There are very few musicians that I discover on my own. Usually, somebody says something about somebody, or I read a review of something, or some musician that I know plays with somebody that I don’t or an unknown comes out on a label that I trust or something. Very rarely do I just purchase something completely blindly without knowing anything at all about the group. Negativland is one of those groups.
While ensconced at Hampshire College, I used to go down to a store called Faces in Amherst. It was a typical college-town store, filled with tapestries and weird clothes and cards and, in the back, a reasonably well-stocked record section. And one of the nice things they did was have a bin of new releases, so you could rifle through it and see what had just come out. One day, while wandering through the bin, I happened across an album called Escape from Noise by some group named Negativland. I had never heard of them, but something about the cover made me linger. I flipped it over and on the back was listed who was in the group and what they played. Along with the occasional keyboard or guitar was listed short-wave radio, manipulated radio spots, and something called the Big Booper. Even though it was on SST Records, a well-known punk distributor, I was intrigued, and I decided to take a chance and bought the album and brought it back to my room.
And was rewarded for my daring.
Negativland is a group of media terrorists from the San Francisco bay area (Concord, to be exact). Perhaps media terrorist is too strong a term, but the majority of their material is made up of manipulated commercially available sounds – samples, radio broadcasts, TV commercials, even pirated cell-phone transmissions. They argue, somewhat persuasively, that we are constantly bombarded, against our will, by commercial messages – that we live in a media-saturated soup – and we should be free to use that material to our own ends – copyright issues be damned. And it’s just that attitude that has gotten them in a lot of trouble.
They first gained some small notoriety with a track from the Escape from Noise album called Christianity is Stupid, in which a cut-up preacher is manipulated to say the opposite of what he means (“Christianity is stupid, Communism is good”). After the album was released, the group heard about a boy in the Midwest who had suddenly murdered his entire family. They discretely suggested to a few key media players that that troubled teen had been listening to Christianity is Stupid before he went on his killing spree. As this was right around one of the times that the powers that be suddenly start fearing that rock ‘n’ roll is the cause of society’s downfall, that rumor quickly exploded and was repeated and expanded upon by the voracious sensationalistic media machine. Which is where the art of Negativland lies. They then released what is probably their best work, the album Helter Stupid, which chronicles the birth of this myth and its subsequent life in the media. A glorious piece of work, it includes samples from the original track woven together with news reports and a phone call from a reporter at Rolling Stone, along with the more blatantly violent commercials culled from television that usually escape such scrutiny by the hypocrites who feel the need to police our nation’s morality.
About this time, I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Negativland perform live, at NYC’s famous Knitting Factory. As they are one of the most obscure groups in my arsenal, I didn’t expect there to be much of a crowd, but was surprised to find the room packed. Even more surprising was the moment, about ten minutes into the show, when the spoken word “gun” came out of the speakers, and somebody yelled out “Sycamore!”, as though they were at a Stones concert and Keith had started the riff from Satisfaction. The concert was remarkable, and surprisingly accurate to the album – no mean feat as nothing is really performed live. Perhaps most impressive was the guy sat in front of a radio spot console and constantly shuffled tapes into it and played little bites along with the dense collage of sound the rest of the band was playing. They threw money and water on their audience. They jumped around like they were real rock stars playing real rock instead of a couple of hyperdweebs asphyxiating on media detritus. And, for a grand finale, they put a couple of pieces of bread into an industrial toaster and let them burn to the point that the entire room was filled with fetid, charred-toast smoke. They rocked on while the smoke got thicker and thicker until you couldn’t see the stage at all. Then they stopped playing and walked off, leaving the audience choking on toast smoke. It was great.
My friend Geoff saw them on that same tour at the cafeteria at Hampshire, and halfway through the performance, some poor soul tripping on acid jumped up on the stage, grabbed a microphone, and yelled “you guys suck!” until he was gently escorted home. Being Negativland, they recorded his tortured cries and then incorporated them into the rest of the show, blaring out “you guys suck” at odd intervals throughout the evening’s tapestry of noise.
