Negativland review/interview

180 Gs  “A Nice Place To Live”

from 180 d’ Gs to the FUTURE! (Seeland)  

sweet chariots o’ fire                                         7.0

(published  Nov. or Dec. '07, paperthinwalls)

Since 1980 (at least), the recombinant entity

known as Negativland has been remixing everything,

beginning with (and past the ending of ) the received notion

of “a band”, with a monstrously ever-burgeoning sense

of anti-corporate, anti-Media-whore enterprise

that extends and spins its tentacles around and through

all the arts, for a start, so that of course “everything”

becomes self-reflexive and for instance, in 2005,

they (for it is always a they, shedding and attracting

particles) sent forth, all around this great nation,

“…a large  visual art show of over 80 piece’s (sic),

of their ‘fine art’ works, video, and home-made

electronic devices… “ And this rolling, roiling,

ravenous, fervently ironic multiplicity,
a baby leviathan driver, forever getting busy being born,

was inevitably and inexorably named,

according to the press sheet, “Negativlandland.”

The slick gravitational waves of such

kinetic me-mass, outward bound in the

gospel bosom of classic Western American

self-direction, must have finally turned negative space capability

indeed, beyond attitude, to bring forth an ahhh cappella

breath of fresh air, The 180 Gs.

The Gs perform the audio pieces of Negativland,

setting them to music. Not that the audio pieces of

Negativland are not music, in Cagean terms of

“organized sound,” and not that this sound does not

include patterned vibrations and connotations of

“daa-dummm,” and “plink-pliiink,” but The Gs

always make a nice set of tones, and tunes.

They (the Minnick brothers) sound young,

and bear the first names of Negativlanders past and present,

including that of Negativland’s late, lamented chaplain,

Pastor Dick Vaughn. Or perhaps it is Negativlanders

who bear their names, for they (the Minnick brothers)

sound “older,” in a forever young, 50s-60s,

rhythm ‘n’ blues, rock ‘n’ roll sense:

they take us on “a positive journey through a

Negativland,” leading all trouble into “media rubble,”

and put the f.u. back in fun, and the fun back in f.u.

This is not easy to do, and on 180 d’ Gs to the FUTURE!

(CD included with a DVD, Our Favorite Things,

which itself includes new videos for original Negativland

audio performances, and much, much more),

there are Gs renditions which are a bit diffuse. 

Yet much fun comes, and not only from blithe spirit,

but also from a poise that that suggests a degree of

seriousness, when appropriate.

Indeed, come to think of it, maybe they always do this:

“Car Bomb” sounds flippant at first, as most of The Gs

harmonize on a list of components which, considering

the title, are likely targets (the “chorus” is a lone G’s

clock-like mouth-clicks). But the voices are so rich and

agile, they also begin to seem like the kind of possible

targets, components, worth caring about, never mind your

car parts. (Okay, them too.) There’s no pathos to this, it’s just

—how it is. “I Am God” calmly juggles several approaches to

religion, including the corrosively righteous.

“The Greatest Taste Around” is from Dispepsi

(a concept album which designated a certain

soda as its devil driver), and may well have been

intended by Negativland to satirize their own tendency

to self-righteousness. But if performed by them

(one suspects), it would or could sound merely ironic,

too “white” a signal, pointing to itself.

(Not bad, necessarily, but probably kind of like Devo’s

bobble-headed cover of Lee Dorsey’s “Workin’ In A Coal Mine.”)

The 180 Gs never sound “white,” because of this sense of just

—how it is. Whatever they think about it, they’ve seen it all.

But they’re still watching.

(By the way, noting that The Gs share first names with

Negativlanders isn’t meant to suggest that they’re all the

same people: 180 Gs’ David Minnick’s urbane, twilight

rumble is very different from Negativlander David Wills’

rattling twang, which seems like it could be the basis for

Negativland’s tape-spliced, jump-cut drive, although they

started without him.)

 “A Nice Place To Live” comes from a familiar kind

of TV or radio feature. The 180 Gs sing an eerie, elegant

clarity into a dusty encounter at the Los Angeles County Fair,

an interview with a community “booster,” who’s proudly

presenting an exhibit, including a creature that wiggles

its paw, powered by the glorious resources of Contra Costa County

(they have everything up there). He clears his throat at one point

(in tune), and there are various other signs that The Gs are

singing a transcript, every noise from an old recording,

making notes and intervals of them, tiny gaps, blue bumps

in the road, all the way to and through Contra Costa County

(over it too: with vocal sounds like copters or saucers, always on track). 

Early American engine-uity, fidelity and entrophy, morphing through

art of the ancient geeks, and now are & bees’ too. A cappella, yeah.

They got it all covered, no samples held. (Although, speaking of

“50s-60s” associations, there was this saying,

“You are what you eat.”). Voices set the pace, re-define the time,

like Negativland always try to do, splice by splice (yeah, even in digits),

of every track, every piece made whole. Somebody’s going home.

Negativland’s Mark Hosler on “A Nice Place to Live”

Are you familiar with the original version?

No.

The original is one of our earliest, it’s from 1981, that we found in

a dumpster. And we just thought it was so bizarre, and

inexplicable and funny, that we made a piece out of it.

And The 180 Gs kind of turned it into something that’s more
like a Gregorian chant.
I actually think, knowing the original, it’s the

single funniest track on the whole 180 Gs CD.

How did you guys come up with the idea of

using a vocal group?

Basically, we got, in the mail, I don’t know how many years ago now,

a CD from The 180 Gs, of Negativland cover tracks.

We were just kinda dumbstruck by it when we heard it,

and they were doing “Christianity Is Stupid” and

“Theme From A Big 10-8 Place,” that’s the last track on

this CD with the DVD. And they were so wonderful,

and I can tell you now that the idea of someone doing a

Negativland tribute album, I would shoot them to stop them

from doing it. We don’t like that kind of weird, fawning fandom,

and those kinds of indie tribute albums are almost always pretty lame.

It became a trend, and I remember thinking,

“Man! I hope no one ever does a tribute album on us, that’d be horrible!”

So here come The 180 Gs, and their approach is so completely,

impossibly strange, and we said, 

“This is so great! Maybe we could get them to do a whole album

of our stuff!” And so we wrote them back, “We love it!”

And obviously they love Negativland, that’s why they did it.

So we told them,

“Look, why don’t you pick a song or two from every record

we’ve ever done, and you can interpret them in any way you want,

change them, the only rule is that you have to follow the

semantic content exactly. No deviations,

every single ‘Ah, um, er’ that’s in there; but other than that--!”

So they did it just to do it, and we said, “Wow.”

So did you kick the tracks back and forth?

 They would send us stuff, and I basically ended up

overseeing it, and when they did the song from Dispepsi,

they did it just like the record, and I said,

“There’s no reason to do that, change it as much as you can, do to us
what we do to everybody else. Mess it up, change it around, go creative,
and I’m going to be totally hardass on you,
‘til you get the little details right.”

They’d send me the words, what they thought it said, and sometimes

I’d have to say, “No, that’s not quite right.” A couple of times I felt

really bad, but some people will notice it, that know the original record,
and obviously, from what you say, you did notice
that they were being

very detailed, even though you don’t know the original.

And now the Dispepsi

piece sounds like a field recording, a work song!

How did they change “A Nice Place To Live”?

The original’s just two guys talking, over a beat,

and The 180 Gs replicate that, they make this sound like

a drum machine, with their mouths, and on top of that they turn it into

this rhythmical choral piece, that to my naïve ears sounds like a bit

like a Gregorian chant,
and it’s done kind of in the round,
where they’re chanting but they’re repeating phrases
off of each other.

180 degrees different from the original
—no, it’s completely different. 

The original is simple, way too simple, compared to
what Negativland
does now: we found this tape,
we just processed this beat
---it was done a long time ago, 1981.

Have you played this for anybody, where you’re living now?

No, I don’t sit anybody down, and say, ”Look at this.”

Well, I would suggest that you try it, because,

especially in the South…The 180 Gs, to me, have this whole

impudent, 50s-60s r&b thing, and even a lot of people who
are prejudiced
down here, get into that kind
of music

…and when the promoter mentions oil wells, I think about

black music as a resource, for all kinds of white people too.

Don (Joyce, another Negativlander) and I like doo-wop,

I like Sam Cooke too…It’s another level you’re picking up on,

and you’re one of the first people I’ve spoken to outside our

immediate group about this project, but one of the other l

evels, that we’re unclear about how it will be perceived,

is that Negativland, whatever you think of what we do,

we are all white guys, and we’re very much responding

to culture that is the dominant, mass media, white culture.

And then we have the 180 Gs doing this very bizarre take

on our work, and it does touch on different idioms in music

that are traditionally associated with blacks, with African-Americans.

And we like it, we thought that just makes it incredibly strange

and wonderful, but as far as what people will think when

they hear it, we don’t know. But that’s kind how it’s always been.

There’s enough of us in the group, that we feel like if we all

basically like what the project’s doing, other people will too.

You can’t worry too much about whether they will.

In the original track, does the promoter sound

stressed at all?

Let’s see, he does it pretty much like this, I know most it

by heart, I just love it. (He performs it.).

So kind of a genial, avuncular—carny barker?

Avuncular, that’s a good word for it.

The 180 Gs sound like they’re testifying

about all the oil it takes, for Wiggles to lift his little paw,

like all the oil in Contra Costa County. Which is where?

Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s a good interpretation,

and Contra Costa County is where Negativland is from.

On the other side of the Oakland-Berkeley hills,

in the San Francisco Bay area, and the record we did with

“A Nice Place To Live” was Points, and the record we did

after that, our third record, A Big 10-8 Place

(recently reissued, with a bonus DVD of their first video

project, No Other Possibility), that came with a map,

with all the information about Contra Costa County,

and there’s a long story about it on the record,

and we took the whole idea of Negativland

(previously the title of an early 70s Neu! instrumental),

and started to make it literally be about where we were

from, and very specifically, not just generically about the

suburbs. We’re from Concord.

And that was the first time we did a concept album,

and forever after that, from ’83 ‘til now,

every record we’ve done has been a concept album.

We never went back to anything that wasn’t.

   I like the focus, the way it’s not a collage,

cut-up text, and it’s about two real places:

Contra Costa, and its exhibit at the Los Angeles County Fair.

The promoter says Contra Costa’s for people who

wanna get away from the smog…

  I only wish I could have seen the display,

I can’t begin to imagine what it looked like.

We just found this tape. We certainly are seen as

doing work that has a real socio-political critique,

and we deal with bigger issues, but there’s always been

a strong thread in our work—we just find weird shit,

and just use it and present it in our work Negativland

didn’t start out to be political, it just came from a pure, naïve love

of the strange culture we live in, in America. You love it, you hate it,

it’s horrifying, it’s silly, it’s ridiculous That tape that we found,

what’s wonderful is, it’s real.

You couldn’t write something like that.

When is it from?

Who knows!

 Must be a while back, for Wiggles to be that big a deal.

Do you prefer to work with older materials like that?

It seems like we often do…We work in film, we work in sound,

we’ve worked in performance, we’ve had art shows in New York

and Seattle and Minneapolis, and we’re always inspired by

what we find. It’s not that we set out to find something,

but you just keep your eyes open, your ears open,

and you run into stuff, and it’ll give you ideas.—Don Allred