I know that Negativland is more or less tangentially related to IDM list
discussion, but for those of you who enjoy or are at least familiar with
the Negativland album "Helter Stupid", you have to read this belated
epilogue...
[posted to the Negativland list, "snuggles"]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 10:28:49 -0500
From: Jonathan Land <jland@incomplete.net>
To: snuggles@kuci.org
Subject: [snuggles]: Helter Stupid Addendum
From Mark Hosler:
Dr. Land
-----------------
Tonight I was rather aggressively confronted for 2 hours at a party in
Olympia by a guy who went to school and was good friends with DAVID BROM
and his brother ( who wasn't killed as he was at a friends house).
Remember our CD "Helter Stupid" and the hoax it was all about?? We blamed
our cancelled tour on a real quadruple ax murder In Rochester Minnesota in
a fabricated press release that claimed that our song "Christianity Is
Stupid" somehow caused the murders. Teenager David Brom committed the
actual murders, our hoax grew to epic proportions in the media, and we then
made a record exposing the truth behind our prank.
Anyway, this guy at the party was telling me how horrible we were for
exploiting the murders and how our hoax affected their town. Wild....very
difficult conversation . What I found out was that our rumor made it back
to that town as THE TRUTH in a big way we never knew about!
Here, after much questioning and endlessly trying to explain what we did
and why to this guy, is what I was told -
Rochester MN is a very small, very cut-off, very religious town. A week
prior to the killings there had been a local story about murder and music
and the connections between the two, and it was being discussed quite a bit
already amongst worried parents. But get this - David's brother Joe
actually sold indy punk records out of their basement (!!!) and the guy I
met at the party claims he actually *was* selling our records!! No kidding.
David Brom was a straight arrow "GQ" kid, very very normal and nice,
who , for some strange reason, happened to let a friend cut his hair into a
mohawk the week before the killings. David did NOT like punk rock either.
The Brom family was FANATICALLY religious, making David go to church
literally almost every day.
So when our story came out, you can imagine how it all "fit" together!!
Crazy punk rock kid from good Christian family listens to crazy music and
kills family, just like the mass media has been telling us all along. . It
slipped perfectly into this stream of things in a town that was looking
for an explanation of why something like this could happen in such a nice
place. The official story in town *literally* became that it was OUR
RECORD ( Escape From Noise) that was on his record player when the
killings happened! So our hoax succeeded in ways we could never have
guessed! And our prank fueled the town and the parents fears that MUSIC
was making their kids crazy and violent. This lead to weird kids being
kicked out of school ( including the guy who was confronting me) , being
persecuted, beat up, etc.
Incredible. Far weirder than anything we could ever make up!! I did mention
to him that as much as we always realized that we WERE exploiting a real
human tragedy, we were interested in dealing with how the media works and
the medias *representation* of the events. Not " the truth". And that good
art doesn't have to be "nice" to be good art. But apparently our rumor
actually made things WORSE in the town for all the punk rock misfit
kids.... it fed into all the fears already there.
I am still very proud of that record we made, but this whole discussion
was unsettling, to say the least! Did we cross a line we now wished we
hadn't? If not, did we come close? I kept trying to explain to him that it
was all an EXPERIMENT in the media to see what would happen- and then when
it blew up into something bigger than we imagined, we tried to do something
creative and responsible with the unexpected direction the whole thing
took. This guy thought we should have known *exactly* what was going to
happen and we were bad for going ahead and doing it.
And one more thing - David's brother Joe Brom was widely believed to have
been the mastermind behind the killings as he was far more deranged than
David ( and I have heard that he was quite crazy from other sources as
well).
So...there are apparently 3 different folks living in Olympia now who all
knew Brom and they sure don't like Negativland...
Mark
--
http://incomplete.net - "If it's not here, it's incomplete!"
"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop taking amphetamines."
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