There are great albums that stand as
collections of the finest songwriting and performance that their makers have to
offer. There are great albums where the studio and production techniques have
been used as tools to take the basic musical material and transform it into
something greater than it was when performed in the studio itself. And then
there is this great album, which is neither of those things.
Negativland is an avant-garde group
- calling what they do “music” is stretching it; “audio-based art” is more
appropriate - founded in the Bay Area in the late 70s. In their recordings,
they find (and seek) audio from mass media, from field recordings, from pirate
radio signals, from sampling of existing records, and from myriad other sources
(yes, including actual music performed by the group sometimes) and make audio
collages - often referred to as the style known as “Plunderphonics” - that are
strange, funny, noisy, and particularly with this album, cuttingly satirical
about mass culture.
The album is divided into two
sequences: the 18-minute title track with 4-minute prologue that sets it up,
and “The Perfect Cut,” a suite of seven connected tracks. In “Helter Stupid”
the band explores what happens when they send out a bogus press release about a
canceled tour and an earlier song of theirs, “Christianity Is Stupid,” being
implicated in a murder investigation and don’t confirm or deny any of the
questions that come their way from the media, allowing the story to snowball. “The
Perfect Cut” works around the theme of formulaic mainstream radio programming,
laden with 70s radio trade ads and focusing on samples from a company that
sells jingles and hooks to commercial radio outlets to push their “product” to
their listeners. Though these seem on the surface to be very different ideas,
the way that the band’s not-entirely-innocent joke began to manipulate real
world television media is like the flip side of the coin of how the formulas of
commercial radio are also molded and manipulated behind the scenes. Both of
these take a look at mass media - TV news and pop radio, respectively - and
give you a smart, funny, and somewhat unnerving glimpse of how the sausage is
made.
“Helter Stupid” kicks off with a
prologue, mostly taken straight from a local news report that picked up their
story from the press release suggesting that a Minnesota murder investigation
may have ties to “Christianity Is Stupid,” seemingly without any questioning or
fact-checking, and ran with it as a lead story. The reporter flatly states
“They say federal authorities asked them to cancel a long-planned 17-city tour
and eliminate live performances until the conclusion of the investigation”
followed immediately by “Negativland’s music is highly critical of the mass media,
nuclear war, and handguns.” Only one of these statements is true. The group
then launches into its exploration of how the media exploits sensational
stories, about the oversaturation of media in our lives, and, as they say in
the liner notes, keeping in mind that “any media experience consists only of
one-way, edited representations of reality.” It’s a tour-de-force of audio art,
loaded with humor and an incisive view of TV's obsession with sensational
stories.
“The Perfect Cut” would seemingly
suffer by comparison, and indeed it feels lighter - pop radio and the music
industry vs. a multiple murder is a definite lightening of content - but if
you’re following through the group’s ideas, the two pieces are complementary in
their skewed, humorous examinations of media. With “Dick Vaughn’s Moribund
Music of the 70s” undergirding each of these pieces, they take a look at the
music industry as a whole - and if you’ve never given thought to the machinations
of business and industry that back your favorite records, that dictates what’s
determined to be new and cool on the radio, it can be just as unsettling as the
title piece. Just as the title cut isn’t really about axe murders, but about
media representation, this isn’t about pop music or making fun of the 70s music
they use, but about how the wheels of industry distressingly interlock with
art.
The album follows their great, more
song-like Escape From Noise (which contains “Christianity Is Stupid” and
is highly recommended in its own right), and presages what might be their
greatest work, the U2 EP, which landed them on the receiving end of a
lawsuit from Island Records, U2, and Casey Kasem (who appears here repeatedly
throughout “The Perfect Cut”), and though it’s way out of print, is well worth
seeking out. But as an album, Helter Stupid stands as their finest work,
and one of the most entertaining and humorous examples of the intersection of
pop culture and avant-garde art out there.
-
Patrick Brown
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