Negativland: Car Bomb
Negativland: Over the Hiccups
[purchase]
Long-standing cultural remixers and early anti-copyright activists Negativland don't make songs or albums so much as they create collections of sonic collage experiments, many of which call to particular genre approaches even as they challenge our sense of what a song is.
Here's two of my favorite such moments: a hilarious and tender a capella recording of a small child with hiccups singing Over the Rainbow which I once kept around to fill time on the end of mixtapes, and a faux thrash-punk litany of automotive nouns punctuated by a ticking drum beat, a clock, and a series of ever-larger explosions.
Both come from Negativland's most album-like album, 1987's aptly titled "Escape from Noise", better known for introducing the world to a song called "Christianity is Stupid".
