The Onion A.V. Club | Negativeland interview

"Since 1980, the California-based cultural-collage collective Negativland has built records, videos, and art installations from fragments of popular media, creating work that comments on mass communication while exploiting it for new forms of entertainment. More than once, this has caused trouble: In 1988, Negativland pretended that its song "Christianity Is Stupid" was responsible for inspiring a Minnesota teenager to slaughter his family, and when the hoax was exposed, the band used the subsequent controversy as the foundation for the album Helter Stupid, which itself proved controversial. In 1991, the band put out the single U2, which featured an unauthorized cover of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," peppered with profane outtakes from a Casey Kasem recording session. Kasem and U2's label, Island Records, weren't thrilled, and the resulting string of lawsuits nearly bankrupted SST Records, Negativland's label at the time. But by the end of the '90s, thanks to hip-hop sampling, "culture-jamming" appropriation had become common enough that when Negativland took on the soda corporations on the 1997 album Dispepsi, the lawyers hardly blinked.

Negativland's latest release, from its own Seeland Records, is No Business, a CD of chopped-up audio tracks from the likes of Ethel Merman, The Beatles, and Disney's The Little Mermaid, packaged with a lengthy essay about the changing nature of copyright law in the digital age. No Business comes amid a yearlong celebration of Negativland's 25th anniversary: Earlier this year, Craig Baldwin's Negativland-heavy documentary Sonic Outlaws hit DVD, and a DVD of Negativland videos and short films is expected to be released shortly by Other Cinema. Helter Stupid was reissued this past spring, and in the fall, Gigantic Art Space in New York City' Tribeca neighborhood will be hosting an exhibition of the band's visual art. To mark this "year of Negativland," The A.V. Club spoke with the band's longest-serving members: founder Mark Hosler and 1981 recruit Don Joyce. They were interviewed separately, but their comments have been cut together, Negativland-style." (full interview at link)