Laurie Anderson Word Of Mouth Lyrics

Word Of Mouth Lyrics

In 1980, as part of a project called Word of Mouth, I was invited, along with a
living other artists, to go to Panape, a tiny island in the middle of the
Pacific. The idea was that we'd sit around talking for a few days and that the
conversations would be made into a talking record. 

The first night we were all really jet-lagged but as soon as we sat down the
organizers set up all these mikes and switched on thousand white light bulbs.
And we tried our best to seem as intelligent as possible. Television had just
come to Panape a week before we arrived and there was a strong excitement
around the island as people crowded around the few sets. Then the day after we
arrived, in a bizarre replay of the first TV show ever broadcast to Panape,
prisoners escaped from a jail, broke into the radio station and murdered the
DJ. Then they went off on a rampage through the jungle, armed with lawnmower
blades. In all, four people were murdered in cold blood. Detectives, flown in
from Guam to investigate, swarmed everywhere. At night we stayed around in our
cottages, listening out into the jungle. 



Finally the local chief decided to hold a ceremony for the murder victims. The
artist Marina Brownovich and I went, as representatives of our group to film
it. The ceremony was held in a large thatched lean-to and most of the ceremony
involved cooking beans in pits and brewing a dark drink from roots. The smell
was overwhelming. Dogs ###040225 around barking. And everybody seemed to be
having a fairly good time… as funerals go. 



After a few hours Marina and I were presented to the chief, who was sitting on
a raised platform above the pits. We'd been told we couldn't turn our backs on
the chief at any time or ever be higher than he was. So we scrambled up onto
the platform with our film equipment and sort of duck-waddled up backwards to
the chief. As a present I brought one of those Fred Flintstone cameras, the
kind where the film canister is also the body of the camera, and I presented it
to the chief. He seemed delighted and began to click off pictures. He wasn't
advancing the film between shots, but since we were told we shouldn't speak
unless spoken to, I wasn't able to inform him that he wasn't going to get
twelve pictures, but only one, very, very complicated one. 



After a couple more hours the chief lifted his hand, and there was absolute
silence. All the dogs had suddenly stopped barking. We looked around and saw
the dogs. All their throats had been simultaneously cut and their bodies, still
breathing, pierced with rods, were turning on those pits. The chief insisted we
join in the meal but Marina had turned green and I asked if we could just have
ours to go. They carefully wrapped the dogs in leaves and we carried their
bodies away.