mouth   World Without End   Yankee See

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