Helter Stupid (song)
| "Helter Stupid" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by Negativland from the album Helter Stupid | ||||
| Released | 1989 | |||
| Recorded | 1988 | |||
| Genre | Musique concrète/Experimental/Plunderphonics | |||
| Length | 18:00 | |||
| Writer(s) | Negativland | |||
| Helter Stupid track listing | ||||
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Helter Stupid is a song by Negativland, released on their 1989 album Helter Stupid.
Structure
The song starts out with a call from Rolling Stone Magazine editor Tom Krotenmacher, who tries to contact the band about backmasking on "Christianity Is Stupid", yet Mark Hosler yells throughout the conversation as it interrupted his TV watching (as shown in the previous song), "NOW! NOW IT BEGINS!" and even saying the statement backwards. From there, the song starts up and does a disco beat to Estus Pirkle's yells of "Christianity is stupid! Communism is good! Give up!" and some other samples. The next part after that is a conversation between the media and David Brom's friends, who say that he isn't bad, with samples of a man's prayer for forgiveness and people yelling out, "Creep!"
The next section goes to what fans believe was sampled from The National Lampoon Radio Hour, but it was recorded by Mark and Don from the band. The section is two men backmasking a commercial said by one of them saying evil messages about David Brom. From there, Richard Lyons talks about sins while Estus, again, talks about Americans being killed. After that, the famous "Helter stupid" section in the song is played as anything that has to deal with murder has one word in them replaced with "stupid", causing a satire to be made.
From there, Richard talks about electronic voices preserved on magnetic tape and makes the listener play a game: try to put themselves in the places where the samples were made. During the second time, right after the band makes the samples say "Christianity is Communism! Communism is Christianity! Christianity is the cause for the murder!", he makes the listener do fun things in the places of the samples while saying, "Is God here? Is God here doing this kind of thing?" From there, Charles Manson starts to ramble and argue and it seems like that somebody is being killed. At the end, an ambulance can be heard driving off in the distance.