‘Don’t Get Freaked Out’: Negativland releases 14th album
The band and culture jamming project Negativland recently released their 14th studio album “The World Will Decide.” Previous albums from this Bay Area media collective, founded in 1980, include “U2” (1991), “The ABC’s of Anarchism” (1999) and “True False” (2019). The latest offering continues their creative use of sampling mixed with original music to examine culture and politics.
The Sentinel spoke with Jon Leidecker, who’s worked with Negativland since 1987 and officially joined the group in 2010. Leidecker has also produced many albums under the moniker Wobbly.
Sonic weapons
JM: “The World Will Decide” is a mind-blowing montage of voices and rhythms exploring ideas around technology, freedom and human empathy. The album begins with ‘Unlawful Assembly’ featuring voices of people at a protest. And police declaring, ‘This is an unlawful assembly.’ We hear people screaming, ‘ They’re shooting rubber bullets into people’s houses!’
Jon Leidecker: “That opening track is basically a studio version of something we’ve been playing in concert since about 2015. A lot of the voices you hear were taken from YouTube and personal recordings from 2011 Occupy protests. Also, the 2014 Ferguson protests and the militarized police response, as well as recordings from the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, to underline that this is a global phenomenon.
We’d open our concerts by playing recordings of the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) sonic weapon that’s being used domestically to disperse protests. The LRAD is a physically dangerous, incredibly painful sonic weapon. You almost don’t have a conscious response; you hear it and you begin to run. We compressed it so that it wasn’t too sonically dangerous.”
Occupy laid the groundwork
JM: “You mentioned the Occupy movement. It wasn’t referenced very often in 2020.”
Jon Leidecker: “It was really strange how many people started referring to it as a failure by 2014. In fact, it sort of laid the entire groundwork for now, 2011 was an important year. Occupy radicalized every student body across the country in a way that the students remember, but definitely seems to have fallen out of the popular narrative. But I remember it.”
JM: “The movements for Black Lives and to defund/abolish police gained momentum last year. What’s on your mind in terms of social change happening now?”
Jon Leidecker: “What’s amaz
ing is how many people did feel compelled to go to the BLM protests in late June and July (2020). I went to a number of them myself in San Francisco. They were outdoors and every one was masked. And I didn’t really know anybody who got sick from those. It really is remarkable what a difference just simply wearing masks makes!
The Black Lives Matter and Afrofuturism platforms are really important. The thing that gets missed when people say, ‘All Lives Matter’ or some nonsense like that, is that the Black Lives Matter platform is the way out for almost every single living being. The reason why those voices matter most is because their solutions are actually solutions for everyone. They see the problems most clearly because they’ve been at the receiving end. So, they’re the people you should be listening to the hardest. I’m speechless. But if I’m speechless, it’s because I’m trying to listen.”
Nobel Peace Prize
JM: “In the song, ‘Don’t Don’t Get Freaked Out’ the band is exploring robots, mortality and autonomy. You’ve sampled the voice of someone describing autonomous weapons, ‘ It can decide by itself, whether or not to kill somebody.’ That’s a huge leap in technology. U. S. drones have been used to kill people accused of crimes without a trial, including Americans. Many seem to for
get that Obama reviewed a daily drone kill list.”
Jon Leidecker: “Obama was quoted once about the irony of how he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in light of how good he turned out to be at killing people. I detect that he’s more than a little haunted by his role in this. We’re already there.”
Technology is not neutral
JM: “An underlying premise that’s questioned on this Negativland album is the notion that technology is neutral.”
Jon Leidecker: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. That was always the Stewart Brand argument, from the early ’ 70s. The optimistic viewpoint was that technology was neutral and we just need to use the force of optimism and goodwill to make sure that these tools are used in the right way. But the technology isn’t neutral. To some degree Negativland’s beat has always been the way in which media shapes us. One of Marshall McLuhan’s quotes that he really loved was, ‘ We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.’ His interest in artificial intelligence was, ‘ What happens when the tools begin shaping us to such a degree that we can no longer really distinguish ourselves from our tools?’”
Artificial therapist
Jon Leidecker: “A critical figure is Joseph Weizenbaum. He wrote
the artificial therapist — Eliza — in the mid ’60s. People were saying, ‘ We might be able to invent robots that can do our dishes. But we’ll never be able to invent a conscious robot or a robot that we’ll be able to relate to as a friend.’ His purpose in writing Eliza was to prove that simply by writing a program that repeated back elements of the sentence you typed to it, you could create the illusion of someone who is listening to you. And if you had Eliza bring up something occasionally that you said 10 sentences ago, then you’d be able to create a program that appeared to be listening to you even more empathetically than your close friends. And to his horror, his program became an international smash hit!
Weizenbaum was so appalled by this that he spent the next 10 years realizing that the real question was not; ‘ What human jobs are computers going to be capable of assuming?’ But the real question was; ‘ What jobs should we allow them to do without putting the entire human race in danger?’ That question has been completely lost in all of the financial imperatives of Silicon Valley.”
‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’
JM: “I noticed that among the guest musicians on “The World Will Decide” is Prairie Prince,