{"product_id":"firesign-the-electromagnetic-history-of-everything-as-told-on-nine-comedy-albums","title":"Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums","description":"\u003cb\u003eA cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s told through the story of the period's most important forgotten comedy group.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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.","brand":"Jeremy Braddock","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46348345245932,"sku":"9780520398511","price":158.33,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46348345278700,"sku":"9780520398528","price":34.94,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0684\/1791\/3068\/files\/9780520398511.jpg?v=1744122785","url":"https:\/\/intl.allstora.com\/products\/firesign-the-electromagnetic-history-of-everything-as-told-on-nine-comedy-albums","provider":"Allstora","version":"1.0","type":"link"}