Negativland carries on despite loss
Listening to Negativland has always been a musical experience unlike any other, and with the release of its latest album, “The World Will Decide,” it has blasted past the realm of scathing social commentary into the void of evil omen.
The band ( for want of a better term) started in the Bay Area in the ’ 70s, though currently only Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker still lives here. Like so many other acts during the pandemic, the members are scattered to the winds. Or in one member’s case, scattered in small plastic baggies in the homes of fans.
Never a band to shy away from guerrilla art and famous for controversy, the members included part of late colleague Don Joyce’s cremains in special editions of their 2016 album, “Over the Edge Vol. 9.” There is a grim joke in the fact that a band known for editing and repurposing content to present in bizarre musical forms should edit and repurpose one of its peers in the name of art.
Then again, Negativland has always been the kind of act that whistles past the graveyard. “The World Will Decide,” which came out on Apple Music, Spotify, CD and vinyl Thursday, Nov. 13, might actually be its most pop record of the 21st century. But it is still heavy on ideas. A companion piece to last year’s “True False,” it explores the increasing way that social media have taken over our lives and what that might mean in the long run for our species.
“It’s like a new lifeform we have to live with, and we’re now convinced it’s actively trying to kill us,” Leidecker told The Chronicle. “The optimism at the heart of the engineering is that it will save us, and we don’t have a ton of understanding of where the solutions that the machines will use come from. We just follow their lead.”
Like every Negativland record, the music is accompaniment for creatively reconstructed quotes and recordings from a variety of strange sources that become lyrics. The band prides itself on its digital archaeology, and it’s unlikely that a listener will recognize the origins of the audio that is being manipulated. These aren’t clips from “Star Wars.” They’re deep dives into random Facebook rants, corporate training videos and other detritus.
“Negativland has always held a lot of humor, but we don’t make love songs,” cofounder Mark Hosler said. “We’re human beings living in the world, taking in what’s going on, chewing it up and spitting it out, regurgitating the media. We’re contributing to a great conversation that we feel needs to be had but isn’t being had.”
Those types of conversations are partially the legacy of Joyce. With Negativland in its fourth decade as a band, it’s not surprising that tragedy has begun to strike. In 2015, Joyce
and former member Ian Allen died, and two years later, cofounder Richard Lyons did as well. The band has always been notorious for obscuring who was a part of the endeavor, but the liner notes for “The World Will Decide” contain a picture of the surviving members holding up pictures of their lost comrades. In addition, Hosler has recently lost both his parents. There’s no doubt that “True False” and “The World Will Decide” were written with loss in mind.
All three deceased members have contributions included in these records, though Joyce’s parts loom largest. He hosted a weekly radio show for years, and he left a mountain of tapes to Hosler when he died. Recordings of those tapes make up a huge portion of “The World Will Decide,” and like the Facebook account of a dead friend that you can’t bring yourself to delete, it’s a weird form of immortality.
“It’s very appropriate and easy to take all these little bits from our archives and make them into new works,” Hosler said. “We realized we had all these classic moments that had never ended up on records. As we’ve made these albums, it really has felt like Don is there, and he just went out for a smoke break. We can still keep working with him even though he’s not still around.”