Side one track one of possibly the greatest album ever, Negativland‘s Escape From Noise isn’t a song, but an announcement. Which is appropriate for 1987, it being a year where music didn’t suck so much as NOISE suddenly felt way too relevant. And nobody’s ever done NOISE as superlatively, as hilariously , as relevantly as Negativland, from suburban San Francisco (or is it Oakland?) – wherever Contra Costa County is.
If We Are The World is the worst record ever released, then it’s entirely plausible to argue that Culturcide‘s assassination of it is the best. It’s certainly the purest response to it. Just take the original, sh** all over it and otherwise make an ugly-beautiful mess of things. Maybe you just had to be there to understand. Ronald Reagan‘s trickle down economics in full effect, the rich getting ever richer, pissing from their penthouses on everybody below, nobody really noticing as they stood in line around the block for Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwartzennegar, Michael J Fox movies. There is an alternative history of the past twenty-five where the revolution did happen. The ravenous masses rose in unanimous disgust and ate the rich. And it all started with Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America (the album).
In which the Residents sample the Beatles and make such a glorious mess of things that rumours eventually surface that they are in fact The Beatles themselves, undercover. And all of this at least a decade before sampling-stealing-pirating in the name of art had even begun to achieve hip status. “I actually heard this when it was new in 1977. Not that I was remotely cool at the time, more the opposite. A friend’s big brother heard me talking loud about how progressive rock was the only music that really mattered, because it was so inventive, so ambitious, so strange … so he got me high and set me straight on the fact that there were far, far stranger things going on out there in the name of music than I ever could have imagined.”
“Husker Du‘s 1984 double album Zen Arcade was one of those documents that changes everything forever. Here was a punk-hardcore-whatever that was simply, enormously MORE. Here was a band that was going to do whatever the f*** it wanted as long as the sound was sharp enough to cause bleeding at fifty yards. What’s Going On Inside My Head was my mantra for a while – less a question than a howl of purposeful confusionism. Don’t bow to the chaos of the age. Eat it. Let it nourish you.” (Philip Random)
A much loved Rolling Stones nugget gets eviscerated by Eugene Chadbourne, one of those unique geniuses who started out with rock and roll but quickly grew bored, thus free jazz, bluegrass, country, noise – everything really. And a huge discography in which, if you dig deep enough (often through limited run cassette releases), you discover that he’s probably covered every song known to man (and woman) at some point or other, and in doing so, he’s singlehandedly kept the world from ending.
Randophonic 