Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums

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Jeremy Braddock

Firesign

The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums

Jeremy Braddock

$157.95

Hardback

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English

University of California Press
10 February 2025

Music; Music reviews & criticism; Electronic music; History: specific events & topics; Popular culture

A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s told through the story of the period's most important forgotten comedy group.

This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture.

He deploys a vast range of material sources, drawing on numerous interviews and writing in tune with the group's obsessive and ludic reflections—on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more—to focus on Firesign's work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era.

By: Jeremy Braddock
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 635g
ISBN: 9780520398511
ISBN 10: 0520398513
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 10 February 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jeremy Braddock teaches literature, media, and sound studies at Cornell University and is author of Collecting as Modernist Practice, which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.

Reviews for Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums

""A more compelling book of this kind could hardly be imaginable."" * Los Angeles Review of Books * ""Jeremy Braddock has done absolutely astonishing work in putting together this history of the group, how it leveraged the technology of the moment in real time (as it was released), and all the obscure references and connections in it from history, current affairs, and pop culture. An enormous achievement."" * David Wineberg's ""The Straight Dope"" * ""Tremendously informative and enjoyable."" * Mindplex Magazine * ""A significant addition to the literature of the period often called the Long Sixties. . . . From Braddock’s discussion of the troupe’s influences and personal histories to the clever and erudite analysis of the group’s work, his exploration of the Firesign Theater is certainly well worth the wait."" * CounterPunch *