Every so often, the consumer kicks back at the peddler who presumes too much.
One of the blandest and longest-standing assumptions has been that ''radio-friendly'' singles should conform to a three-minute format, even after improvements in technology allowed artists to move well beyond the limitations of the earliest platters.
In 1981, Laurie Anderson's eight-minute song O Superman not only dismissed that notional time constraint, just as Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody had six years previously, it also placed a supposedly non-commercial, strictly-for-the-art-freaks New York avant-garde performer one spot short of the top of the UK singles charts.
There was a message here: ''Give us something new and interesting. We can handle it.''
The mesmeric song's success took Anderson as much by surprise as it did the small label that carried it.
When the dust from the whirlwind of interest finally settled, Anderson found herself with a seven-album deal and the impetus to commit pieces from her performance art magnum opus United States I-IV to tape for major label debut LP Big Science (1982).
The album grapples with the United States' place in the world as a great nation - great in size, in achievements, in power and in expectation.
Viewed from the outside and in, America is laughed with and at, is questioned about matters of progress and treatment of the individual, and is presented as hugely vulnerable in the face of a fast-changing technological environment.
Anderson's human-ness is evident in the softness and warmth of her tone but is reshaped by the use of vocoder, harmoniser and pitch shifter. It enables her to play both the wry observer and the unflappable recorder of perceived truths, a woman and a machine.
Loops create rhythms from slices of breathy singing, and seldom does a track take the form of a conventional pop song. Within the context of the time, it is a remarkable crossover album that has lost little of its relevance.
