Oh, I didn't mean to compare Justin Timberlake to Laurie Anderson by any means, I was just saying that my arguments against some of today's pop music could very well be used against me in my own music. It's like when Michael Jackson's Black or White came out. I was bitching to high hell that the repetitive guitar and the samples bothered me but then my favorite song at the time was Rush by Big Audio Dynamite which had, you guessed it, a repetitive guitar line and samples. So when called on it, I learned not to make generalizations.

But I have hope, dear friend. The fact that Laurie Anderson's epic saga of United States parts 1 though 4 is available on CD and not even out of print. So there's gotta be something to the fact that they are kept in the Warner Bros. catalog.

I didn't have other friends to expose me to cool and unusual music. I somehow latched on to Blondie and The B-52's early on, and the soundtrack of Pretty In Pink got me to seek out and explore bands like The Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths and New Order when I'd never even heard of them before. And my one saving grace was a show called "Alive From Off Center", which exposed me to a lot of avant garde performers. It was here that Laurie Anderson did a whole episode where she created a digital "clone" of herself, only to have it turn out as a three foot tall man.

I do find it ironic that my earliest exposure to underground and avant garde music was on Saturday Night Live. For those of you who weren't around in the 70's and early 80's, decades before the musical guests of SNL were pop stars de jour, you could find bands like Sun Ra, Capt. Beefheart, The B-52's (before Rock Lobster became a frat party fav), Talking Heads and many other unusual acts.

Oh great, I'm gonna have O Superman in my head all day now. LOL!