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Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New
In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area.
“We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental sound collage record, which eventually sold 15,000 copies. “We were shocked that people were interested in something so strange.”
Hosler started the group with David Wills and Richard Lyons, but the Negativland lineup has changed, and the range of its work expanded over 46 years.
The multimedia collective has produced more than 30 albums and EPs, as well as fine art, books, radio and live performances that mix found and original material. The band came up with the phrase “culture jamming” to describe its approach to layering art from various sources..
Negativland continues to innovate and perform, collaborating remotely. Its live show, Over The Edge: Significantly Less Deceptive, at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters on September 16, will combine sound, music, radio, humor, and sonic experimentation. Hosler, who lives in North Carolina, will be on stage with San Francisco’s Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), a collaborator with the band since 1985, while Wills contributes by phone from his home in Seattle.
Negativland Live at Internet ArchiveSeptember 16, Doors @ 6pm / Show @ 6:30pmIN PERSON @ Internet ArchiveTickets: $20, register now: https://eventbrite.com/e/1994683818998
Negativland has been influential in the remix space. It has challenged conventions around media, copyright, and artistic freedom. Hosler said the band wanted to carve a space to talk back to power through its audio collage art.
“The thread that goes through all of our work is that we are always responding to and describing American culture,” Hosler said. “It’s our perceptions of power, money, capitalism, who runs things, who’s in control and how the media works. We are creating this alternate, weird, parallel universe version of reality as we perceive it.”
The group was thrust into the limelight when it released a record poking fun at, and sampling from, the U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The Irish band and their label sued Negativland for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and defamation of character in 1991 and, with Negativland’s “U2” record having been released by the label SST Records, the group reluctantly settled.
Negativland used the episode and attention from the media to highlight the need for copyright reform. It shared the story of its legal battle and argument for the right to make new art out of corporately owned culture in the 1995 book, Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral Two. The book led Hosler to give more than 140 lectures about appropriation, corporate ownership and the intersection of art and law at schools and universities around the world.