What was the HelterStupid prank?
Buy the HelterStupid album to get a full understanding of this, but the basic story is that Negativland exposed the laziness of the media by issueing a press release stating that they were cancelling their upcoming tour because their song “Christianity is Stupid” had been implicated in an actual murder case where a teen-ager killed his parents with an axe. This was a total fabrication (although the song and the case were real), but many stories ran in print and on the television reporting the facts exactly as Negativland had reported them in the press release! A truly scary/hilarious album resulted. 7. Are there other widely distributed artists like Negativland? Yes. Snugglers seem to like John Oswald’s super-sampled and then insanely-folded pieces. Most notably ‘Plexure’, a 20 minute CD with samples of 2-4000 pop songs. See the video ‘Sonic Outlaws’ by Craig Baldwin for more info on other folks who do this. And of course there is a long history of experimental music (John Cage, Stockh
