thinking about our reactions to Negativland, particularly the track "This Is Not Normal"

[packbat]

Negativland's album True False on Seeland Records was released on 25 October 2019.

The music video for "This Is Not Normal", track 12 of 14, was produced in April 2020 and released on YouTube on May 4. It contains a lot of distorted and strange imagery and camerawork and contains some fast cuts, body horror, and death, and the lyrics feel ... at the very least, heavy-adjacent?

States in the United States didn't begin sending stay-at-home orders until March 19th. Our state didn't until March 30th. We'd heard the crisis downplayed at first, but by March 30th we were certain that the stay-at-home order was overdue.

We didn't have any reusable masks. We had an ancient box of paper masks that we bought out of some fantasy of using them as dust masks, but they were a limited resource and we knew they would all be gone sooner the more we went out, so we went out less and less and nearly none. We were already a hikikomori, but we ended up even more shut-in, and everyone else was too. The world was in disruption, and everyone felt helpless.

(And the George Floyd protests were yet to remind us that, despite the murderous nature of our governments, people have power.)

This is the context in which we heard "This Is Not Normal". This is the context the video invited, with its contrasting of the old, busy world with the empty streets of social distancing lockdown. It came like a reminder, like a warning, like a revelation:

You must understand the meaning of any facts you wish to remember.

Remember:
Don't trust your memory.

...and

just, the most newscaster generic official professional voices, one after another

saying "this is not normal"

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The nature of ambiguity is to create massive leaps of interpretation. You can see it in that game of science-communication telephone organized by the Minute Earth team (cw: alcohol, food, diet talk): people are handed a series of images without context and try their best to guess what it might have meant, and maybe they're close but maybe their ideas have nothing to do with anything. Ambiguity does that. And for a plural system that has never even heard of the band, Negativland's "This Is Not Normal", even with a video recontextualizing the words, is deeply ambiguous.

What the hell is normal? We argued in late May that "the definition of 'normal' is that we are expected to not question it." To say that this is not normal, that now is not normal, is to say the past we remember was normal ... but we shouldn't just accept that. We shouldn't trust our memories. We shouldn't trust the manufacturers of normal whose normal let the past months, years, decades happen.

Dogs bark with the voice of children pretending to be dogs - and that's normal.

Normal didn't make sense. It felt like it made sense because it had been made normal - we had been taught to accept it. This is not normal, but the normal this is not was a lie we were told.

We listened to "This Is Not Normal" many times. It felt like someone got it.

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We like reading comments on YouTube. A lot of comment sections are truly horrible, but a lot of them are generally fine or even just straight-up good, and the one under "This Is Not Normal" was good.

In the first couple days the video was up, someone in the comments asked people to talk about what they thought the main topic of the video was about and we replied.

Near the beginning of December, someone else saw our comment and asked if we'd be willing to elaborate on it, so we did.

At the end of December, another person replied and mentioned they'd be interested in what we thought of Negativland's next album, The World Will Decide, so we gave what we could find of it on YouTube a listen.

"Before I Ask" and "More Data" felt ... cynical? "Don't Don't Get Freaked Out" was clever but felt anti-transhumanist. By the time we got a bit into "Open Your Mouth", we were being seriously bummed out and didn't want to listen to any more.

...we did today, out of curiosity. We listened to True False, listened to "Either Or" and "Limbo" and "Discernment" and "Certain Men" and "Melt the North Pole" and "Fourth of July" and ... uh, not going to say the title of that one ... and "One Bee At A Time" and "Secret Win" and "Destroying Anything" and I think around that point our partner asked how we were doing and we had to conclude that it was not good and we didn't want to hear any more. It was all awful and grim, shocking imagery of the violence that our society passes off as normal.

Many reviewers called True False humorous, sardonic, comedy.

The person who asked us about the next album appreciated our reply - our criticism of its hopelessness and its focus on technology as a villain.

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"This Is Not Normal" came out on 25 October 2019, months before the first identified cases of COVID-19. It's not about lockdowns. I think it's stronger, being read as about things much, much larger than a global pandemic.