“In *How to Wreck a Nice Beach—*Dave Tompkins' fascinating history of how the vocoder transformed from WWII encrypting device to funky futuristic enabler—there is a chapter that opens with Laurie Anderson's "O Superman", one of the most peculiar songs to ever dominate the Pazz & Jop critics poll and Top of the Pops. "The song takes place on an answering machine imagined," Tompkins writes, "a disemb”
