PICK OF THE WEEK: "Stand By For Failure: A Documentary About Negativland"

An impressionistic deep dive into the Californian experimental band Negativland

We first became aware of the band Negativland in 1991, when they released the bizarre cover of U2's 1987 song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", including kazoos and extensive sampling of the original song underneath a profane off-air rant from well-known disc jockey Casey Kasem. One of Kasem's milder comments was "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?" It was a confusing and intriguing piece of music, one that we would soon learned landed Negativland in an expensive law suit with U2 over the use of their copyrighted material.

That was all we knew about Negativland UNTIL THIS WEEK, when our friend, guitar virtuoso William Tyler, recommended the documentary “Stand By For Failure: A Documentary About Negativland”, which absolutely blew my mind.

In 1978 David "The Weatherman" Wills, Richard Lyons and Mark Hosler formed Negativland, which quickly became an absurd and noisy multimedia world without boundaries, ownership or privacy.

Negativland's complex chaos of “plunderphonics” poses both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, propaganda, power and perception in the global village. Negativland continue to be pioneers of art in the electric age, and the medium reveals that any message is all in our heads.

This documentary is not a conventional narrative documentary, but more like Negativland’s music itself, full of collage and found material, and often raising more questions than answers.

Below is a link to watch the movie free on Youtube. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Love ya, Beautiful Babies!

Ben & Ione