Laurie Anderson deserves credit for chutzpah, first of all. With about four and a half hours of material on five discs, United States Live is the world's longest rap album – I'll explain soon – and just about the last thing you'd expect from a major label. It is also, of course, the condensed-for-vinyl version of the seven-hour performance work United States I-IV, which included films, slides, videos, music and live action, not to mention hand-shadow animals, when it was mounted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983.

It was big. It was also determinedly nonmonumental. Anderson has said the four parts of United States are about transportation, politics, money and love, yet those major topics are only casually addressed. United States is built of short segments, like a variety show: a few words, a few pictures, something to tap your toes to, something to chuckle at, something a little scary or a little peculiar.

In fact, if The Ed Sullivan Show had recruited all its talent in downtown New York circa 1979, it might have ended up as something like United States. Anderson's performance overlaps with the propulsive organ-and-saxophone music of Philip Glass, the avant-funk of Talking Heads, the stories of Spalding Gray, the matter-of-fact monologues of Lucinda Childs in Einstein on the Beach and, doubtless, other music and theater experiments. It's not necessarily plagiarism, since ideas like minimalist music and down-home surrealism were in the air then.

Like other performance art, United States I-IV was created as an event – to be seen, perhaps documented, but not duplicated. Under normal circumstances, we'd only hear the punch lines once. As she was putting the whole shebang together, though, Anderson found herself in the pop market (addressed in Part III, the section about money) when "O Superman" hit the British Top Ten. She couldn't resist the opportunity to let United States be preserved as a recording (and as a book, published by Harper & Row). On paper and vinyl, it seems clear that United States was formed by accretion rather than by grand design: some flash-forwards at the beginning of Part II, flashbacks near the finale and recurrences of the riffs from the title song of her album Big Science don't really add up to a full-scale structure.

Although the record business helped spread Anderson's renown, United States is by no means a song cycle. The music that could be extracted from it most easily has already appeared in slightly different versions on Big Science, Mister Heartbreak and Anderson's album with John Giorno and William Burroughs, You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With; United States Live does include previously unrecorded violin, cello and bagpipe solos, ominous bits and pieces of keyboard music, the rocking "'Language Is a Virus from Outer Space' – William S. Burroughs" and a hot little polka, "Cartoon Song." Anderson has her own variant of minimalism – she writes a snappy riff with four or five notes, then shifts the rhythms around at will, mixing repetition and unpredictability.

I called United States Live a rap album because as the music riffs along, the center of attention is Anderson's voice. Alert to every rhythmic pause and every rising or falling inflection, she turns herself into an all-American announcer. She has the sultry, measured, utterly impersonal tone of a bureaucratic spokesperson, imparting neutral information or life-and-death bulletins as if purity of enunciation were all that mattered: "Our pilot has informed us that we are about to attempt a crash landing. Please extinguish all cigarettes. Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position...."

Anderson sings, too, but the album focuses on the calm musicality of her speaking voice. With just a slight shift in delivery, she is not just a stewardess, but a lecturer, a raconteur, a reporter and something like a hypnotist. She clicks out the consonants in a phrase like "a hat-check clerk at an ice rink" and takes the right authoritative tone to assert, "When TV signals are sent out, they don't stop. They keep going. They pick up speed." With her microphone run through a harmonizer to change the pitch, she also can become an impressive but disembodied male voice or a chipmunk squeak. Her delivery, you soon realize, is as stylized as that of Melle Mel or Eek-A-Mouse; it's just that we're used to it because it's everywhere.

Anderson's untouchable detachment gives everything she says an eerie resonance. She does better voice-overs than Ronald Reagan; in anything but an art piece, we just might believe her. Tied in with her delivery is one of her more persistent obsessions – the feeling that language can be more persuasive than reality. In "Let X = X," she looks up into a "sky-blue sky"; in "Walk the Dog" – the B side of her "O Superman" single – she notices that the trees are made of wood. She says she doesn't believe the Japanese have a language; they just draw pictures and make sounds. When it comes to the semiotics racket, she's no Umberto Eco, but she does make you wonder a little.

Her other themes are more diffuse. Anderson takes on her own self-consciousness as a performer, her equipment, the art world (in a SoHo-ized talking blues, "New York Social Life"). She also hops around the states, stopping off for anecdotes in Kentucky, the Midwest and Los Angeles, although at times her United States sounds like Saul Steinberg's, with not much past the Hudson except airplane flight paths.

United States started out as something called Americans on the Move, and perhaps it overexpanded, because Anderson is best with two old-fashioned American themes – home and hitting the road. In passages that sound like found dialogue crossed with dream language, Anderson describes being not quite anywhere in everyday sentences. The sense of flippancy, or hip irony, or false naiveté, disappears completely; all you hear is the soothing, clearheaded tone of a radio commentator who doesn't know or care where you are. Ain't that America? (RS 441)

JON PARELES