With so many kids in trucker hats running around talking indie ("Death Cab for Cutie is sooo deck"), it's always good to have a trump card. And by trump card, I mean a strange obscure band you can pull out of your pocket next time you're in one of those music-referencing psychological battles with a kid you're convinced is faking it.
If you don't have a trump card yet, consider using the band Negativland. For starters, it has a great name (say it: "Negativland." It rules), and it's from the '80s, which I'm told is cool these days. But it's also a great band.
Negativland was birthed in 1980, when San Francisco high school kids Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons got together with cable repairman David Willis.
Their first, self-titled release introduced what would become the bands trademarks: sarcastic genius, disturbed sound manipulation, and unchecked experimentation.
Over the next few years, Negativland added a couple more members and put out a couple more LPs. They delved deeper into the art of voice sampling and were signed to legendary indie label SST.
In retrospect though, this was all just prelude. Because it was the 1987 album, Escape From Noise, that would define the members as a band and enshrine them as cult rock icons.
Interestingly, the guys in Negativland thought Escape would tank so hard they didn't even want to tour in support of it. When a teenager in Minnesota shocked the country by killing his parents with an axe, the band issued a press release saying they were canceling their tour. It was an argument over one of Escape's songs, "Christianity is Stupid," that inspired the kid to kill his mom and dad. Ironically, the media ate it up like candy, and suddenly Negativland was at the center of a national controversy. Thanks to the hype, Escape's sales jumped and the road show not only continued, but did far better than expected.
But aside from the agitation, Escape was simply a terrific album. "Christianity is Stupid" may have inspired some deranged kid to kill his mom and dad, but it's still an awesome track.
Sampling the Rev. Estus Pirkle, a fundamentalist known for saying things like "if you can't stand up to the miniskirt crowd ... what're you gonna do when communism arrives?" the title pretty much sums up the song. Pirkle's preaching is manipulated into a taunt of "Christianity is stupid! Communism is good!" and paired with a thudding, hedonistic bass drum and droning guitars, to hilarious effect.
"Michael Jackson" flaunts the band's arrogant side, as an otherworldly voice calls out to everyone from "Weird" Al Yankovic to John Lennon to Dean Martin for making bad pop music.
"Playboy Channel" takes a look at the banality of sex in America through an absurdist lens, while "Sycamore" is a devastatingly caustic look at violence in suburbia.
"Methods of Torture" puts a candy cane musical background to a lesson in torture ("place someone's head inside of a bell ... and ring it/ and eventually, they'll go insane").
"Car Bomb" is a track of unparalleled sound anarchy, blurring throbbing drum and bass, staccato guitar ticking and terrified vocals. And "Time Zones" turns an interview with Ted Koppel into a sci-fi, call and response masterpiece about the number of time zones in the Soviet Union (there are 11).
Escape did it all, violating musical structure and mainstream taste, pushing the envelope as far as one band can push it. And though the band had several good years of media terrorism left in it, it never peaked this high again.
Obscure yet controversial, aged but not outdated, and prime ammunition for your hipster cannon; splurge the 12 bucks and pick up Negativland.
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