Richard Lyons

Negativland is an American experimental music band that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s.

They took their name from a Neu! track, while their record label (Seeland Records) is named after another Neu!

track.

The core of the band consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills (aka "The Weatherman"), Peter Conheim and Jon Leidecker (aka "Wobbly").

Negativland has released a number of albums ranging from pure sound collage to more musical expositions.

These have mostly been released on their own label, Seeland Records.

Negativland started in Concord, California, in 1979 around the core founding members of Hosler and Richard Lyons (who were in high school at the time).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they produced several recordings for SST Records, most notably Escape from Noise, Helter Stupid and U2.

Negativland were sued by the band U2's record label, Island Records, and by SST Records, which brought them widespread publicity and notoriety.

The band is also part of the Church of the SubGenius parody religion.

The band released its eponymous debut in 1980.

A number of releases followed in the early 1980s, but it wasn't until after the release of their breakthrough sample and cut-up sonic barrage Escape from Noise in 1987 that Negativland gained wider attention.

Vinyl copies of the album came with "CAR BOMB" bumper stickers, in reference to the album's song "Car Bomb."

Negativland coined the term culture jamming in 1984.

Don Joyce added it to the album JamCon '84 in the form of "culture jammer".

The songs within were parodies of the group U2's well-known 1987 song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", including kazoos and extensive sampling of the original song.

The song "The Letter U And The Numeral 2" features a musical backing to an extended profane rant from well-known disc jockey Casey Kasem, lapsing out of his more polished and professional tone during a frustrating rehearsal that had gone out to many stations as raw feed and was taped by several engineers, who had been passing it around for a number of years.

One of Kasem's milder comments was "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?"

(U2 was actually formed in Ireland. Moments earlier he had read from his script, "the Irish band from Dublin".)

U2's label Island Records quickly sued Negativland, stating that placing the word "U2" on the cover violated trademark law, as did the song itself.

Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to deliberately confuse U2 fans, awaiting the impending release of Achtung Baby, into purchasing what they believed was a new U2 album called Negativland.

Following the somewhat unexpected success of this album, Negativland faced the prospect of going on a money-losing tour in 1988.

To prevent this, they created a press release that claimed Negativland were prevented from touring by "Federal Authority Dick Jordan" because of claims that Negativland's song "Christianity Is Stupid" had inspired 16-year-old mass murderer David Brom to kill his family.

The press release went on to vigorously deny the purported connection between Negativland and the murders.

While Brom had in fact argued with his father about music shortly before killing his family, no one had ever claimed that Brom was spurred to murder by Negativland's music.

The claim that Brom's crimes were inspired by Negativland was disseminated and discussed, generally skeptically, in local media as well as the Village Voice, with at least one Bay Area television station apparently believing the claims of the press release to be factual.

The incident became the foundation for Negativland's next release, Helter Stupid, which featured a cover photo of TV news anchorman Dave McElhatton intoning the Brom murder story, with the news station's caption "Killer Song" above his head, and a photo of the ax murderer.

Negativland's next project was the U2 EP, with samples from American Top 40 host Casey Kasem.

In 1991, Negativland released a single with the title "U2" displayed in very large type on the front of the packaging and "Negativland" in a smaller typeface.

An image of the Lockheed U-2 spy plane was also on the single cover.

In June 1992, R. U. Sirius, publisher of the magazine Mondo 2000, came up with an idea.

Publicists from U2 had contacted him regarding the possibility of interviewing Dave "The Edge" Evans, hoping to promote U2's impending multimillion-dollar Zoo TV Tour, which featured found sounds and live sampling from mass media outlets (things for which Negativland had been known for some time).

Sirius, unbeknownst to Edge, decided to have his friends Joyce and Hosler of Negativland conduct the interview.

Joyce and Hosler, fresh from Island's lawsuit, peppered the Edge with questions regarding his ideas about the use of sampling in their new tour, and the legality of using copyrighted material without permission.

Midway through the interview, Joyce and Hosler revealed their identities as members of Negativland.

An embarrassed Edge reported that U2 were bothered by the sledgehammer legal approach Island Records took in their lawsuit, and furthermore that much of the legal wrangling took place without U2's knowledge: "by the time we [U2] realized what was going on it was kinda too late, and we actually did approach the record company on your [Negativland's] behalf and said, 'Look, c'mon, this is just, this is very heavy...'" Island Records reported to Negativland that U2 never authorized samples of their material; Evans' response was, "that's complete bollocks, there's like, there's at least six records out there that are direct samples from our stuff."

The "U2" single (along with other related material) was re-released in 2001 on a "bootleg" album entitled These Guys Are from England and Who Gives a Shit, released on "Seelard Records" (a parody of Negativland's record label Seeland Records).

Negativland may have themselves been responsible for the re-release; although the Negativland website refers to this release as a bootleg, it is available from major retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and Tower Records, as well as Negativland's own mail-order business.

Negativland are interested in intellectual property rights and argue that their use of U2's and others' material falls under the fair use clause.

In August 2007, Joyce provided an audio cassette copy of the Mondo 2000 interview with Evans to the U2 fan website U2Interview.com.