Firesign (eBook)

The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums

Jeremy Braddock (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
320 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-39854-2 (ISBN)

Infos

A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and 70s told through the story of the periods most important forgotten comedy group. This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture. He deploys a vast range of material sources, drawing on numerous interviews and writing in tune with the groups obsessive and ludic reflectionson multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and moreto focus on Firesigns work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era.

Inhalt

Contents

Preface 

Liner Notes 

1. ALBUM / Talking Book 
WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM (1968)
How Did the LP Become a Book? (Archaeology of Contemptible Media)
Who Were the Readers of Records?
Happenings, December 1966
Listening to the Electrician
There’s a Fog upon LA
The Dialogic Imagination (Slight Return)

2. RADIO / Duplicity Is the Double of Duality 
HOW CAN YOU BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE WHEN YOU'RE NOT ANYWHERE AT ALL (1969)
Put-Ons and Propaganda (How to Be in Two Places at Once)
Label Troubles
Contradictory Space
Archaeology
Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine
(Slight Return)
Goons and Beatles
Five Years on the FM Band
Our Rendezvous with Destiny Is to Unconditionally
Surrender

3. CINEMA / Remediating the Studio System in May 1970 
DON'T CRUSH THAT DWARF, HAND ME THE PLIERS (1970)
Overdub/Edit (How to Be in One Place Twice)
TV or Not TV
A Head of His Time
Studio Systems c. 1970
Stereo and Dolby
Stoner Narratology
East Coast / West Coast, Radical Juxtaposition

4. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / Up Against the Wall of Science 
I THINK WE'RE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS (1971)
Publicizing Mobile Privatization
Into the Seventies, for Real (Slight Return)
Man Conforms
You Have Violated Robot’s Rules of Order and Will
Be Asked to Leave the Future Immediately
Art and Technology
Unhappy MACNAM

5. TELEVISION / What Is Television? 
THE MARTIAN SPACE PARTY (1972), THE FIRESIGN THEATRE VS. DREAM
MONSTERS FROM EL OUTER SPACE (1972), NOT INSANE (1972), TV OR
NOT TV (1973), ROLLER MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE (1974), IN THE NEXT 
WORLD, YOU'RE ON YOU'RE OWN (1975)
A Transient and Unstable Medium
Satellite
Cable
Reruns, Dreams
Ambient Television, Nightmares

coda / Run-Out Groove 
Not TV and Not Rock Either
Campoon ’76
The Church of the SubGenius and Negativland
Crate Digging as Archaeology—Firesign in Hip Hop
Forward into the Past

Acknowledgments 
Appendix A: Firesign Theatre Discography 
Appendix B: Firesign Theatre Samples in Hip Hop and
Electronic Music, 1989–2023 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Instrumentenkunde
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Pop / Rock
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Mechanik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Schlagworte: 1960s counter culture • archives • bozos • Columbia Records • Comedy • comedy act for stoners • everything you know is wrong • FCC • future is here • media • media technology • Musical Theater • Nixon • PLAYS • Politics • Radio • Satire • Sound Studies • televangelism • Vietnam War • Vinyl • Wounded Knee
• ISBN-10: 0-520-39854-8 / 0520398548
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-39854-2 / 9780520398542