Laurie Anderson | It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole

Laurie Anderson

It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole

New York City, USA: Holly Solomon Gallery, 1977

7” vinyl record

Edition size unknown

“I will be shot with a rifle at 7:45 p.m.,” performance artist Chris Burden wrote to the editors of Avalanche magazine, “I hope to have some good photos.”

On November 19th, 1971, he made good on his promise. At the  F-Space gallery in Santa Ana, California, he stood fifteen feet away from a friend armed with a .22-caliber rifle and took a bullet to the left arm. The work, named Shoot, has been described as Burden's "most infamous”. 

In It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole Laurie Anderson recalls the piece as a kind of cautionary tale. The 45 rpm single was originally created as part of jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, for an exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City. Peter Gordon appears on saxophone, Scott Johnson on bass guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums.

Copies of the 7” single on Discogs have sold for as low as low as a hundred dollars, and as high as two thousand. 

It’s an uptempo hillbilly avant-garde song about bullet holes, black holes, dark holes, dug holes, holes in the soles of shoes, and giving credit where it’s due. I recall a similar observation Anderson once made about shampoo commercials and their grandiose claims about cleanliness, when it's the water that does most of the work.

Jackson Arn in the New Yorker describes Burden’s practice with another hole analogy: "I hear the chuckle of a shrewd entrepreneur filling a hole in the market."

I used to use myself as a target

I used myself as a goal

I was digging myself so much

I was digging me so much

I dug myself right into a hole

Now, in a hole it's so dark

You can't see a thing

It's easy to lose sight of your goals

It's not the bullet, not the bullet that kills you

It's the hole, it's the hole, it's the hole...

It's not the bullet it's the hole

Like a ventriloquist I can throw my voice

Long distance is the story of my life

and in the words of the artist Joseph Beuys

"If you get cut, you better bandage the knife"

Cause, in a hole it's so dark

You can't see a thing

It's easy to lose sight of your goals

It's not the bullet, not the bullet that kills, you know

It's the hole, it's the hole, it's the hole...

Like a hole, like a black hole in space

You disappeared and there's nothing to take your place

Now I'm sweating, I'm freezin, in this Jamaican sea breeze

I remember you in my knees

I really feel like fallin’

It's not gravity that's getting me down

It's giving me those down and out lowdown blues

It's not the rain that's getting me wet

It's the holes, it’s  the holes in my shoes!

It's not the bullet, It's the hole

Cause, in a hole it's so dark

You can't see a thing

It's easy to lose sight of your goals

It's not the bullet, not the bullet that kills, you know

It's the hole, it's the hole, it's the hole...

It's not the bullet...

It's the hole...