I’ve gotten a couple of emails about the musical selections these first few weeks of 2008, generally along the lines of “Why are you posting up blatantly leftist propagandists?”
My answers have been as follows: Because Skinny Puppy kicks ass, and Negativland because of what I’m going to post this week.
Negativland took the MSM for a ride and used their own “If it bleeds it leads” motto against them.
You most likely remember the BS that Tipper Gore, et al, put the music industry through in the mid-80’s with the labeling of music (and then came TV and then came video games and then came food, etc.).
You probably also remember the showtrial that Judas Priest got put through after the 1985 attempted double suicide of a pair of Priest’s fans.
Well, Negativland was listening to the media garble on and on about “backwards masking” and “subliminal messages” being put onto records during theose years and took the story of a mass murder committed by a Minnesota teenager and turned it to their advantage.
They were too broke to take their previous album on tour, and instead of just canceling it, they sent out a phony press release stating that the police involved in investigating the murder of a mom, dad, sister and brother with an ax by the oldest son in the family had asked them to not start the tour because of a song on that album.
That track contains samples from the Reverend Estus Pirkle and a sermon he wrote about a nightmare where he “visited” a Communist country where the streets and fields were lined with speakers broadcasting the message “Christianity is Stupid! Communism is Good!”, among other insipid messages, all day and night. This was the basis for the film “If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?”
The story and the band were included on nightly newscasts for over a week in the San Francisco area. Rolling Stone and magazines like Newsweek and Time wanted to interview them about the situation.
It took a couple weeks for anyone in the media to even think of calling the Minnesota police involved in the case to ask them about it.
Egg on the face would be using too light a phrase to describe the MSM after someone finally bothered to do so.
That track is the opener of Negativland’s follow up album, appropriately titled Helter Stupid
The album also contains an 18 minute long track containing huge quantities of the media hype surrounding the story as well as seven other tracks created from various bits of ads from publishing companies looking for business from 70’s radio station managers.
Yes, Negativland is blatantly anti-gun (FYI: I believe Joe has found the California gun bigot Initiative I had quested for last week: 1982’s I-15), and yes, they’re probably still against electricity generation via Nuclear Power.
But I believe that anyone who can use the media’s own genitalia to screw them like that deserves to be congratulated and to even have dollars tossed their way in the form of album sales (for those who believe differently, you can buy their albums used).
Enjoy!
I think they’re in league with the Church of the SubGenius, like Devo and Penn Gillette (or Penn & Teller).