A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and ’70s told through the story of the period’s 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 group’s obsessive and ludic reflections—on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more—to focus on Firesign’s 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.
विषयसूची
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 Sub Genius 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
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Jeremy Braddock teaches literature, media, and sound studies at Cornell University and is author of Collecting as Modernist Practice, which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.
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