You may or may not have heard of the semi-underground art rock band Negativland. I was first introduced to them through their album Escape from Noise featuring weird songs using samples from old industrial films and shortwave radio clips. There’s an especially controversial track called Christianity is Stupid but I prefer the bit of cold war paranoia, Yellow, Black and Rectangular. A few years later, their U2 EP was famously recalled by the record company after a lawsuit from DJ Casey Kasem. The EP featured outtakes of Kasem swearing and being a general ass about having to read a long-distance dedication to a deceased dog. Here is the original outtake.
David “The Weatherman” Willis, Negativland’s main source of weird samples and general absurdity, was also a budding filmmaker of the weirdness variety. Here is his masterwork, “Fetch My Cigarettes,” starring his mother and himself. It was included as part of their VHS compilation, No Other Possibility, but was an independent work. It’s only 4 1/2 minutes long, and the first minute is skippable.
