Negativland has been successfully prophesying doom for 40 years now, their secret all along being using society’s words against itself. Pioneers in sampling and culture jamming, the outfit is perhaps most notorious for a petty, prolonged and hilarious copyright battle with U2, but they’ve had a longer, more varied and for more subversive career than simply lambasting Ireland’s most famously bloated activist hypocrites.
Hypocrisy and consumerism have been the primary targets throughout their catalog of appropriation and recontextualization, played out in albums, performances, radio programs, video work and books. Depending on how one counts, the new The World Will Decide is their 14th album of new work, although cataloging their output is about as easy as tabulating a CEO’s tax shelters. While their means of production have become commonplace—it’s easy enough to search out YouTube uploaders using sound clips and audio collage to create pastiche parody—Negativland keeps fresh by addressing contemporary worries. The World Will Decide (released last month on their own Seeland imprint) is largely concerned with living life online and all of the surveillance and data-mining that comes with it. But the album also takes on such timeless concerns as gaming and eternal damnation. It’s a “mirror image sequel,” according to self-generated hype blurbage, to the 2019 release True False, turning the focus “away from our very human inability to accurately define reality, and towards the technologies attempting to do a better job at it.” In a vision not so different from the ambitions of the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The World Will Decide depicts a world so beautiful humans can’t appreciate it, much less contribute anything to it. The sound bite narratives and constructed dialogues of which the album is comprised are set to music that sounds like ad execs trying to appeal to the youth market by pantomiming rock and dance music. Like the vocal tracks, it’s often built around loops, but employs some talented human musicians (including Kevin Blechdom, Matmos and Ava Mendoza)
Buried near the beginning of the final third of the overwhelm that, like every Negativland record, The World Will Decide is is a track that seems key to defining what the media manipulation subterfuge operation, or “band,” is all about. It isn’t, of course. There is no key to Negativland. That or everything’s a key—it’s all about the power of suggestion. But the 8½ minutes of “Attractive Target” are highly suggestive, like a glimpse behind the curtain, into a darkweb nightmare of fear porn, weaponization, techno edge, matrix manipulation, paranoia and confusion. It is what the rest of the album is intended to distract you from. The unnerving is real. The World Will Decide is ultimately an examination into the minutiae of societal collapse, the mundane details of human extinction, an apocalypse so slow no one notices, with catchy ditties to occupy us on the way down.
Author
Kurt Gottschalk is a writer, journalist and broadcaster based in New York City.
