The Letter U and the Numeral 2


What happens when your art consists of sampling other people's work? If your name is Negativland, you get your ass sued by U2.

This story juxtaposes things that should never be within a million miles of each other. It's a story of little guys fighting big guys, of the volatile mixing of art and business, of indie-label musicians and corporate lawyers. It's not a funny story, although the term pro bono might make you laugh later. It's a story that hasn't ended yet, but by the time it does, lots of money will have changed hands, and lots of people - musicians, pop stars, record companies, and lawyers - will have spent thousands of hours in court.

The story is about Negativland, a collective of three or more friends who sometimes get together to make music. Well, maybe it's music: recorded audio material - television jingles, radio talk-show clips, conversations culled from radio waves, anything that features the sound of a human voice - is fodder for the collage that comprises a Negativland recording. Mediaddicts who see society suffering under a constant barrage of TV, canned imagery, advertising, and corporate culture, Negativland's members are, by self-definition, artists of appropriation. They create with mirrors.

Gathering the most memorable, most evocative, or most provocative chunks from the spew, they reassemble them into something new - occasionally political, frequently critical - and spin them back into the barrage. Combining, say, car-manufacturers' slogans, sound effects, and a PSA warning against drinking and driving in "We Are Driven" (from their 1993 release, Free), they create a danceable phantasmagoria that disses our culture's obsession with the automobile: simple enough, thought-provoking, and pretty funny. At their worst, the members of Negativland are repetitive and smarmy; at their best, they are razor-sharp, microscopically focused, and deadly accurate.

At a tiny North Oakland, California, studio, where he collaborates with Mark Hosler and Don Joyce (Negativland's brain trust), Chris Grigg explains the band's techniques. "By working with several levels at the same time, we encourage people to observe multiple meanings - even if they aren't intended - in everything around them," he says. Negativland invites us to inspect more closely the surrounding world and its media, a practice Grigg calls "instructive, terribly fun, and a bit psychotic."

Using closer inspection as a working philosophy, Negativland creates plenty of media itself: CDs, LPs, EPs, cassettes, a video, magazines. Time Zones Exchange Project, a double CD with a 28-page booklet, released last October, is an elaborate, Church of the SubGenius-meets-Griffin & Sabine historical hoax. Some members of the band produce KPFA-FM's Over the Edge, a weekly 3-hour improvisational radio program in nearby Berkeley. Others are finishing a "caustic, perversely complete" guide to Disneyland. The band's latest project, a CD and book entitled Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 is inspired by a recent adventure they had with the law. You might have heard about it.

Three years ago, in August 1991, the band and its label at the time, SST Records, released a single called U2 that featured a U-2 spy plane, the lettering "U2," and Negativland's name in small print on its cover. The recording included about 35 seconds of a U2 song, American Top 40 icon Casey Kasem making disparaging comments about the band ("These guys are from England and who gives a shit?") while bawling out his staff, CB-radio conversation, and inane commentary from The Weatherman, one of the group's occasional members. Innocuous and very funny, U2 was signature Negativland. Despite its cover, it could never, once heard, be mistaken for a recording by the Irish pop zillionaires, it would never be taken for anything other than a parody, and it would be unlikely - since Negativland had never sold more than 15,000 copies of any release - to reach a huge audience. U2 wasn't going to make anybody rich, nor was it going to make Island Records Ltd., U2's label, poor.

But it nearly bankrupted Negativland.

"The bulk of appropriated material on our earlier releases was from fairly obscure stuff," says Joyce in retrospect, "and U2 marked the first time we had ever taken on pop music. It wasn't even something that attracted us, but it just became appropriate because we got these Casey Kasem tapes mentioning U2. It's nothing we'd have chosen to do otherwise"....

aren't we sick of this story yet? it's only been, what, 15 years? it's been commented on, by both sides repeatedly.

GrayKing said:

kinda makes you wonder why i'd post a thread about it tonight, huh?