HAPPY HEROES 1998 (Seeland 018) CD Addicted to Noise, May 29, 1998 New Negativland EP Recycles Commercial Outtakes Orson Welles and O.J. Simpson are among the subjects of Heroes' edited-tape tracks. Media pranksters Negativland are like the tape-manipulating Davids who never get tired of chopping at the ankles of the mega-conglomerate Goliaths of the world. Constantly taking new and bolder swipes at what it sees as rampant hypocrisy and deception on TV and radio and in movies, the group -- which has taken on U2 and Pepsi in recent years -- set its sights on celebrity hucksters on its recently released EP, Happy Heroes. "Of course the use of existing material technically puts us on the wary (or worry) side of existing law," said Don Joyce, one of the group's members, of the eight-track EP. "But getting away with this unauthorized kind of reasonable recycling of American culture seems to actually be getting easier, not more difficult." The "recycling" Joyce is talking about in this case is the unauthorized use of commercial outtakes featuring the late, great film director Orson Welles shilling for Jolly Green Giant peas, as well as bloopers from a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad and manipulated snippets from an O.J. Simpson workout tape, which appear on the song "O.J. And His Personal Trainer Kill Ron And Nicole" (RealAudio excerpt). The Welles tapes, which Joyce said have been available on the tape-trading underground for a number of years, were passed along to the band by a musician friend. Backed by abstract ambient music, the tape-edit track "Jolly Green Giant" (RealAudio excerpt) finds the master director arguing with the writers of several commercials about the wording of their ad spots, at one point complaining that "this is a lot of shit -- you know that." Seemingly at the end of his rope, Welles finally loses it, griping, "I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare ... I've spent 20 times more for you people than any commercial I've ever made. You're such pests." David Thomson, a Welles expert who wrote the 1996 biography "Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles," said the tapes come from an English commercial recorded by Welles in the '60s. "Most fans have heard these countless times," Thomson said. "And they represent an actor forced to read bad lines." The culture-jamming band that brought you a 1991 deconstruction of U2's mega-hit "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" (and subsequently entered a protracted legal battle over it) conceived the new project as the logical follow-up to last year's Dispepsi album. That album consisted of cleverly deployed edits of Pepsi commercials fashioned into a commentary on the insidiousness and mindlessness of soda advertising. Negativland member Joyce said that where Dispepsi was all about brand identification, the new album is about celebrities shilling for products, both real and imagined. "Mertz [an imaginary 'feel-good' pill advertised throughout the EP by phony rock star Eddy Idle] is both a good, old idea and the perfect hook for a recording product because it's so hard to make up your mind about recording products these days," Joyce said. "Thus, the solution is within the product. For instance, if you had a tin of Mertz you wouldn't need to be asking these questions." Joyce also expressed his satisfaction with the "Jolly Green Giant" song, calling it "one of the most perfectly realized pieces using such tapes we have ever done." A spokesperson for the consumer-relations division of Pillsbury, the parent company of Green Giant, said she had no authority to discuss the matter, but seemed less taken with the song. Karen, who would not give her last name, said, "I haven't heard the outtakes, but I will be forwarding this information to our legal team." "We continue to believe that the best way for artists to open our culture to this healthy and useful form of recreation and self-criticism is by example," Joyce said of Negativland's continued testing of the copyright waters. "Build a piece and they will come, regardless of the restrictive legal fences put up by the control freaks of commerce. It proves its own worth over and over again in practice, and soon it becomes a publicity liability for culture 'owners' to contest it." As proof, Joyce said there was no fallout at all from the Dispepsi project; the group heard that Pepsico was aware of the album but chose not to contest it. Once again, the band has entered into a somewhat gray area, according to attorney and copyright expert David Nimmer, author of "Nimmer on Copyright." While he said he had not heard the album and could not say definitively what legal issues might be attached to the recordings, Nimmer did say that in the case of the Welles tapes, if they were recorded before 1972, they are not subject to statutory protection. "Only after [1972] did Congress accord protection to sound recordings," Nimmer said. "But outtakes from commercial sessions are protected under the law; sometimes they're even accorded greater protection than actual commercials." As far as Joyce is concerned, he said the challenge for the band is not to originate new sounds, which he personally considers impossible at this point in musical history, but to "recycle the plethora of already existing sounds into unexpected contexts." "When there are 'too many' sounds already, as with tires or paper or glass," he said, "recycling is the smartest and healthiest move and may allow one to survive, at least temporarily." Gil Kaufman
THE MEMPHIS FLYER For some reason, whenever the name of the audio-collage group Negativland is glimpsed or heard, two separate indelible images surface. The first is a graphic that was printed in Les Daniels' seminal 1971 book Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, which pictured a clutching, claw-like hand emanating from a television (along with three microbe-filled balloons labeled "Misinformation," "Half-Truths," and "Mind Rot") attacking the skull of an unwary victim with the caption, "What are YOU doing to protect yourself from MEDIA BURN-The Nation's leading mental crippler." The second appeared in director Nicolas Roeg's challenging 1976 film adaptation of Walter Tevis' The Man Who Fell To Earth. Space oddity Thomas Jerome Newton (played with detached perfection by David Bowie) is surrounded by a bank of video monitors, each tuned to a different channel. As the cathode-ray sounds and visions grow to an overwhelming cacophony, Newton screams, "Leave my mind alone!" Put these two powerful media commentaries together and you have a good working definition of Negativland. No stranger to these pages (your not-so-humble reviewer previously tackled the band's Sex Dirt and Dispepsi in this column within the past two years), Negativland is back with a vengeance in the form of an eight-track extended- play CD titled Happy Heroes. With a "total consumption time" of 26 minutes and 36 seconds, Happy Heroes delivers more bang for the buck-particularly if you have a wicked sense of humor and high threshold for aural pain. To the uninitiated: Much of Negativland's output will leave the delicate amongst you screaming for mercy-but for those savvy (and wicked) enough to read between the lines, a rollicking good time awaits. Thought-(and laughter-) provoking packaging is an integral to Negativland's modus operandi. The cover of Happy Heroes features the infamous image of a topless Janet Jackson with an unidentified pair of male hands cupping her bare breasts. However, the Negativland version cleverly tweaks the expected by superimposing Marcia Clark's face over Janet's, and adds O.J. Simpson's exuberant face peering out from behind her raised arms. With the consensus being that O.J. got away with literal muder, why shouldn't Negativland get away with figurative murder? Alert the good-taste police, because offensive material doesn't stop here. Bloated legend Orson Welles grapples with peas on "Jolly Green Giant," a disoriented Colonel Harlen Sanders verbally stumbles repeatedly throughout "Chicken Diction" (isn't his corporate visage looking more and more like Chairman Mao these days?), and the scintillating shocker of them all, "O.J. and his Personal Trainer Kill Ron and Nicole," with it's repeated affirmation to "get the blood flowing" over a pair of hair raising screams. (Another mirthfully morbid touch-the bonus insert poster picturing the Bloody Green Giant and the One World Advertising Logo.) The repeating theme on Happy Heroes would have to be the universal symbol for all pervasive (and persuasive) media, which Negativland conjures as a concoction called "Mertz"-a "tiny, brain-shaped tablet that makes up your mind." So, if your mind hasn't already been made up for you, fight back and avoid the total brainwashing pattern that bombards us at every turn by wallowing in Happy Heroes. And don't expect these guys to ever change their name to Positivland.-David D. Duncan
NOW MAGAZINE Negativland's latest release is another hilarious "fair use" effort that extends Dispepsi's dissing of advertising into embarrassing celebrities, including a pissed off Orson Welles, a bumbling Colonel Sanders and cover star O.J. Simpson, who is seen grabbing prosecutor Marsha Clark's breasts a la Janet Jackson's Rolling Stone pose. Negativland got hold of OJ's workout video, (the one that proved he wasn't too arthritic to kill), which contains dialogue with his trainer that is so ironic ("this is just to get the blood flowing, right?" "just hold her there") that they needn't have added the screams to make "OJ and His Personal Trainer Kill Ron and Nicole" the sickest three minutes you'll ever hear.
ORLANDO WEEKLY "Happy Heroes" wraps a series of cut-and-paste sonic segments around loosely unifying themes of advertising and commercialism. In terms of context, this disconcerting mix of fiction, sound collage and music is closest in spirit to Negativland's seminal avant-prankster recording, "Escape From Noise." The title track is a five-minute discourse on stardom, dripping with spiky thorns of irony and set to the sort of music your cousins play at family reunions. Recurring character Eddie Idle's pitch for the "Black Hole Tube" is also worthy of mention, as is "Chicken Diction," in which Colonel Sanders- sounding like he had too many secret spices- hilariously and incompetently attempts to hype his Kentucky Fried Chicken. Happy Heroes is a heaping helping of brain food digestible in less than half an hour.-Ian Koss
GAVIN REPORT The boys known as Negativland are at it again. Having gained sudden national fame a few years back by butchering U2, this new EP release is sure to once again piss-off multinational corporations. The targets this time include Green Giant, Colonel Sanders, and O.J. Simpson. The band also uses the services of Eddy Idle to help champion a new "product" called Mertz, which was created to help make up your mind. Also included is a megamix of "Happy Heroes" from Dispepsi. As usual, bizarre. Very bizarre. Back to PRESS US Back to NMOL 
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