Negativland
Over the Edge, Vol. 2 – Pastor Dick: Muriel’s Purse Fund (Seeland)
by Nik Rainey
The development of Negativland into our edgiest cultural terrorists is not hard to figure. Since 1981, they’ve had a weekly five-hour free-forum to hone their media-manipulative skills – Over The Edge, a spontaneously-woven crazy quilt of deadpan satire, audio effects, and unscreened audience participation via telephone. At its best, the results achieve synapse-jumbling new extremes of aural pranksterism, non-linear noise layering, high satire and low comedy, the sound of an alternate universe where the Firesign Theatre, Robert Anton Wilson, Marshall McLuhan, and the Church of the Subgenius intersect and overlap. A universe, in other words, that looks a hell of a lot like our own. For those of us not within blast radius of KPFK, their San Francisco base of covert operations, they’ve distilled the essence of OTE into an ongoing series of CDs that represent the Universal Media Netweb at its signal-jamming best.
Pastor Dick is Neg’land’s sideswipe at religious radio, that blandly malign realm where salvation is yours as long as you don’t touch that dial. Not the most original or inspired target, admittedly, which keeps this a few notches below the exhilarating pinnacles of their sharpest attacks (copyright law, media hysteria, cultural jingoism), but it’s still a cut above most play-once-then-file comedy records. The good pastor begins by announcing that his secretary, Muriel, has had $180 stolen from her purse, so he has devised an easy and entertaining way to raise both the purloined money and his listener’s souls – just phone up, confess to three sins, and pay accordingly. And, as a bonus, he will match every dollar raised with a slug from a bottle of champagne to help illustrate the point that drunkenness is a sin. Though Negativland’s source-chopping live technique is in full effect, the show hinges on the interaction between Dick and his actual callers, who seem in on the joke to varying degrees, from the twelve-year-old who admits to stealing her mother’s car while on speed to the guy who just calls to say “fuck you” a total of forty-three times. Skirting the edge between visionary and puerile, Pastor Dick is alternately goofily hilarious and noisily impenetrable – even edited down to 73 minutes, it can be unfocused (which, given the circumstances, is pretty inevitable) and lacks the thrust of their painstakingly crafted studio recordings. Still, fans will get their share of hoots from this, and the enclosed 16-page booklet, “Pastor Dick’s Flagship Faith,” is as sacriliciously hilarious as can be. (Where can I get my own “If The Rapture Comes, This Car Will Have No Driver” bumper sticker? My “Car Bomb” one’s starting to peel off.)
