Firesign

The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums

Jeremy Braddock

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780520398511
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520398542
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s told through the story of the period's most important forgotten comedy group.
 
This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture.
 
He deploys a vast range of material sources, drawing on numerous interviews and writing in tune with the group's obsessive and ludic reflections—on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more—to focus on Firesign's work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Liner Notes
• 1. Album / Talking Book: Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968)
• 2. Radio / Duplicity Is the Double of Duality: How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)
• 3. Cinema / Remediating the Studio System in May 1970: Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970)
• 4. Artificial Intelligence / Up Against the Wall of Science: I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus (1971)
• 5. Television / What Is Television?: The Martian Space Party (1972), The Firesign Theatre vs. Dream Monsters from El Outer Space (1972), Not Insane (1972), TV or Not TV (1973), Roller Maidens from Outer Space (1974), In the Next World, You’re on Your Own (1975)
• Coda / Run-Out Groove
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Firesign Theatre Discography
• Appendix B: Firesign Theatre Samples in Hip Hop and Electronic Music, 1989–2023
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index