“The lyrics are a one-sided conversation, like a prayer to God. It sounds sinister – but it is sinister when you start talking to power. I juxtaposed sinister and mundane imagery: “Hold me Mom in your long arms, your petrochemical arms, your military arms.” We’d always been told that America was the motherland, to appeal to our love of mom and dad, but it’s really not like that. I put the US post office slogan in, too: “Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”The song is based around a looped “ha ha ha ha” done on a harmoniser, but I wanted it to be like a Greek chorus – not just one voice – so I used a vocoder, which was originally developed as spy technology to disguise voices. It fitted the concept.”
Laurie Anderson on “O Superman”

“Traditional plays invent characters, change them, and predict their postplay lives,” she explained in the 1979 premiere issue of Performance Art Magazine. Her approach, she said, leaves her “freer to be disjunctive and jagged and to focus on incidents, ideas, collisions…Personally, I feel closer to the attitude of the stand-up comedian — not only because I believe that laughter is extremely powerful but because the comedian works in real time.”
Laurie Anderson