The Mysterious J (Live) Lyrics

The Mysterious "J"(live版) - Laurie Anderson

In the book there are several chapters about

Women talking and women writing

Now it seems likely that men invented

writing and wrote what

Maybe ninety

maybe ninety five percent of

Everything that's ever been written

Oh theres the recent theory that a woman

The mysterious jwrote much of the old testament

But only because god was portrayed

in this book as patriarchal

Tyrannical and inconsistent

The way presumably only a woman

would write about a man

But I think I can picture this j scribbling away

And laughing although the first time

I saw the bible re enacted was

sometime in the seventys

And there was a cable tv show in the midwest and

Bible study groups would act out parts of the bible

But these were pretty low budget productions and

Shot in a church basement or somebodys

And all the prophets had towels wrapped around

Their heads for turbansbut you could see the tags

The ones with the washing instructions

of Sort sticking out and back there were very

few women on these tapes

They tended to be the odd shepherdess

sort dancing girl bit part

Then last year I was invited to perform in

Israel and I was very excited because

I wanted to see jerusalem where this mysterious

J had spent her life writing and working and

The gulf war had made me even more curious

So I did some asking aroundsome informal research

And I talked to an israeli woman who was living in

New york and she was really having a hard time

Living there and she was always complaining

About american men and say

You know american men are such wimps

I mean they're always talking about their feelings

And I said they are

And she said she really liked israeli men because

They were so tough and because

they all had guns and I said

Gunsyou like guys with guns

And she said she did and went on about how terrible

It was that clinton wanted to reduce the army

And she was so animate about this that

I started to get kind of worried yeah

thought yeah I that's true what are all these

Military people going to do when they lose their jobs

And then I thought wellhang on weve

Got all these service industries now

Things like psychotherapy and the military

Approach to psychotherapy

would really be kind of perfect

Really efficient and fastyou know listen

You are nothing you are a wormand if you

Don't get that mother complex out

By o four hours you are dead meat