{"product_id":"firesign-the-electromagnetic-history-of-everything-as-told-on-nine-comedy-albums-9780520398511","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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJeremy Braddock\u003c\/b\u003e teaches literature, media, and sound studies at Cornell University and is author of \u003ci\u003eCollecting as Modernist Practice\u003c\/i\u003e, which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of California Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50911854395666,"sku":"9780520398511","price":104.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_7d4ac838-dbba-47a4-85b0-1152e2fa649e.jpg?v=1738757861","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/firesign-the-electromagnetic-history-of-everything-as-told-on-nine-comedy-albums-9780520398511","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}