An American Band

Ryan Worsley's Stand By for Failure, a documentary chronicling the history of the southern California experimental sound collective Negativland, saw its east coast premiere at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (PhilaMOCA) on Thursday, following its first ever screening on November 12th at the Other Cinema in the band's origin city of San Francisco. Playing to an audience of only eleven individuals (including myself and the MOCA's sole staff member and digital projectionist), sporting no copyright protection, and composed of some 56 years of audiovisual material, Worsley's film straddles a fine line between conventional band-doc and its own avant-garde remix, in keeping with both the style and ethos of its subject.

Negativland formed between the years 1979 and 1980 from the unlikely friendship of two eccentric Concord high schoolers, Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons, and a semi-reclusive 34-year-old named David "The Weatherman" Willis. Building upon the juxtaposition of tape loops and the heavy sampling of everything from radio call-in shows to adverts to televangelist broadcasts, the group combined these elements with unorthodox instrumentation and electronic devices to produce unique sonic compositions. A choice bit of early audio featured in Stand By for Failure records Hosler and Willis's disagreement as to whether or not the results of their playing around should qualify as "music," or something else entirely. What's more, the trio didn't even necessarily think of themselves as a "band," though it was Hosler's idea to present themselves as such so that their self-produced records would be included among the alternative and rock stacks in record stores, rather than tossed in with the experimental and avant-garde music crates that hardly anybody ever explored. The collective would eventually expand to include Ian Allen, Chris Grigg, and Don Joyce. The latter was the host of a weekly late-nite sound collage program on Berkley's listener-funded KPFA called Over the Edge, and would prove especially influential in terms of platforming and expanding the satirical mythology of the group, frequently inviting Willis, Hosler, and Lyons on air to assist in improvising compositions and sketches. As their cult following grew, their work also expanded into video art and elaborate multimedia live shows. At the same time, their abstract experimentations transformed into something both more aesthetically accessible (especially in terms of having fluid ambiences and discernible rhythms), as well as more satirically sophisticated. Hosler's prosaic notion of "tricking" the average consumer into supporting avant-garde works coalesced with Joyce's conception of "culture jamming," which seeks to co-opt the mechanisms and products of mass media in a way that subverts or disrupts consumer culture and the dominant ideology of capitalism. 

Over the course of the '80s, Negativland gradually became one of the most prolific and significant acts of an underground network of D.I.Y. music that, from our current vantage point, is too often narrativized only in terms of developments in punk and alternative rock. To be frank, though, if there is one major flaw in Worsley's new documentary, it is that it does not do much to elucidate either the regional circumstances and practices that led to the formation of Negativland, nor to the broader network of avant-garde and experimental electronic music as it proliferated in North America contemporaneously. He certainly has his work cut out for him in terms of the massive body of material he has to sift through in order to produce Stand By for Failure, but the decentralized cultural firmament from which the group emerged - which should also include the Church of the SubGenius, Myke Dyer's John Doe Recordings, and the Tellus tape magazine, to name just a few - goes conspicuously unacknowledged, both in terms of narrative content and compositional elements. Still, there is no doubt an at least semi-conscious irony in the extent to which something that Hosler conceived of, in part, as a "parody band," is now getting the "great American band" treatment, and thus the more individualistic rather than collectivistic view of pop culture history. Even the title of the documentary, Stand By for Failure, seems to meditate on the ultimate impossibility of truly disrupting or subverting a society so starkly alienated, so vastly commoditized, and so accelerated in its cannibalization of the accumulative potential of exactly that which seeks to subvert it.

Our story nominally begins all the way back in 1966 during the Christmas holiday, with a precociously eccentric Willis as a boy interviewing his mother on what must have been one of those old portable reel-to-reel tape recorders. Then again, this beginning also straddles the canyon of time into the present day, with a recording of the senior Willis now sporting a scraggly white beard, sipping an iced coffee, while he sits at a makeshift creation station assimilated by a veritable chimera of computer screens, mixing boards, synthesizers and sequencers, and various other electronic instruments. A certain degree of elliptical framing isn't precisely unusual in music documentaries. If anything it's the most intuitive narrative device of the genre, especially when at least some of the musicians are still living. But Worsley's particular style of juxtaposition of past and present right out of the gate suggests less the compartmentalization of a time period and more a kind of temporal collapse. Stand By for Failure will proceed to hit all the major narrative beats of a conventional music documentary, from the seemingly serendipitous coalescence of the group's founding members, through the development of their unique sound and creative philosophy, through controversies that at once hinder and promote their development, through the premature passing of key members and the recruitment of new ones. But while the film will certainly be illuminating to audiences relative to their lack of familiarity with a significant though obscure act within a niche genre, Worsley, as an editor, remains just as, if not more committed to the reinforcement of the textures and ephemeral qualities of Negativland's music and video art itself. By the documentary's conclusion, one gets a feeling less of the progression of a band than of a cycle of at once sublime and nightmarish recurrence, acknowledging the human interest of the collective's members and their story, but more so concerned with aspects endemic to their massive body of work that suggests an inescapable cycle.

Though their music explores and satirizes various themes - not just consumerism, but also nuclear proliferation, gun culture, and surveillance - the pre-eminent fixation of everything Negativland has ever produced is tied directly to the aesthetics of sampling. Their plundering and parodying of media without the permission of intellectual property holders at once tests the boundaries of fair use, while also suggesting the intractability of even the notion of property and a truly intellectual or creative culture. Major media conglomerates and advertising agencies possess infinite powers to pulverize us with manipulative content, and yet the legal presupposition is that the private citizen has no inherent rights to take these things they are inundated with daily and do whatever they want with them. Furthermore, the upward accumulation of intellectual property into fewer and fewer hands engenders serious concerns about the future of culture as an at all "popular" phenomenon.

At the same time, though, as Hosler acknowledged as recently as a 2012 keynote presentation at the International Symposium of Electronic Arts, Negativland's testing of these boundaries as spectacularly and for as long as they have has lead to an ironic situation where their art is just as illegal now as it was when they started, but nobody really seems to care that much. One can look at this in such a way as to claim that the collective has basically achieved a kind of "capital peace." No longer truly satiric, they are in fact one of the "great American bands," who stridently carved out and came to dominate a consumer niche that, even if they technically still violate copyright standards, is not only no threat to the rights-holders, but more likely directly helpful in terms of normalizing and promoting sometimes obscure bits of content. Another way of looking at it is quite different, though: We rather conclude, by observing the long-term arc of Negativland's media, epitomized in the production of Stand By for Failure, that Negativland no longer really appropriates media external to itself, but rather only remixes its own creations, to the point that all disruption and subversion is inwardly, rather than externally directed.

That's perhaps the most fascinating thing about Stand By for Failure. The way Worsley tells his story, there is never any acerbic judgment of the collective as genuine eccentrics and real-life "characters." There is, however, a strange sense of a thread being lost in the montage, like an Ouroboros, but as a symbol of abject and compelling sympathy, rather than occult revulsion and horror. Started out as a "parody band," the joke itself is now lost to time and nostalgia. There is only the appropriated aesthetics, which is now the unalloyed real thing. Negativland existed first as farce, and now exists as... Well, not so much as "tragedy," but certainly a kind of moribund melancholy. Worsley has not only created a very good music documentary, but has basically stumbled onto a twist ending that virtually no one could have expected: Here is Negativland, the definitive American band.