Negativland - Biography
Negativland is a collective of amateur musicians, sound collagists, social satirists, cultural provocateurs, and media saboteurs, loosely assembled in the San Francisco Bay area in 1980. They’ve released records, CDs, video, fine art, and books, produced radio programs, and engaged in live performance — all with varying degrees of creative success and absolutely zero degree of financial success. They were purportedly started by a bunch of high school students with one of their teachers. Their sense of humor, around which much of their work is based, is somewhat juvenile. They have referred to themselves as “wacky.” Doesn’t sound promising, does it.
Then also know this: They’ve managed to deliberately whip up a few national media frenzies; get blamed for some axe murders; satirize the most popular rock band on the planet; get sued back into the stone age by said band; subsequently hang out with said band; directly contributed to the aesthetic demise of the most highly regarded and critically acclaimed indie label of their era; struck fear into the reptilian hearts of music industry executives around the planet; and forced a debate about intellectual property rights and fair-use allowances that saturated the entire music industry from top to bottom and continues to this day.
And they managed to thoroughly humiliate America’s Top 40’s smarmy, mummified host, Casey Kasem. And they lived to tell about it all. Barely.
Those familiar with the satirical “religion,” The Church of the Subgenius, will quickly recognize the leanings of Negativeland. They take particular aim at corporate culture, commodity capitalism, patriotism, advertising, the media, and organized religion, in particular, and the overall banality of American life, in general. Membership is fluid and considered irrelevant but the consensus is that the primary members are Mark Hosler, Richard Lyons, Don Joyce, David Wills, and Peter Conheim.
Negativland’s weapons of choice against their various enemies: pranks, hoaxes, and what could be described as contextual repositioning. They take bits and pieces of cultural flotsam, and shuffle them around until they imply a meaning very different from their original intent. The group calls it “cultural archaeology;” another suitable, voguish term is “culture jamming,” which Negativland claims to have invented. All of these, in the name of activism, have gotten the band into boiling-hot water over the years.
Most of the band’s output has been through its own Seeland label. The self-titled debut, Negativland (1980 Seeland) had a highly respectable run for an experimental release — despite the original, obviously time-consuming, handmade covers. The audio incorporates everything but the kitchen sink — then throws in about a hundred kitchen sinks for good measure. Original music fades in and out. It’s got hyper-fuzzed guitar, synths, and a drum machine, sort of a languid, lethargic version of Chrome.
Otherwise, it’s sound collage. There are power tools, TV commercials, public service announcements, vacuum cleaners, et cetera. An elderly lady, presumably someone’s relative, introduces the band. Some of the era’s political jackals make appearances. There’s static and ambient noise. It’s not The Faust Tapes or anything, but for high schoolers in 1980, it’s an admirable first effort.
Negativland was followed by Points (1981 Seeland). It starts with a multi-layered track in which someone’s mom hectors him with various questions then tries to start an accordion performance. At the same time there are random metallic ringings and gongings, on top of which sit loud bits of static. Elsewhere there are field recordings from the county fair, a barbeque, and even a jaunty little Casio instrumental. It’s sort of an askew odyssey through suburban life. A Big 10-8 Place (1983 Seeland) continued the trend, with increasingly sophisticated editing.
However, it was Escape from Noise (1987 SST) that really put the group on the musical map. First, it was on the then-acclaimed SST Records, which was at its peak in 1987, with Sonic Youth, The Minutemen, Black Flag, Husker Du, and The Meat Puppets all still on its roster. The second big assist came from college radio, which lept at a number of the tracks. Escape is a quantum leap for the band, and begins with a wry, professionally produced announcement for radio programmers, detailing the commercial potential of the LP. “Quiet Please” contains no such thing, and is a non-stop riot of cartoon action sounds. In other spots there are sarcastic vignettes, field recordings, industrial interludes, and a Southern Baptist preacher whose words are collected, multiplied, then shipped off in the diametrically opposite direction. Pop culture, politics, and consumerism all receive swipes. Jerry Garcia, Jello Biafra, and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh all make absurd “guest appearances,” e.g., Jello flushes a toilet.
Next came the first of an escalating series of media brouhahas. As both a prank and a publicity stunt, Negativland wrote and released a phony press release. In it, they claimed that a real, jailed teen named David Brom had been compelled to kill his parents with an axe due to the influence of their song "Christianity Is Stupid," from Escape from Noise; the song contained samples deriding Christianity taken from the pro-Christianity film, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?.
With reckless abandon, the story of the “Killer Song” that spawned a teenaged killer ran throughout the national media, print and television. Suitably amused, Negativland used the scandal as the theme of their next release, Helter Stupid (1989 SST) which depicted a photo of a TV news anchor repeating the axe-murder story, with the caption "Killer Song" prominently displayed, along with a photo of David Brom. The record itself is a cunningly conceptual effort, a bit of refracted media spin — at 33 RPM.
The band got hold of an uproariously profane rant by TV and radio’s beloved disk jockey, Casey Kasem, and decided to base their next recording around it. The clip, originally captured when Kasem thought his mic was off, is a breathtakingly potty-mouthed tirade against a then-unknown U2. The nicest thing Kasem — pop music’s Mister Nice Guy for the previous, like, ten-thousand years — can muster is, “These guys are from England, and who gives a shit!”
The group decided to intersperse that clip with a cut-up/collage of U2’s recent, mammoth hit, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The result, “U2” (1991 SST), is a sardonic blast at U2’s gospel/arena-rock self-indulgence, and it doesn’t do wonders for Kasem’s image, either. However, with the addition of a bunch of vocal tracks by Negativland that overtly mock the band, Bono, and their lyrics, it’s pretty caustic — even for mockery of U2 (which, for the record, is an activity that’s about as challenging as playing whiffle ball with aluminum bats).
For the cover, they placed the logo “U2” as large as possible, nearly 12-inches wide and tall. In tiny letters at the bottom: “Negativland.” There’s a small SR-57 aircraft silhouette on there, too. It’s lost in the gigantic “U2” logo. The arrival of U2’s own Achtung Baby (1991 Island) was imminent.
Greg Ginn of Black Flag, who ran SST, was a notorious stoner. The guys in Negativland were accustomed to making aural collages from their suburban bedrooms.
Honestly, nobody pointed out the obvious?
They never knew what hit them.
Island, U2’s label, dropped massive lawsuits on SST and Negativland, claiming copyright infringement, as well as an intent to deliberately fool fans in the marketplace in advance of Achtung Baby. SST was covered, contractually. They yanked the record from retail, destroyed all copies, and charged all losses to Negativland’s account. Negativland? They got all the lawsuits and corresponding legal fees. (This was a very public episode in which a band was thrown under the bus, within a punk-oriented community in which business ethics were the gold standard, and it was a pivotal moment in the rise and fall of SST. The label, full of recording artists already disgruntled with accounting practices — or lack thereof — disintegrated shortly thereafter, as a mass exodus led many to other indies, and some to the majors.)
The ultimate irony? To promote the tour for Achtung Baby, U2’s publicist approached a magazine publisher to interview band member The Edge about the band’s new use of quasi-, post-modernistic appropriations and cut-ups — of course, Negativland’s stock and trade for 15 years. Through back channels and collusion, the magazine got a pair of anonymous Negativland members placed as the interviewers. As pointed questions mounted, they finally revealed their identities. Bizarrely, there was rapprochement, and a rapport developed that continues to this day.
The band weathered the storm, after years, but doing so seemed unlikely at the time. In they aftermath, they published a magazine full of documentation of the incident, legal briefs, court transcripts, legal opinions and more. The name “U2” was in the title.
Island sued. Again. Successfully.
In 1995, Negativland finally got to present their side of the story. With the title amended to the mutually agreeable Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995 Seeland), they self-published a book. It’s a 270-page tome that also contains a ten-track CD. Within its pages they argue for redefined boundaries for intellectual property law in the nascent digital age, as well as the rights of free usage.
The digital age suits Negativland. They remain more productive than ever. They’ve worked on a not-for-profit designed to expand the accessible database of copyright-free licenses; they’ve been the subject of Craig Baldwin's feature-film documentary, Sonic Outlaws; they’ve founded an e-mail discussion list, with the mission being the establishment of an incubator for culture-jamming activities; and they’ve curated an art exhibit in Manhattan's Gigantic Artspace gallery.
However, when it comes to satisfaction and victory versus consumerism, greed, fatheaded-ness, and overall corporate stupidity . . .
They still haven’t found what they’re looking for.