sonic detournement - the curious case of negativland
On September 5, 1991, a federal judge issued a restraining order against SST Records and Seeland MediaMedia, the fictitious publishing company run by members of experimental art collective Negativland. The order demanded that all 6000 copies of their single “U2” be turned over to Island Records for destruction, citing defective packaging, image defamation, and a number of other charges. It was also suggested that the record’s very existence might in some way be detrimental to the financial situation of Irish band U2. The record was a synthesizer re-reading of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, laced with samples of a foul-mouthed Casey Casem, host of American Top 40, angrily swearing at his engineers over an ill-timed death dedication to a dog named Snuggles. Island Records argued that by releasing a single entitled “U2”, Negativland were attempting to seize some of U2’s record sales by misleading consumers. Ironically, U2 were at that time embarking on their “Zoo TV” tour – a tour in which media sampling, both visual and auditory, was the centrepiece.
Negativland’s career since the late 1970s has been a fascinating trip through the prickly, dangerous backstreets of the American legal system as it pertains to art and artists, and a boldly incendiary attempt to critique the culture industry, through the appropriation, manipulation and re-configuration of existing cultural artefacts. Before sampling became a cornerstone of the mainstream music industry, Negativland was experimenting in the musique-concrete techniques of found-sound appropriation that had been pioneered by such seminal artists as Throbbing Gristle in the early 1970s and John Cage in the 1960’s. Since 1981, Negativland has also hosted a highly experimental, groundbreaking radio show – Over The Edge. In the wake of their prosecution over the U2 single, they have written extensively on the subject of found-sound art, and the legal ramifications of fragmentary sampling as applied to create new artworks. Negativland embrace a performance-art aesthetic, heavily influenced by The Firesign Theatre, in that the band members have a number of characters that are presented on record, on stage, and more commonly on their radio program. From the egotistic DJ of “The California Superstation” – Dick Vaughn, to Pastor Dick - the moderator of debate program “Christianity Is Stupid”, each character has been carefully constructed for maximum satirical potency.
But, in the beginning, Negativland was less interested in social commentary, than in the presentation of the sounds of their native Berkeley, California. Negativland, their debut album, is just that – 20 untitled tracks consisting of found sounds, snippets of dialogue, snatches of synthesizers and acoustic guitars. The cover, however, points to the path the band was about to take – for Negativland has no real cover art. Every copy of the record was hand-made by the band – founder members Mark Hosler, Richard Lyons, and David Wills having made 15,000 to date. The jackets are constructed from various pieces of found media. Mine consists of a square wallpaper sample, some floral-patterned dress fabric, with the band’s name, and the album credits pasted across the front. There have been reports of copies of Negativland constructed from the pages of recipe books and magazine clippings. The Negativland album features the first appearance of “The Booper” – a device built by member David Wills – or ‘The Weatherman’ as he later became known. “The Booper” is an instrument designed by Wills to create spiralling loops of feedback and white noise. Negativland is, then, the first instance of the band’s attempting a form of commentary on consumer culture. Negativland have subverted and satirised the iconography usually associated with the music industry and the act of selling a record. Instead of a clearly identifiable image, such as a photo of the band members, or something more abstract, a`la Pink Floyd’s prism from the cover of Dark Side Of The Moon – Negativland give us an album cover that is beyond image. What images there are become constructed via the mundane and the everyday, as opposed to presenting us with a clearly manufactured consumer object designed for maximum viewer impact. Indeed, Negativland’s central image is that there IS no image – the cover-art is in a state of flux as constant as the consumer culture from which it has been created. The album inverts every established convention in the art of recorded music. There are no “songs”, and certainly no song titles – just track markings. There is no album title. There is no cover. Sonically, there is nothing that resembles what we have come to recognize as “music” – it is a droning, cacophonic expanse of the sounds of everyday life.
Negativland’s second release, Points, continues the Throbbing Gristle-inspired sound of the debut, although Points proved even more impenetrable and raw. However, on their third release, 1983’s A Big 10-8 Place, we begin to see the brewing storm of controversy that was to follow the band throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s. The centrepiece of the album is the creepy, bizarre ‘180-G – A Big 10-8 Place, Part Two”. “10-8” is the citizen’s band radio code for “on the air”, and it is on the air that Negativland take us – as narrated by David Wills, now rechristened ‘The Weatherman’, on a bizarre, nonsensical trip through Contra Costa County, the birthplace of the band, punctuated by samples of individuals communicating over ham and CB radio. The album’s key sample is of a woman saying in an excited voice – “Come on, Kids! Let’s get your father and go look at some MORE new houses!”. This is one of Negativland’s first blatant swipes at rampant consumerism, something that later bloomed into the full-fledged dark satire with the Dispepsi album.
With three albums of experimental sound collage under their belts, Negativland embarked on the recording of what many consider to be their masterpiece – Escape From Noise. It is here that Negativland’s satirical powers took full flight. The album opened with an announcement to radio stations, assuring them that this is a record which has been market-tested and formatted for maximum success, “without having to rely on such intangibilities as taste or intuition”. Skewering their targets with precision, Negativland launched a savage attack on the American consumer marketplace, focusing on such diverse elements as the landscape of the Top 40 (Michael Jackson), the problems one can face when enjoying an evening alone (The Playboy Channel), as narrated by Playboy cable repairman The Weatherman, and sampling a discussion in which it is revealed that people fear torture more than death (Methods Of Torture). A particularly arresting moment occurs in “You Don’t Even Live Here”, which addresses the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster by way of a sample of a particularly angry, disillusioned resident. The album brings out one of Negativland’s more important sides, and one that is integral in their success – humour. Escape From Noise is a funny record – with such amusing moments as Mark Hosler’s daughter singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” through a potent case of hiccups, and a touching ode to a soft-drink that has been contaminated by an insect in “The Nesbitt’s Lime Soda Song”. Escape From Noise is probably the most accessible Negativland album, and the one most suited to listeners unfamiliar with their somewhat abrasive compositional style. The track for which the album will be remembered, though, is Christianity Is Stupid – a song that will feature prominently in Negativland’s follow-up, the epic art-terrorist masterpiece Helter Stupid.
David Brom is a minor figure in the canon of American homicide, yet his place in history is guaranteed, thanks to Negativland’s involvement in his case. In the late 1980s, sometime after the release of Escape From Noise, news began filtering through of a 16-year-old-boy who had murdered his parents and sisters with an axe. On hearing of the case, Negativland devised a brilliant hoax designed to illustrate the unreliability and scandal-mongering nature of the mainstream media. In a phoney press release, Negativland claimed that they were unable to tour behind the Escape From Noise album because they were being investigated by homicide detectives. Allegedly, Brom had been listening to Escape From Noise, and the track “Christianity Is Stupid” may have been responsible for his decision to murder his family. It was, of course, a complete lie. But, as it turns out, it was a lie of the best kind. Negativland’s bogus story was picked up by the mainstream media, and reported across the United States, their self-created myth growing larger and out of control. The group sampled the media coverage of their story, and re-engineered the material into a side-long compositional piece entitled Helter Stupid – a clear allusion to the Manson murders of 1969, and the role that The Beatles’ White Album played in Manson’s trial and conviction. Tasteless? Probably. Helter Stupid is, however, a disturbing, chilling, and hilarious journey through the inner workings of the mainstream media. Opening with a sampled phone call from Rolling Stone to the Seeland offices asking for a comment on the case from Negativland, the album moves through report after report, with journalists giving solemn commentaries on the events, cross-cut with samples of various figures discussing the relationship between murder and music. As both a piece of satire, and as an expose of journalistic practises, Helter Stupid is an invaluable social document. The second side of the album, an endless, nauseating retrospective of the most vapid disco music of the 1970’s revolving around mainstream radio’s endless search for “the perfect cut”, was taken from Negativland’s experimental radio show Over The Edge.
When one listens to Over The Edge, it is clear from the very outset that this is dangerous, truly subversive listening territory. Always opening with a sample from Vangelis’s “Heaven And Hell”, the show is the creation of Don Joyce, a member of Negativland who was experimenting with free-form radio in the 1970’s, and found kindred spirits in the other members of the band. Over The Edge is the antithesis of mainstream radio, which has now become the private whore of the record industry – it is a confrontational, litigious, sprawling mess of sound, music, performance, and ideas. Each week, the show is given a theme – be it the ownership of sound during the Napster debacle of the late 1990s, or the role of Death Metal in popular music, or recorded aural histories of the Second World War. What makes Over The Edge especially daring is that in part the show is constructed by listeners, connecting over both telephones and the internet, listeners are encouraged to drop their own samples, opinions, and slices of commentary live and unedited into the mix. The result is as unpredictable as it is fascinating – a format of entertainment that completely obliterates the boundaries between spectator-performer transference. The direction of the sounds that are being broadcast is in the hands of both the shows audience and its creators. Indeed, Negativland also incorporate the techniques of The Firesign Theatre’s groundbreaking broadcasts of the early 1970s, in that they create characters and performance pieces directly designed to stimulate the imaginations and emotions of their audience. An April 1991 show entitled Christianity Is Stupid presented the idea that Over The Edge has been retired for the week, and has been replaced with a forum on the concept that Christianity IS stupid, Negativland’s Richard Lyons as “Pastor Dick Bush” presenting the negative and Don Joyce as “Mark Feign” for the affirmative. Listeners are invited to call the show to express their opinions on the subject in an uncensored, frank manner. Richard Lyons’ performance as Dick Bush was completely believable, displaying a formidable knowledge of bible theory, theological ideas, and Christian dogma that the audience completely believed that what they were hearing was the real thing. No calls were made accusing the panel of being Negativland in disguise – which is a testament to the validity of their performances.
Continuing the religious theme, Dick Bush is obviously the evolution of one of Negativland’s more enduring characters – the irritatingly pious religious broadcaster “Pastor Dick”. In 1982, Pastor Dick presented his now-legendary programme “Muriel’s Purse Fund”. The fiction here is that Pastor Dick’s sister has had money stolen from her purse, and he is a suspect in the theft. In order to reimburse her, he is holding a pledge drive – he will take people’s sins over the air, and for each sin, he will charge a fee on a scale he has created to rank the severity of sins, and will drink a glass of champagne for each. Initially, the calls are surreal, as the Over The Edge listening public tells strange tales of dropping mushrooms, belittling their employees, “jamming” office PA systems, and stealing their parents’ cars. The second half of the broadcast resumes Negativland’s cut-and-paste aesthetic, giving us a warped history of religious programming, the highlight being a 1950s call-in show in which a nervous caller debates the validity of being a Christian and owning a car called a “Dodge Demon”.
The Weatherman has been the centrepiece of a number of episodes of Over The Edge – two of which have been preserved on CD. The first, The Weatherman’s Dumb Stupid Come-Out Line was almost blocked from release because it contained a number of Pink Floyd and Village People samples. The show centres on the notion that The Weatherman had recently decided to declare his homosexuality, and was now encouraging the Over The Edge listening audience to come out of the closet on air with him. The responses he receives are less than friendly, and at times downright antagonistic giving us an insightful glance into the question of sexuality in the media in the late 1980s. The second Weatherman album is one of the highlights of Negativland’s discography – The Willsaphone Stupid Show. The Weatherman’s family home in the 1980s was completely wired with microphones, allowing the young David Wills to record and broadcast the sounds of his family home from any part of the house. Focusing on his family get-togethers, we are given a gentle, melancholy document of the lives of an average family, years before “Reality TV” was ever thought of. Indeed, The Willsaphone Stupid Show offers us one of Negativland’s more bittersweet moments. After three hours of Betty Wills, The Weatherman’s extremely engaging mother discussing everything from “dreams of fire” to “comb music” to her impromptu rendition of Devo’s “Jocko Homo”, The Weatherman abruptly stops the tapes from rolling, and sadly informs us that his mother has passed away, and the tapes we are about to hear are the final ones that he will ever make.
Perhaps Over The Edge’s most radical broadcast was the one that formed the second side of Helter Stupid. The concept is simple – KPFA, the alternative radio station that broadcasts Over The Edge, has been turned into “The California Superstation”, hosted by nauseatingly smug DJ Dick Vaughn, played again by Richard Lyons. Using a massive library of stale 70s pop hits, commercials, and mindless games – including the hilarious “More On Music” – Vaughn constructed the ultimate mainstream radio programme, and the absolute antithesis of Over The Edge’s renegade spirit. Over The Edge listeners were suitably incensed. They called into the show to threaten Vaughn’s life, telling him that they would destroy the KPFA radio transmitters, and will slash the tyres on his car. The second half of the show is entitled “Moribund Music Of The Seventies” – as Vaughn repeatedly reminds us, it the first ever 1970’s nostalgia programme. Figuring the wave of baby-boomer nostalgia shows that still pollute the airwaves, “Moribund Music Of The Seventies” is a brilliantly satirical take on the nostalgia industry – despite Vaughn’s admissions late in the game of total artistic and commercial failure – something with which his callers wholeheartedly agree.
It was on Over The Edge in 1991 that Negativland’s now-infamous single “U2” was debuted. A landmark case both in the band’s personal history, and in the legal concept of “fair use”, “U2” is, at its core, hilarious. A twisted re-reading of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, featuring The Weatherman’s oddly jerky vocals, the track included the appropriated found-sounds of Casey Casem of American Top 40 fame, swearing at his engineers over an inappropriate death dedication to a dog, Snuggles. The record was in stores for a week before Island Records issued a cease and desist writ. Negativland defended its right to free expression in a long, costly court case but in the end were powerless to stop the suppression of “U2”, and found themselves sadly having to leave Greg Ginn’s SST records, who clearly felt that Negativland were getting what they deserved, refusing to assist them with their legal fees. A book, Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral 2, was later published by Seeland, detailing the case in graphic detail, accompanied by a recording of Over The Edge’s cultural critic Crosley Bendix – performed by Don Joyce – detailing the concept of “fair use” as it pertains to the U.S Copyright Act. The act is geared towards the protection of intellectual property as it relates to corporate control – the RIAA, ASCAP, and the large owners of cultural material believe that sound is a commodity that can be owned. Negativland do not agree – arguing that fragmentary sampling of existing material is a practice that has existed for thousands of years in art, from Duchamp to Plunderphonics, to Warhol, and that these concepts do not become dismissable simply because we are living in an overly litigious age of rampant capitalism and corporate greed.
Indeed, the concept of “fair use” is something that a number of other artists have been fighting for since the dawn of electronic music – beginning with Stockhausen all the way through to the Evolution Control Committee’s 2000 single “Rocked By Rape”. Certainly one of the more interesting art collectives is The KLF, the Kopyright Liberation Front. Taking the media-prankster, art-terrorist mentality of Negativland to its logical extreme, The KLF began with a brilliant cut-and-paste masterpiece entitled What The Fuck Is Going On?, released as The JAMMs – or “The Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu”. Unfortunately, What The Fuck Is Going On? relied heavily on samples by Swedish pop group ABBA, who refused to give the KLF their permission for use – and, as with “U2”, the record was suppressed, then destroyed. Interestingly, the KLF’s album Chill Out – their major label debut – featured sampling of Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac and a number of other artists in one long 60 minute recording session, attempting to recreate the feeling of a drive in the English countryside. The KLF went on to have an unbelieveably subversive career, in which they scaled the pop charts with their track “3a.m Eternal”, before appearing at the Brit awards, performing the song in a duet with thrash metal band Extreme Noise Terror, and firing at the shaken crowd with a machine gun filled with blanks. They then deleted their back catalogue from distribution and delivered a dead sheep at the London offices of their publishing company. As art terrorists, the KLF’s most extreme stunt involved an ingenious parody of the art world, in which they withdrew a million pounds from their private bank accounts, nailed it to a board, and attempted to sell it for £500,000. When no takers emerged, they simply took a film crew to a remote island and burnt the entire million pounds cash, a stunt they described as “The Rites Of Mu”.
As late as 2002, we see record industry attacks on the freedom to engage in fair use, with John Osborne’s Plunderphonics being banned from distribution – the Canadian Music Industry seized all copies of the album and physically destroyed them. Plunderphonics is an unbelievably intricate, detailed exercise in sampling with Osborne drawing from cultural products across the board – from 1950s swing records to Michael Jackson to thrash metal to The Beatles. The original Plunderphonics is still illegal to possess, yet Seeland Records, Negativland’s publishing arm, has issued a boxed set entitled 96 Plunderphonics 69, an exhaustive overview of Osborne’s work.
One of the more disturbing examples of fair use occurs in the work of Bob Ostertag. Ostertag, a pioneer in cut-and-paste electronic sound, in 1991 released Sooner Or Later. As solemn and profoundly moving as any album in recorded history, Sooner Or Later was directly influenced by Ostertag’s experiences in El Salvador during the 1980s, and is largely constructed around the sound of a young El Salvadorian boy burying his slain father. The sounds are simple – we hear a shovel digging in the dirt, a fly buzzing around the body, and the boy’s breathing. Sooner Or Later proves that despite the subject matter, found sound appropriation and re-engineering can produce results that are as potent and challenging to an audience as those created by conventional instruments. Sooner Or Later, as well as Ostertag’s back catalogue, is also being distributed by Negativland’s Seeland Records.
Copyright law as it pertains to collage artists such as Negativland is completely at odds with the artistic aims of creators, and has become geared primarily towards the protection of economic interests. The public domain is now a wasteland of cultural objects which are seen to have outlived their economic usefulness, and as such are consigned to the scrap heap. This is completely at odds with the concept of public domain that existed as little as fifty or sixty years ago – an age in which we were not at the mercy of an overly litigious, greedy consumer culture. Folk music, in its original form, can no longer exist as a result of this – the art of passing down words and music from person to person, with each subsequent artist leaving his or her own personal stamp on the piece, has now, essentially, been made a criminal offence. The evolution of words and music through the passing of time has been halted due to the fact that words and music can be owned by private parties. This is, clearly, illogical – and is a clear signal that our outmoded copyright laws are being exploited, and need to be updated.
The reason behind this is simple. Artists will always draw, in varying degrees, from the world around them as the fuel for their personal creative expression. Be it Warhol’s experiments with the concept of 20th century celebrity, to the overly-politicised, stripped down music of the punk movement – artists will always seize those things that directly affect them from the immediate culture that they live in as fodder for their art. In the infancy of the twenty-first century, we inhabit a culture that is reaching a disturbingly high saturation-point of media and technological influence – the television, the radio, the internet, the cinema, and the endlessly invasive nature of commercial advertising are providing the backdrop for our lives. That said, it is necessary that artists be given the freedom to draw from any cultural material that they deem fit, rather than being placed into gridlock by an uncaring, corporate mentality that insists against all logic that media artefacts can still be privately owned once they have been released into the world for cultural critique, consideration, and digestion. Once a person hears a song on the radio, and it is in their head – they own it. A song, or an image, or – indeed – a piece of writing should not be the exclusive property of a handful of private owners, motivated by opportunism and driven into a frenzy of shotgun-tactic litigation to further their economic goals. These bodies are perverting copyright law in response to their insatiable, exploitative greed. Copyright law “as we know it (including the word itself) is an invention of the eighteenth century… (it was) important enough that Congress was given the power to manage it ‘to promote the progress of science and the useful arts’ – a progress that depends on authors’ being encouraged to write and publish, and on readers being encouraged to read and react to what they had read.”[1] Clearly, as it is currently operating, the function of copyright law as it pertains to the arts is not for the protection and encouragement of knowledge and cultural product – but, rather, to further the economic aims of a minority group of art-property ‘owners’, who have hijacked the laws.
Crosley Bendix’s illuminating essay on the U.S Copyright Act suggests that an ideal situation would be for copyright law to simply “prohibit straight-across bootlegging, provide cover version royalties, and practically nothing else”. This, quite obviously, is an ideal situation – in that it would serve to give media artists the freedom to operate in a culture free of the shackles of money-hungry litigation lawyers, and profit-driven corporate rule. Lawmakers must be made unequivocally aware that there is a world of difference between bootlegging a work, and using an existing work in the patchwork creation of new cultural objects. Appropriation is not theft, despite the cries of the corporate contingent of the art-media industry. Appropriation is not a pathway through which an artist may claim financial rewards for the work of others. Conversely, appropriation cannot prevent an existing artist from profiting from their work. U2 certainly didn’t lose any money over “U2”. The case is a perfect illustration of Island Records exploiting the situation, simply because they saw an opportunity to squeeze some money out of a group of individuals who had neither the money, nor the legal loopholes necessary to fight back.
Art needs to acquire an equal footing with marketers in legal terms. Despite much of our mass-media culture’s propulsion being primarily rooted in the financial rewards of ownership, and the endless desire for the acquisition of cultural product – art is not a business. As such, art should not be defined by lawyers, marketing personnel, and other parties motivated by gain. It is this mentality that has resulted in the breakdown and stagnation of many of the arms of mainstream art – when millions of dollars are at stake with every album, film, or novel that is released, the success of the work is not defined by its place in the canon, and the critical evaluation it may receive by other artists – it is solely defined by the monetary rewards that its release has engendered for those parties who own it. This, clearly, is an unhealthy situation to be in. By freeing up the corporate control that is being exercised over cultural artefacts, the benefits would be immediate and rewarding, allowing artists the freedom to operate in their chosen fields, without the threat of lawsuits and accusations of ‘theft’.
It is refreshing to see groups of artists such as the KLF and Negativland adopting policies of open hostility with the industry-regulated domination of cultural products. Negativland’s latest aural assault is the satirical masterpiece Dispepsi. Released with the title in anagram form (one had to ring a phone number on the inside jacket to get the real album title), Dispepsi sees Negativland taking aim at a single industry – that of soft drink marketers, in particular, Pepsi Cola. An album which explores the disturbing concept that advertisers can “mould not only what the world will be presented as, but can creatively mould the consumer to whatever shape they require for the product”[2]. For example, one of the samples includes a smug-sounding Michael J. Fox discussing a Pepsi commercial he did in the 1980’s, and commenting on the response that it received – as “people treated it like a movie”. And, indeed, Negativland is aware of the problem of advertising being mistaken for entertainment, or – in the worst case – art. The record could easily have been the demise of Negativland as the album is loaded with highly actionable samples, none of which were cleared or – obviously – paid for. Amusingly, Pepsi Cola’s only response to Dispepsi was a press secretary simply stating “it’s good, but it’s no Odelay.” It is Dispepsi that perhaps best sums up Negativland’s philosophy, in a track entitled “Bite Back”. Over a slow, plodding bassline two samples vie for space – that of an advertising executive explaining the tenets of successful marketing, and insisting that “once economic liberty is abridged, all other liberty is abridged.” The other is the voice of a young man explaining that “we can stop the corporations, all we need to do is stop buying their products”, as he lists the products that we clearly do not need. Negativland’s career has been attempting to ‘bite back’, from Escape From Noise onwards, tackling it’s targets and skewering them with precision and intelligence.
The future, then, is an uncertain place for the area of found-sound art, although – with the rise in prominence of the Internet, a solution may be at hand. The internet is “marked by a circle-of-gifts mentality, according to which people produce materials and contribute them to a common stock on which they draw themselves.”[3] The Internet provides us with a communications medium that has absolutely no rules or restrictions on what can or cannot be transmitted, published, copied, sampled, or otherwise seized from the constantly flowing rivers of information. With the current press surrounding peer-to-peer file sharing networks, typified by Napster, we are seeing the Internet evolve into a place where copyright law simply cannot exist. With the accessibility of broadband internet access, it is now not inconceivable to never have to spend another cent on recorded media – film, music, and the written word are all easily accessible via the Internet, completely subverting any legal issues surrounding art-property ownership. Obviously, this is the first step in the realising of a world in which copyright law will work for artists, rather than against them. Negativland have embraced this anarchic mentality, broadcasting Over The Edge on their website (www.negativland.com), and offering all material on the site free of charge, including the “U2” single. Not only is the material free of charge – but one is free to sample, re-arrange, and otherwise reconfigure anything Negativland has used in the creation of a new found-sound art piece.