On Sonic Outlaws (1995)
Dir. Craig Baldwin – USA – Music Documentary & Collage Film
“The media is like- it’s like an oil drum!”
It is, and using it as a steel drum is the only fitting purpose. This thing is conceptually huge and I’ll be doing it a disservice in reviewing it, but if it persuades you to hear something new it’ll be a success. Negativland are one of the bastions of political music in the last half-decade; enduringly funny, technically innovative, and right-on, throughout time. Punk as hell in the original sense. If you don’t know their work, they are an anarchist group of sound collage artists who take samples from various broadcasts and retextualise them for satire. A couple of example records for you to sink your ears into are: Dispepsi (1997), a horrifically all-too-modern attack on the cola wars of the 1990s, and JAMCON ’84 (1985), a fictional documentary about a convention of amateur radio jammers. They cover it all!
Some background for the uninitiated: in 1991, the band released a 12″ EP called U2, featuring the silhouette of a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance jet on the cover. This was put onto market in record shops shortly before the release of U2’s next album, so as a small relatively unheard-of group, Negativland were clearly trying to syphon off some of U2’s success here by misadvertising their record, surely? This is the basis of the documentary – U2 quickly finds out about the record and actions a cease and desist order to the band, ordering the EP to be pulled from shops, and demanding that they destroy remaining copies of the record. Negativland wouldn’t let this stand. And as anarchists they certainly wouldn’t comply benignly.
This film not only works as a fantastic behind-the-scenes document, but also acts as a sampler for their material, complete with visual accompaniment, and feels more like listening to an album of theirs than finding out about the U2 lawsuit. It shouldn’t be left unsaid either, not only U2, but Negativland had lawsuits with Disney and Michael Jackson, and I’m sure Casey Kasem, a disc jockey heavily sampled on the record that ended up releasing after this whole fiasco, would have taken action at some point too. It really is way more experimental than labelling it as a documentary would have you believe, a remix of found footage and radio snippets, speaking to the audience patronisingly but with a tongue-in-cheek awareness.
“Don’t you think that’s a little voyeuristic?”
“Maybe, but the airwaves are meant to be free, and here they are”
Here’s another quote I love. Paired with the description of sound collage as folk music (a comparison I hadn’t ever heard of before but was a missing puzzle piece in the correlation of my personal taste), I think this describes their philosophy with more detail than any amount of posturing about art and intellectual property and fair use could ever. In its heart of hearts, it’s music of the people. It’s Napster. It’s the KLF. It’s the Gerogerigegege. It’s a fuck-you rejection of playing by the rules, and totally accessible to anyone, regardless of training. With footage of Oswald, the granddaddy of plunderphonics, (which is a whole other blog post to be made in itself) demonstrating live and laying out his techniques in such a crude way is nothing short of gospel to the music nerd. These guys are the last pirates, not only swashbuckling and stealing or whatever image you have of them, but not participating in musical society. Folk-music playing socialist pirates.
Through the Helmut Herbst film, which is appropriately quoted in this, parallels are drawn with the Dadaist movement, Hausmann’s The Art Critic photomontage in particular being used is an intimate relation with the band’s own Helter Stupid, one of the group’s most successful records, both artistically and commerically, in which they take responsibility for inspiring a music fan’s string of murders, and then use audio clips from radio and TV news coverage to create a collage on the moral panics and hysteria of contemporary American suburbia.
I feel something like Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic feels a little bit more like what they are going for sonically however sometimes – less solid in form but bringing a higher number of contrasting elements together – but they truly take inspiration most from Heartfield’s work like Werkzeug in Gottes Hand?, which satirised Hitler and industrialist Thyssen in the times when he was merely Chancellor of the Reichstag. There’s an excellent analysis of the piece here.
All in all I think we touch on U2 for maybe 20 minutes total in a solid sort of way. Most of the runtime is dedicated to Negativland waxing lyrical with whatever footage they want, but the last 15 minutes are totally golden and would be worthy as a short film unto themselves, Baldwin really outdoes himself here. Structurally, it doesn’t make much particular sense, but you become so swept up with the conspiracy of the Barbie Liberation Organisation that it doesn’t matter to you. The Star Trek parody is also a sight to behold. Footage of spacecraft exploding to a jazz jaunt though is one of the most delightful AV compositions I’ve come across and was a fantastic end to the whole documentary. I never knew how much I needed a feature length visualiser to their music.
The film is free to watch on Internet Archive. Do yourself a favour and watch it!
The Mezzanine 