Did the rock band Negativland really inspire a brutal killing spree?
In 1987, the experimental noise-rock band Negativland released the album Escape From Noise and would go on to be the closest thing to a hit they’d ever have.
As their debut release on a major label, it would be the first of their albums to have an actual promotional budget. It was also marginally more commercial than their other works, yet even then, that “marginally” is doing some seriously heavy lifting. It’s less that they’d sold out and more that their baffling, experimental noise rock was now split into five two-to-three-minute songs rather than one fifteen-minute number. There was also slightly more melody now than there had been previously.
Yet that was not what threatened to make Negativland, briefly a household name. It was a song of theirs, in fairness, but one that hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
You see, in February 1988, 16-year-old David Brom murdered four members of his immediate family with an axe. The case made national headlines for how utterly shocking it was, and in the furore that surrounded the story, Negativland published a bombshell press release that stated that the last song Brom had listened to before committing the act was a song from Escape The Noise titled ‘Christianity is Stupid’.
Listening to the song, one can imagine it being the bop of choice for a budding serial killer. It takes the words of a sermon from Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle and repurposes them to be an anti-American, anti-religion, pro-Communist tirade that soundtracks a soundscape imagining a USA under communism. It’s a deeply surreal, deeply silly spiel that borders on disturbing at more than a few moments, and now, it transpired that it had inspired one of the most horrific crimes of the time.
Needless to say, suddenly Negativland were a big deal for all the wrong reasons.
But did Negativland inspire a killing spree?
At the time, the story was picked up by several news outlets, which ran the story pretty much the moment they heard about it.
Suddenly, many fairly mainstream news personalities were discussing the music of Negativland and playing it on daytime TV, especially in their native San Francisco Bay Area. They parroted many of the points made in the band’s press release, namely that the band were “advised by Federal Official Dick Jordan not to leave town pending an investigation into the Brom murders”.
However, this mention was the first sign that not all was as it seemed. Most media outlets that got hold of the story found that there was no California Federal Official by the name of Dick Jordan, much less any that had anything to do with the Brom murders. Only one news station, KPIX, seemed to buy the story, running the story on their TV broadcast and reaching out to the band for further comment.
The band responded that their attorney, Hal Stakke, had advised the band not to make any further comments in the press. Spoiler alert, Hal Stakke was as real as Dick Jordan. Yes, the whole thing had been a hoax, and what’s more, there was a reason for it as well. The band collected all the media discussion about their supposed involvement in the murder and turned it into the title track of their next album, Helter Stupid. The 22-minute sound collage was built around samples from the KPIX news bulletin as a way of commenting on the sensationalism the media partakes in when genuine tragedies happen.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “fake news”, eh?