Negativland
Our Favorite Things CD & DVD
(Seeland)
It’s been over twenty years now since Negativland first took on the responsibility of subverting every audio medium in the world and tipping every sacred cow in sight. There have been lawsuits. There have been feuds. There has been outrage; and it has all occurred to the expressed glee of both the band and those people intelligent enough to get the joke. Initially appearing as an anonymous brain trust primarily concerned with issuing the critical and satirical but Conservative response to Reagan’s daydream nation and the self-absorbed “Me” generation that it spawned, as well as the intrinsic hypocrisy that was the cornerstone of both. The band had it nailed and, for a while (particularly when U2 came out and the band was sued very publicly by both U2’s label and Casey Kasem), Negativland were regarded as public enemy number 1. The band has continued since then, but now a lot of the commentary that the band was offering has become more permissible.
Until, of course, Negativland swapped media.
For the first time in their history, Negativland has now released a collection of their best-known tracks on a DVD complete with brand new video content and the results are as disturbing as they are illuminating. Our Favorite Things is a collaboration between Negativland and 18 experimental filmmakers, and is potentially even more inflammatory than any audio the band has ever released for the sensory-depriving volume of footage alone; snippets of old Western films, transcripts of Casey Kasem’s rant on “U2,” manipulation of Ariel from The Little Mermaid and the “down and to the left” footage of the JFK assassination are just a few of the images ram-rodded together on Our Favorite Things. Separately, that content would be static—but in this context they seem incredibly prescient and ominous. The soundtrack, of course, is what holds the mélange together and by the time “Guns” rolls around with its images of men in pine boxes and positively macabre “Over the Hiccups,” the DVD asserts its messages bluntly and explicitly; there’s no mincing words here, this is honesty with a baseball bat delivered in Negativland’s inimitable way: laugh-out-loud funny because it’s explicit and outrageous.
The CD that accompanies the set is something else completely. 180 D’Gs To The Future is not affiliated with Negativland at all—except that 180 Gs has made an entire career out of covering Negativland songs as an R&B a capella group. It’s actually sort of jaw dropping to hear the band pull it off too—if they weren’t so damned good at what they do, it’d be tediously unlistenable—but there isn’t a line (vocal or instrumental) omitted and the disc gets over on 180Gs’ ability to arrange this music for nothing other than vocals.
Our Favorite Things successfully updates Negativland’s satire for a whole new potential audience and continues to stretch the boundaries of good taste. As the music business gets progressively more conservative (read: primarily concerned with money, which means that more subversive elements dissolve in favor of competent professionalism), Our Favorite Things appears as a pickle in a punchbowl; and not a moment too soon.
A Big 10–8 Place CD & DVD reissue
(Seeland)
There are moments however, and this is one of them, when as much as you might like a band, you have to wonder if they’d been capable of anything memorable without a single particular member. A Big 10–8 Place was Negativland’s third release overall and is heralded as their first concept album, but in retrospect (and probably at the time as well) it’s difficult to tell what exactly the concept was other than (as the choral rejoinder on “Theme From A Big Place” goes) being “very stupid.” Utilizing cuts of tape as short as a quarter-inch long (keep in mind that this album was made decades before the advent of computer editing software), 10–8 plays like a giant found sound smorgasbord that goes in a thousand directions at once, but has trouble really getting anywhere. The last album that the band released before Don Joyce joined and contained the band’s ideas into coherent songs (Escape From Noise—a landmark album in any language—was released next), there is little on this album that functions as sonic connective tissue; many of the sounds simply hover inchoately for a few seconds before vanishing and not much of that is dialogue to drive the tracks either. Unlike the band’s later albums, there isn’t really much to 10–8 at all: no discernable driving theme to any of the songs (a real problem when you’re working in a pastiche medium) and the band’s vaunted humor is scarce.
As the first four tracks progress, you keep waiting for a punch line—for something at all to filter through the static—and by the time “Four Fingers” finally spits out something resembling a numbskull’s campfire song it seems like the band might be able to build some form of momentum for the sheer fact that it’s at least a song. But then, of course, it dissolves into something not unlike bogus and retarded talk radio and the record simply ends. In a word, the final result leaves the listener feeling used.
Included in the reissue of A Big 10–8 Place is a DVD copy of Negativland’s first foray into filmmaking that has gone largely unreleased until now. 1983’s No Other Possibility really only offers the visual equivalent to Negativland’s early sound: snippets of TV commercials, vignettes and skits acted out by the band and family members, found video oddities, live band concert footage and tons of Halloween paraphernalia don’t really go anywhere, and although small bits of high-stupid comedy do surface, it doesn’t really offer much of a viewing experience after the novelty wears off.
On the wish list of reissues from Negativland that have yet to come out, both A Big 10–8 Place and No Other Possibility rank fairly low (any of Escape From Noise or the U2 and Guns EPs would’ve been preferable), but this release does offer the promise of a starting point if nothing else; here’s the early stuff, bear with them until we get the good stuff again.
More about Negativland: www.negativland.com
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