Blog Archives
Negativland
Not many bands can claim to have invented an entire genre of music, but Negativland actually goes one better than that: They invented an entire art form, a technique called culture jamming, that is now such an accepted part of consumerist, mass media culture that it’s hard to imagine anyone having to invent it. From Adbusters to Banksy to self-aware Sprite commercials to fake BP Twitter accounts, the basic concepts of culture jamming are part of our everyday vernacular at this point. But yep, Negativland coined the term back in 1984. Before that, it was hard to know what to call the band’s mix of intercepted CB-radio conversations, sampled radio announcers and commercial jingles, krautrock, processed guitars, and ambient noise. Except really, really weird.
Negativland was started all the way back in 1979 by Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons, who were then still going to high school in the East Bay. Early on, they recruited a reclusive cable TV repairman named David “The Weatherman” Wills to join the group; his homemade devices, like cellphone scanners and a sampler/oscillator called The Booper, really helped the group perfect their sound collage approach to making music.
The group’s 1987 album Escape From Noise got them a little attention, but what really put Negativland on the map was their 1991 U2 EP, which most famously featured a spoof of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” accompanied by a profanity-laced, anti-U2 rant by Top 40 radio DJ Casey Kasem. The track earned Negativland its first lawsuit, from U2′s label, Island Records. After a four-year legal battle, chronicled in a book called Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, the two parties settled—Island dropped their suit, and Negativland stopped distributing the U2 EP (although they later reissued it as a “bootleg” under the fairly awesome title—quoted from part of Kasem’s anti-U2 rant—These Guys Are From England and Who Gives a Shit).
Thirty years later, Negativland are still at it: They’ve got a new project called It’s All in Your Head FM v2.0 due out later this year, along with a handful of reissues, and band member Don Joyce continues to host a public radio “audio collage” show called Over the Edge on Berkeley’s KPFA. And hey, kids—you can book one of two totally different Negativland shows in your local planetarium, art gallery, or high school auditorium! Take your choice between either a “two-hour-long, action-packed look at monotheism” or “a wordless wall of electronic sound.” Either way, you’re bound to impress all your snooty art friends and vastly increase your chances of scoring with girls whose panties drop at words like “semiotics” and “Noam Chomsky.” [Update: That link is now dead, so apparently they're not playing planetariums anymore. Sorry.]
We’ll leave you with a classic Negativland video from their 1989 opus No Other Possibility. The cigarettes are probably a metaphor for something, but we prefer not to dig too deep on this one and just appreciate it for its delightfully Pythonesque silliness.
Links:
- Negativland official site
- Negativland on MySpace
- “The Letter U and the Number 2″ (great article from Wired magazine about the Negativland vs. Island Records lawsuits)
Scanner
Recording artists have been using found sounds and ambient noise in their works for decades, but few have done it in ways more innovative or controversial than Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner. Beginning in the early ’90s, Rimbaud, who is based in London, has used cellphone scanners, police radios and other devices to record electronically transmitted conversations and turn them into musical compositions. His work tests not only people’s notions about what constitutes music, but also people’s notions of privacy. It’s a little disconcerting to think that your cellphone chat with your girlfriend might wind up as raw material for an avant-garde electronic composer.
These days, Rimbaud’s become known as a “conceptual artist” who composes film scores, sound installations and various more high-brow projects in the art world. He also records with a experimental band called Githead. But he’s still trolling the ether with his cellphone scanner, too. On his latest Scanner album, “Rockets, Unto the Edges of Edges” (released earlier this year), he even sings a little–but the snippets of ghostly, disembodied, electronically transmitted voices are still in there. If every word in the dictionary had its own soundtrack, Scanner’s music is what you’d hear when you looked up “alienation.”
Here’s a video for a track from “Rockets.” Creepy stuff, huh?
Links:
