Sonic Outlaws, the Negativland movie, is now streaming on Fandor and I wrote about how it’s dissection of sampling, copyright infringement, and idiotic American copyright law is even more relevant 16 years after the movie came out. We’re all culture-jammers now.
“These guys are from England and who gives a shit?” Casey Kasem exhorts after flubbing the name of Irish rock group U2. That’s just one of the sounds—sampled, found, manipulated, re-composed—heard on Negativland’s U2 EP. Some others: the Saturday morning countdown host angrily yelling about a sad dedication to a dead dog right after “an uptempo fucking record,” random expletives from Kasem woven into the song’s instrumental bed, the familiar strains of U2′s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” picked apart, overlaid with video game sounds, and that longing-filled melody performed on budget synthesizers and a kazoo…
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?