It's All in Your Head

Everyone's favorite media scavengers and anti-copyright gadflies, Negativland have long displayed a creative irreverence for nearly every aspect of contemporary human existence, and while they've long embraced a skepticism about faith (most notoriously on "Christianity Is Stupid" from their 1987 album Escape from Noise), they've chosen to explore the subject at length on 2014's It's All in Your Head, a 104-minute audio collage pondering the tricky business of what people believe and why they believe it. Presented in the form of an ongoing broadcast from "the Universal Media Netweb," It's All in Your Head is a sonic crazy quilt of music, sound effects, manipulated pop songs, repurposed interviews, bits from movies and TV shows, original dialogue, and all manner of found sounds that in the first half primarily examines Christianity in American culture. Near the end of Act I, an aggressive attack on the United States is reported, and as the UMN is declared to be under new management, the second half of the piece primarily concerns itself with the Islamic faith (particularly as it's seen in the First World), using the same sort of building blocks as part one. While a fair amount of It's All in Your Head is played for laughs on some level, ultimately (and like most of Negativland's work) this feels less like comedy than a think piece that heaps equal amounts of scorn and careful consideration on both faiths examined here. (Significantly, Negativland have packaged It's All in Your Head in an authentic King James Bible, while also offering a variant edition that's tucked inside a Qur'an.) As both cultural and religious satire, It's All in Your Head is certainly intelligent and brilliantly executed, though it seems to imagine a world without Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and dozens of other sects (including atheism); as a device to promote conversation about the place of religion, it's interesting but flawed by the fact the artists seem most eager to speak to people like themselves who have seemingly opted out of religious practice and belief in a supreme being. To repeat a fitting cliché, Negativland seem to be preaching to the choir on It's All in Your Head, though there's no denying the skill and imagination of the performance puts them on a relative par with Mahalia Jackson.