A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s as 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. Working at the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock reveals 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.
Focusing on Firesign's work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975, Braddock deploys a vast range of material sources, informed by 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. 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.
By:
Jeremy Braddock
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780520398528
ISBN 10: 0520398521
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 29 October 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
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.
