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

A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and ’70s as 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. Working at the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock reveals 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.

Focusing on Firesign’s work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975, Braddock deploys a vast range of material sources, informed by 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. 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.

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.